Harvard University recently put the campus Christian group Harvard College Faith and Action on “administrative probation” for pressuring a student to resign from the group’s leadership because she is in a lesbian relationship. Andrew T. Walker comments:

Harvard has now taken to disciplining a Christian student group—and not some radical fringe group, but the largest Christian group on campus—for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follow Christian ethical teachings on sexuality. . . .

Gone ought to be any pretense that universities such as Harvard are in any sense interested in diversity or tolerance. Secular campuses that traffic in diversity, and who worship at the altar of intersectionality, while singling out Christians for holding to Christian doctrine and then penalizing them for it, [are guilty of bald-faced] hypocrisy. And in this case, hypocrisy is the tribute that liberalism pays to vice.

But even on the relative scale of liberal hypocrisy, Harvard is a special case: the school was founded explicitly on Protestant, even Puritan faith and is now penalizing a group for holding to religious convictions that would have been identical to its founders’ views. All in the name of enforcing doctrinaire liberal politics. The shift is so radical that while just a few decades ago it took some courage to be openly gay at Harvard, these days it takes a great deal of courage to be openly Christian.

Sadly, the spectacle at Harvard is hardly unique.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.