In a 1998 speech on Marine Corps radio, the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that the American tradition “has consistently affirmed a national belief in God—but not a national belief in a particular religion.” In this light, he lamented the trend in American jurisprudence since the 1960s that has sought to enforce government neutrality toward religion in general. Scalia invoked George Washington as the “best of exemplar” of the traditional view:

I want to speak this morning about one of our oldest and I think most important national traditions that has for some years been in grave and imminent peril: the traditional belief, expressed unashamedly in our national pronouncements and reflected faithfully in our public policies, that we are a nation under God. . . .

We have also had, from the very beginning, publicly supported army and navy chaplains, House and Senate chaplains who open each day’s sessions with a prayer, exemptions from state property taxes for houses of worship, “In God We Trust” on the coinage (since the Civil War), and yes, even opening of the sessions of the Supreme Court with the invocation “God save the United States and this Honorable Court.” This religious tradition of ours has consistently affirmed . . . the key distinction between official encouragement of religion, which was always practiced, and official favoritism of particular religious sects, which was prohibited.

When he presided over the 1787 convention in Philadelphia that drafted the Constitution, Washington wrote home to his wife, Martha, that “this morning, I attended the Popish mass.” Imagine this aristocratic Virginian attending a Roman Catholic church service. He attended . . . to demonstrate that this new nation would not favor one sect over another. This was the same extraordinary man who, in the first year of his presidency, would write a letter addressed “To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island,” thanking them for their letter to him and saying, among other things, . . . “May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants, while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” . . .

[However], our national tradition of public religiousness is imperiled, because many people, particularly opinion leaders . . . espouse the view that the government must be scrupulously impartial, not merely as between various religious sects and denominations but even as between religion in general and atheism. The Constitution, these people believe, forbids government from bestowing any special favor upon religion, even if it is done in a non-sectarian fashion. How serious the situation is may become apparent when I tell you that these people include (insofar as one can tell from the cases) a majority of the justices of the Supreme Court.

In the two decades that have elapsed since Scalia uttered these words, the secularizing trend has grown only more extreme.

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.