On Yom Hashoah this year, the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center (FSWC) held a large outdoor memorial ceremony. Tarek Fatah describes the unusual, and uplifitng, event:

[A] turbaned Sikh, the Brampton City councilor Gurpreet Singh Dhillon, graced the occasion saying, “at the end of the day we are all Canadians, we are all humans, and no matter what faith you belong to we have to remember we are all brothers and sisters.” I have rarely come across Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, or Muslims at Holocaust remembrance days over the years.

There was also a delegation of Hindu pandits from Kashmir, who have faced violent persecution since 1990, when their entire population was ethnically cleansed from its ancient ancestral homeland by Pakistan-backed jihadists. . . . There were also Islamic clerics as well as representatives of the Ahmadi Muslims who are a targeted community in Islamic Indonesia and Pakistan and barred from entering Saudi Arabia because they are considered apostates.

The event was the brainchild of Avi Benlolo of FSWC along with an Indian Buddhist [named] Zenji Nio. . . . I asked Nio what motivated him to bring together so many communities in one place. Ordinarily, he is diplomatic, but this time his words were blunt: “Throughout history, anti-Semitism has been promoted on occasion from both Christian as well as Muslim pulpits and by both Christian as well as Muslim leaders. So, as a Buddhist, I felt it was important to have all these leaders in attendance to send a message to people all over the world that they should not allow religion to instill within them hate and bigotry.”

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.