A major organ of Russia’s state-controlled press has published a dubious report on the distribution of wealth among the country’s various ethnic groups. Jews, unsurprisingly, are listed as holding the most wealth of any non-Russian ethnicity. The overall message is that minorities—Jews, ethnic Ukrainians, Armenians—have grown fat at the expense of “real Russians,” who have been deprived of their fair share. This piece of “reportage,” Masha Gessen writes, suggests that Putin has settled on his regime’s newest scapegoats:

Russia is casting about for new enemies, and the media appear to feel the need to contribute to the search. For two months now the state propaganda machine has been pulling back from the intense anti-Ukrainian rhetoric that dominated the spring and summer. In Moscow, city authorities have even painted over at least one Crimea-themed mural, replacing aggressive military images with video-game characters. The rhetorical withdrawal from Ukraine probably has two goals: forestalling further Western sanctions and perhaps reversing some that have been imposed, and diverting Russians’ attention from a war that risks becoming too costly.

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.