Daniel Mael, a student at Brandeis University, recently found himself threatened with disciplinary action for reporting on another student’s tweets celebrating the murder of two New York City police officers. Two years earlier, he was charged with “bullying” for having written an article taking issue with critics of Israel. His experience, writes Abraham H. Miller, is symptomatic of the decline of free speech in American universities:

Before the creation of so-called speech and decency codes, a campus dean would have advised [Mael’s “victim”] to engage Mael in a public exchange, beginning, perhaps, with the student newspaper. Today, however, universities have become hypersensitive about students’ feelings. . . . To ensure students never experience the discomfort of having their ideas openly challenged, universities have instituted speech and decency codes. . . .

The codes require the establishment of an entire bureaucracy to monitor and enforce them. As prison guards need prisoners, the bureaucracy needs violators. To create a steady population of violators, the bar for offenses has to be continually lowered; new violations have to be created, and sometimes victims have to be sought out and taught they are victims.

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.