Last Thursday, the website of the New York Times invited European Muslims to comment on how they were affected by the Paris attacks. Asks Liel Leibovitz: why is the “Times obsessively interested in the experiences of only one minority group in Europe?”

It’s hard to understand the paper’s continuing obsession, in their surveys and on their editorial page, with the mortal threat of “Islamophobia”—a dubious term that lumps together actual crimes with thought-crimes, like reprinting the cover of Charlie Hebdo—when the people being harassed, beaten, and murdered in Europe these days are Jews. This is especially true when the people doing the harassing, beating, and killing are Islamists.

Later—after recovering from its moral panic?—the paper changed the text to solicit the thoughts of Europeans in general. No explanation offered.

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.