On Thursday the White House issued a much-anticipated executive order on religious freedom. The editors of National Review argue that this order tries to accomplish what it cannot, and does little if anything to fix substantive problems:

[The order] is a vague and unworkable mishmash of executive direction that has the potential to make the problem worse.

First, the president purports to, as he put it, “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment,” a law that forbids tax-exempt religious organizations to endorse or oppose candidates from the pulpit. While religious organizations already enjoy the right to advocate and agitate in the political arena, the Johnson Amendment represents a free-speech restriction that is almost certainly unconstitutional [and] at odds with a tradition of First Amendment jurisprudence barring the linkage of government benefits to the restriction of unrelated constitutional rights. The problem, which President Trump does not quite seem to comprehend, is that an executive order cannot simply overturn a piece of legislation. . . .

Instead [of working with Congress to craft new legislation], President Trump will imitate President Barack Obama’s approach to illegal immigrants and simply order that “prosecutorial discretion” be expanded and codified in such a way as to forbid categorically enforcing federal law. . . . We are . . . skeptical that such an approach would last five minutes should another Democrat end up in the White House, which, alas, is bound to happen someday, and which would leave churches vulnerable to future sanction for deeds done under the assumption that the prosecutors would be permanently sidelined.

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.