Reflecting on what he terms the “summer of terror,” Douglas Murray assails the inability of Europe’s media, and its politicians, to assess the problem properly:

For the time being, the acceptable thing is to blame Islamic State (IS). There is sense in that. The German train attacker had an IS flag at his home, the Ansbach bomber left a video pledging allegiance to the group, and at least one of the Rouen church attackers had tried to travel to Syria to join it. The extent to which the group is involved varies, and it undoubtedly talks up its capabilities, but Islamic State’s ability to inspire as well as direct [terror] will be a problem as long as it exists.

However, opinion polls show that the European public knows that the problem is bigger than that. Before IS there was al-Qaeda. After IS there will be something else. . . .

The French prime minister, Manuel Valls, . . . among others, is willing to be strident about “Islamism.” But like every other European political leader, he is unwilling to admit where it comes from. Again, the public is ahead of him. They know that Islamism comes from Islam. The extreme interpretation may be a minority problem, but when a continent is struggling to assimilate the Muslims already present, there is a huge risk in bringing in so many immigrants from war-torn parts of the world where jihadism is already rampant. Some of this summer’s attackers were born here; others were recent arrivals. . . .

If Europe wants to help genuine refugees then it can help them outside Europe, as Britain has sought to do. It does not need to turn Europe into one vast refugee camp: we can’t afford it, and aside from a noisy fringe of migration extremists, the people of Europe don’t want it. . . . [But] as the public continues to move to the right, its representatives will continue to stampede to the left. And the . . . madness will continue dragging on into the autumn. Which could be not just the autumn of this year—but the autumn of liberal Europe.

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.