Since the bloody bombing at a Manchester concert on May 22, a great deal of information has come to light about the perpetrator, Salman Abedi, some of which may suggest parallels to the case of the most recent attacks in London. Dominic Green writes:

Abedi was not a “lone wolf” who had “self-radicalized” on the Internet or been “inspired” by Islamic State (IS). . . . France’s interior minister, Gérard Collomb, announced that Abedi had “proven” links to IS, and that British and French intelligence services had information that he had been in Syria in 2015. . . Just after the bombing, one of Abedi’s friends told the Times of London that Abedi had left for Libya “three weeks ago” and returned “recently, like three days ago.” . . .

In some respects, Abedi has the background of a typical Euro-jihadist. The son of immigrants, he dropped out of college and into adolescent criminality before sinking further into the redemptive fantasies of Islamist violence. . . . [But] Abedi grew up with Islamic “radicalism” and was always known to the authorities. He was born in Manchester in 1994, to parents who had sought asylum from [Muammar] Qaddafi’s Libya. His father Ramadan Abedi . . . sought sanctuary in Britain because he was an Islamist, and thus an enemy of Qaddafi. The British authorities granted asylum because Qaddafi [at the time] was Britain’s enemy too. . . . [The elder Abedi] was also a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG).

The LIFG was founded in 1995 by Abdelhakim Belhadj and other Libyan mujahedeen who had fought the Russians in Afghanistan and wanted to overthrow Qaddafi and create an Islamic state in Libya. Its personnel and ideology overlapped with those of other Sunni Islamist groups, notably the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and latterly the group Ansar al-Sharia, which took part in the deadly 2012 sacking of the U.S. installation in Benghazi.

Similarly, Green writes elsewhere, Saturday night’s assault, perpetrated as it was by three people, “cannot be the work of a ‘lone wolf’ or a ‘misfit’” but must be that of “an organized, collaborative unit.” How, asks Green, did the cell avoid detection and “what if, as in the case of Salman Abedi (the Manchester bomber) the trail leads abroad”?

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.