Last week, an explosive device went off in the Swedish city of Malmo—which has also been the location of many anti-Semitic incidents in recent years—and a police station was bombed in the same neighborhood the week before. Nobody was hurt in either instance, but, Sohrab Ahmari points out, if similar instances since October are added to the tally, Malmo has a frequency of bombings that puts it “in the same category as Mogadishu and Quetta.” And this is only part of a larger problem:

Long known for its tolerance and quality of life, [Sweden] has lately seen an alarming rise in gang violence, sexual assault, and terrorism—most of it linked to a large and unassimilated Muslim minority. There were more than 320 shootings and at least 110 murders in Sweden in 2017. . . . Rapes in 2017 were up 10 percent over the previous year, for a total of 7,226. . . .

There is no getting around the connections between Sweden’s crime wave and the country’s immigration-and-assimilation failures. . . . And yet its government, which likes to tout itself as the world’s “humanitarian superpower,” continues to extend an open-door invitation at a time when voters have run out of patience. Don’t be surprised if that frustration translates into significant ballot-box gains for the hard-right, neo-Nazi-linked Sweden Democrats come September’s parliamentary elections. When the responsible parties fail to deal with reality as it is, voters will turn to irresponsible ones.

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.