Islamist terrorists rarely make an effort to conceal their religious motivation. But some in the West—prominent politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and others—are ready to conceal it for them, and instead to justify their actions by assigning moral responsibility wholly to the affluent West. Paul Hollander writes:

We are . . . instructed that it is Western governments and societies that radicalized the terrorists—bred terror—by the colonialism of the past, the failure to integrate new immigrants, our refusal to allow them to voice their just grievances, and, finally, our demonization of them for no other reason than their disagreements with us [over such things as] the religiously sanctioned mistreatment of women or the sharia law that justifies stoning female adulterers to death, chopping off the hands of thieves, . . . flogging other criminals, [and] fatwas against the likes of the novelist Salman Rushdie, targeted to be killed as punishment for blasphemy. Presumably all such disagreements should be seen as matters of cultural diversity and tolerated in a good-natured, nonjudgmental manner.

Such explanations . . . suggest that the perpetrators had little choice in the matter. . . . In this scheme, only the powerful, the top dogs and victimizers, are capable of making choices and thus can be held responsible for their actions; the underdogs, the victims, the victimized are not in a position to make morally relevant choices as their behavior is determined by brutal social forces.

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.