Reviewing a recently published collection of essays by the noted historian Daniel Pipes, Edward Alexander reflects on his contribution to the study of the Islamic world:

More doggedly than any other expert on Middle East affairs, Daniel Pipes has riveted his attention upon the threat that radical Islam poses to civilized life in nearly every corner of the globe. . . . He is the polar opposite to the willfully blind politicians who, as if to prove that the greatest deceivers are the self-deceivers, refuse even to identify the enemy by name and even (in Europe) impugn any criticism of the world’s most intolerant religion as a violation of “human rights.” . . .

In [one of the volume’s essays], Pipes demolishes the Muslim claim to Jerusalem as entirely political rather than historical or religious. “Jerusalem appears in the Hebrew Bible 669 times and Zion (which usually means Jerusalem) 154 times. In contrast, Jerusalem appears . . . in the Quran . . . not once.”

Palestinian Arabs were, of course, keenly aware of the ancient Jewish and Christian attachment to Jerusalem, to say nothing of the fact that Palestine’s British colonial administrators and their children had for generations sung of their aspiration to “build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” . . . Jerusalem did not become the focus of Arab political and religious activity until early in the 20th century, in response to both the Zionist movement and Britain’s assumption of the mandate for Palestine.

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.