When the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979—the same year as Iran’s Islamic Revolution—a group of Arab Islamists went to fight the Soviets and thus, writes Sebastian Gorka, founded the global jihadist movement:

It was [in Afghanistan] that the ideas of a global jihad were forged and the original jihadist army coalesced, in no small part because of the massive resources that poured in from America and Saudi Arabia to support the indigenous mujahideen. . . . Abdullah Azzam, [then] Osama bin Laden’s boss and the real founder of al-Qaeda, . . . [along with a] small band of Arabs—no more than a few hundred—transformed a conflict between Moscow and the tribes of Afghanistan into a global movement for Islamic jihad in which Muslims of different languages, cultures, and countries coalesced into one brotherhood in pursuit of one objective—the victory of Islam and the word of Allah across the earth.

Without Azzam’s new ideas about jihad, legitimized by his scholarly prestige, and bin Laden’s access to millions of dollars in funding, Afghanistan’s jihad might have stayed within its borders. Together, these two men were able to take their enterprise global and start a fire that still rages today, more incandescent than ever.

Abdullah Azzam was born into a Palestinian family who had to flee the West Bank after the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. He became a disciple of the Muslim Brotherhood, studying during his formative years the incendiary works of its founder, Hassan al-Banna (1906–1949) and those of Sayyid Qutb, finding in them the expression of his own rage and sense of victimhood. Studying in Syria and Egypt and teaching in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, he came into contact with the leading Islamist movements of the day, weaving their disparate intellectual threads together into a cohesive doctrine, which he eventually published in 1984 as a fatwa titled Defense of the Muslim Lands. The foundational work for the global jihad of the 20th century, Azzam’s Defense contains the key assertions at the heart of every jihadist enterprise.

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.