Reminiscing about life as a journalist in Tehran in the 1970s, Amir Taheri recalls the advice of the numerous foreign intellectuals who visited the once-cosmopolitan city, which could be summed in one word: “modernize!” The Middle East has by no means failed to modernize; however, Taheri argues, it has done so in all the wrong ways:

Traditions that had provided a moral compass for centuries were now dismissed as cumbersome if not a sure sign of backwardness. Old institutions such as tribes, guilds, Sufi orders, clerical hierarchies, and family networks that had counterbalanced the power of the state were dissolved or weakened, leaving power concentrated in a few hands at the center of government. The aim was to “Westernize” as quickly as possible even if that meant the destruction of the indigenous culture which now appeared atrophied or degenerate. . . .

Another thing [the apostles of modernization] ignored was that in our neck of the woods, that is to say the Middle East, the machinery of state had modernized itself by enhancing its powers and developing new modes of control, manipulation, and repression. That, in turn, had led to the Westernization of part of traditional society that now used an essentially Western narrative in its struggle against the established order.

For example, the late Ayatollah Khomeini’s discourse owed more to Lenin and Stalin than to the great Muslim philosophers and theologians of the ages. The seizure of power by mullahs in 1979 highlighted Iran’s jump to Westernization. The revolt was dubbed a “revolution,” a Western concept for which we have no word in the Persian language. The mullahs organized a referendum, wrote a constitution, devised a Western-style flag, raised a Trotsky-style militia, and built a cult of personality around Khomeini modeled on the one that existed around Stalin.

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.