Today’s atheists and agnostics, like many of their precursors, usually claim that their unbelief flows from logic and science, whereas the religious worldview is based on blind or benighted faith. Arguments in favor of religion, they assert, are merely cases of subordinating reason to emotion. In Unbelievers, a history of atheism that focuses on Europe around the time of the Reformation, Alec Ryrie paints a very different picture. Nick Spencer writes in his review:

In reality, as Alec Ryrie shows in this short but beautifully crafted history of early doubt, unbelief was (and is) chosen for “instinctive, inarticulate, and intuitive” reasons just as much as is belief. [He argues] persuasively that unbelief was as much, if not more, about what people felt as about what they thought: in particular, a confluence of moral outrage and personal anxiety.

Beginning in the Middle Ages, termed an “age of suspicion” rather than of faith, Ryrie describes medieval skeptics as being like contemporary flat-earthers. They had no evidence to support their position, but practiced “a stubborn refusal to be hoodwinked by the intellectual consensus of their age.” . . . It wasn’t that philosophical ideas were altogether irrelevant. . . . It was that such thinking tacked with the wind, rather than made it. . . . As Ryrie writes: “Intellectuals and philosophers may think they make the weather, but they are more often driven by it.”

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.