Of the roughly 1.1 million people murdered at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, about 10 percent were Gentiles, including a handful of Soviet POWs of the Muslim faith. Robert Satloff believes this fact ought not be forgotten:

Holocaust denial is particularly pronounced in many Muslim societies. Coupled with its first cousin—anti-Semitism—it is propounded by national leaders, like Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mohamed Mahathir and the Palestinian Authority’s Mahmoud Abbas, and by religious leaders, like the influential Qatar-based cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi. In Arab and broader Muslim popular culture and social media, the phenomena of Holocaust ignorance, denial, and celebration are, regrettably, commonplace.

Thankfully, there is some important good news. A growing chorus of Muslim leaders has been increasingly active in countering this pernicious hate, speaking out in support of tolerance and against Holocaust rejectionism.

Including Muslim victims of Auschwitz alongside the nearly million Jewish victims and the thousands of Christian victims will help bring Muslims into this critical historical narrative and contribute to this positive trend. After all, while the Holocaust was an overwhelmingly Jewish tragedy, the Nazi quest for global domination based on a warped sense of racial supremacy continues to animate annihilationist rhetoric and apocalyptic strategies one hears from extremists in Muslim societies.

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.