Few philosophers have exerted so great an influence on the humanities and social sciences as Michel Foucault—who was also one of the first Western enthusiasts for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Reza Parchizadeh writes:

Foucault’s interest in Islamism started in 1978, [the year before the Islamic Revolution], when the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera asked him to write a series of articles about Iran. To fulfill that assignment, Foucault spent time among members of the left-leaning Confederation of Iranian Students and other opponents of the Pahlavi regime, [Persia’s then-ruling dynasty], in Europe. He then went to Tehran and met with many prominent revolutionaries. When he returned to France, he visited Ayatollah Khomeini in the village of Neauphle-le-Château near Paris where he was exiled at the time.

Foucault strongly supported what he called the “spiritual revolution” in Iran, an event he believed was meant to save humanity from the clutches of materialism and capitalism. Though he was occasionally called out in French intellectual circles and in the French press for taking such a stance, he did not stop supporting the Islamists.

While the ayatollahs’ brutality eventually left Foucault disenchanted, and may even have led to a moderation in his anti-capitalism, his embrace of their radical ideology had a lasting impact:

[Foucault’s approval] made it much easier for the Islamists to justify their positions to Western audiences despite their tyranny and violence in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia. Leftists, who are hostile on principle to Western values under the all-encompassing term “capitalism,” felt free to ally themselves with Islamists and thereby helped to promote their agenda in the West.

Almost from the very beginning of the revolution in Iran, it became fashionable in the Western academic world to employ Islamist professors, scholars, and researchers. The recruitment of Islamists at Middle East Studies centers in Europe and North America, and their promotion in influential Western media, became commonplace. Over the past 40 years, the global intellectual approach to Iran has thus been firmly in the clutches of Islamists and their left-leaning allies.

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.