Last week, BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen conducted an interview with Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas. What ensued was an exercise in propaganda, not only licensed but amplified by the interviewer himself. Alan Johnson writes:

Bowen . . . allowed Meshal, an anti-Semitic terrorist who has exulted in the killing of Jews as Jews, to preen and pose, without challenge, before a global audience—with the full imprimatur of a respectful BBC—as a heroic Palestinian democrat, a moderate man, a peacemaker, and a reluctant liberator in the glorious tradition of Nelson Mandela and George Washington.

Bowen even allowed an incitement to go unchallenged. “Netanyahu likes to shed blood,” spat Meshal—an old image about Jews-with-power that has a certain, ahem, history. Bowen didn’t blink. . . . Bowen [also] allowed Meshal to claim that Hamas was not Islamist. . . .

Bowen didn’t just leave Hamas spin unchallenged. He actually spun for Hamas himself. “Mr. Meshal said he and the group had agreed to accept the boundaries which existed before the 1967 Middle East war as the basis for those of a future Palestinian state,” wrote Bowen. But that is just not true. It is, to be frank, Hamas propaganda.

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.