While Moncef Marzouki, the former president of Tunisia, was on a boat that was attempting to run the Israeli naval blockade of Gaza, one of his countrymen murdered 37 beachgoers. David Horovitz wonders why, exactly, Marzouki was so concerned with Gaza:

[E]ven as it has sought to shift toward democratic stability, Tunisia is widely reported to have provided more recruits for Islamic extremist groups, most emphatically including Islamic State, than any other nation on earth. That river of recruitment was flowing full speed during the three years of the Marzouki presidency.

As the Israeli navy escorts him into port, has the former president of the world’s largest supplier of Islamic extremists paused for thought? Has he engaged in a little introspection? How has the news of [the recent] act of barbarism been affecting him? . . .

[O]n the very weekend that a young Tunisian man, poisoned by benighted zealots, gunned down dozens of innocents in the country Marzouki used to run, here he was sailing the high seas on behalf of [Hamas], an Islamic extremist organization, strategically engaged in poisoning young minds and bent on dispatching its recruits to carry out murder. Does the president see the appalling irony? Probably not.

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.