Ilana Romano and Ankie Spitzer, whose husbands were among the Israeli athletes murdered by PLO terrorists at the 1972 Munich Olympics, have for the first time made public information they obtained about the massacre, including photographs and descriptions of the torture and beatings to which the hostages were subjected. Sam Borden writes:

Ms. Spitzer explained that she and the family members of the other victims only learned the details of how the victims were treated twenty years after the tragedy, when German authorities released hundreds of pages of reports they previously denied existed. . . . “We asked for more details [in the aftermath of the attacks], but we were told, over and over, there was nothing,” Ms. Spitzer said.

In 1992, after doing an interview with a German television station regarding the twentieth anniversary of the attack in which she expressed frustration about not knowing exactly what happened to her husband and his teammates, Ms. Spitzer was contacted by a man who said he worked for a German government agency with access to reams of records about the attack.

Initially, Ms. Spitzer said, the man, who remained anonymous, sent her about 80 pages of police reports and other documents. With those documents, Pinchas Zeltzer, the lawyer [representing the victims’ families], and Ms. Spitzer pressured the German government into releasing the rest of the file, which included the photographs.

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.