In the apparent terrorist attack at Ohio State University on Monday, an eighteen-year-old refugee from Somalia—whose Facebook page indicates his sympathies for Islamic State and al-Qaeda—drove his car into pedestrians and then began stabbing passersby with a knife until stopped by a police bullet. William Jacobson comments:

When I heard the story of the car ramming and knife attack, my mind immediately went back to the recent so-called knife intifada in Israel, in which car rammings played a prominent role. . . . The Ohio State attack reminded me in particular of an attack in which a Palestinian terrorist in Jerusalem rammed a bus stop with his car and then got out with a meat cleaver and started slashing a man. It took several shots from a passerby to stop the attack. . . .

It will be interesting to see the reaction to the shooting of the [Ohio State] perpetrator. When Israeli police shoot Palestinians in the act of car ramming or stabbing, there is an outcry from Palestinians and international “human-rights” groups accusing Israel of “extrajudicial executions” and threats to take Israel to The Hague for war crimes.

[Whatever the reaction], when it comes to terrorist tactics, what happens in Israel doesn’t stay in Israel.

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.