On August 15, Israeli police arrested Raed Salah, the head of the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement, which is the largest Islamist organization operating within the pre-1967 borders. Salah played a significant role in inciting the most recent violence on the Temple Mount, as Reuven Berko explains:

[Salah] controls an enormous funding empire that pays mercenaries (the men of the Murabitun and the women of the Muribitat) to riot on the Temple Mount, in Jaffa, and at other sites depending on their rate and his orders.

The massive amounts of cash being pumped into the Islamic Movement, as well as its twin sister Hamas, come from global Islamic charities and, indirectly, from Turkey and Qatar. The Northern Branch is an exact copy of its fellow terrorist organizations, all of which have roots in the global Muslim Brotherhood movement: al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Islamic State, and [so forth]. . . .

[Israeli] discussion about Salah’s activity as an inciter and a motivator of terrorist acts is reminiscent of the debates among . . . researchers . . . when Hamas was in its infancy. Many made the mistake of thinking that the ideology, which focused on “talk,” was separate from the actions, which focused on killing. Even today, the West is incapable of comprehending that dawa (proselytizing) is not ideological propaganda, study of the Quran and the hadith, or religious and historical enrichment as the murderous Islamic Movement claims, but rather a system of recruitment and motivation that uses “legitimate” Islamic messages to drive the Islamist terrorist machine.

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.