The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)—responsible for a series of high-profile hijackings in 1968 and 1970, the 2014 Har Nof synagogue massacre, and countless other acts of terror—received some attention last week when major videoconferencing platforms refused to host a talk given by one of its leaders. Besides its active involvement in terrorism, the PFLP runs a sophisticated political operation that garners support from various private and public institutions in the West. Yossi Kuperwasser explains:

For many left-wing organizations in the West, cooperation with the PFLP comes naturally. It is a reminder of the “glorious” era when the Soviet Union was a superpower competing for global dominance against “the corrupt capitalist West” (the PFLP still uses this kind of vocabulary). When the Soviet bloc collapsed, these groups had to find a new cause célèbre around which to unite. The PFLP was among the first groups to understand the potential of recruiting softer anti-Israel elements into its networks and to leverage those elements to gain financial support from naïve international donors.

It does so often by creating non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that can work as front groups, such as Addameer: a self-described “civil institution” devoted to “human rights” and led by such men as Salah Hamouri, who orchestrated a plot to murder Israel’s former chief rabbi Ovadiah Yosef in 2005. And this strategy has achieved success:

The grotesque terror-NGO hybrid that the PFLP has perfected is especially notable for its success in gaining funding from the EU and from individual European countries such as the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, and Sweden. These entities are entirely aware of these organizations’ affiliation with the PFLP and the roles that terror activists play in the PFLP’s network of “human-rights” NGOs.

“Dream Defenders,” a relatively small Florida-based radical organization that operates within the Black Lives Matter coalition and has on its board well-known figures like Angela Davis and Linda Sarsour, cooperates with the PFLP directly. For them, no fig leaves are needed; the PFLP itself is a symbol of struggle, apparently including its commitment to stabbing, shooting, and blowing up innocent people. . . . Earlier this year, Dream Defenders co-founder Umi Selah, also known as Phillip Agnew, was hired by the Bernie Sanders campaign.

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.