Since September 11, 2001, if not since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the American left has sought to minimize or deny the threat to Western civilization posed by violent Islamism. Peter Berkowitz examines the effect of this delusional thinking on the Obama administration and the effort of one notable left-wing figure to counteract it:

Only last week, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest and Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz staunchly denied to an incredulous press corps that the Taliban is a terrorist organization. . . . The purpose of the White House’s ludicrous denial is to hide that the basis of the Taliban’s enmity, strategy, and objectives is a doctrine of Islamic supremacy. Such suppression is nothing new for the administration. As early as early 2009, it renamed campaigns in the struggle against Islamic extremism “overseas contingency operations.” . . . Last September in a White House speech, Obama actually declared that IS—even as it was establishing a new caliphate in Iraq and Syria—had nothing to do with Islam.

As Berkowitz notes, “The president . . . has reasons grounded in the progressive or left-liberal sensibility that he epitomizes to avoid mention of the Islamic roots of the jihadists’ rage.” Those reasons have recently been laid bare in an essay, “Islamism and the Left,” by Michael Walzer, “one of the nation’s outstanding political theorists . . . [and] a politically engaged man of the left [who] criticizes fellow leftists from within the tent.”

Although he never mentions Obama by name, Walzer argues persuasively that the left has failed to adjust its thinking to the rise of “Islamist zealotry” because of a set of increasingly typical moral and intellectual errors. . . . [One can only hope that] Walzer’s bracing critique . . . will ascend speedily to the top of Barack Obama’s reading list.

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.