It has become de rigueur for Western leaders to characterize acts of terror and violence committed by Islamists as having “nothing to do with Islam,” or at least to claim that most Muslims do not support the jihadists. Joshua Muravchik analyzes these positions and finds them lacking:

The Quran is not organized as a logical treatise any more than is the Bible. It is sprinkled with “sword verses” as well as “peace verses,” and the proper interpretation or application of these verses has always been a subject of debate among believers and Islamic scholars. Great value is often attached to emulating Muhammad, who . . . did kind and peaceful things but also was a conqueror. As [President] Obama recently reminded Americans, “people [have] committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” but Christ himself counseled turning the other cheek; not so, the Prophet of Islam.

Certainly, contrary to [White House press secretary] Josh Earnest, the Paris killers Cherif and Said Kouachi and Amedy Coulibaly believed they were fulfilling the strictures of their faith, and they were prepared not only to kill but also to die in doing so. Neither can it be said, alas, that they were merely one (or three) of a kind, like the homegrown American terrorists who blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. Of the 51 organizations listed by the State Department as “foreign terrorist organizations,” 38 are predominantly Muslim, mostly Islamist in ideology. Their works are evident daily all around us.

And what do statistics suggest about the support enjoyed by Islamist beliefs? Muravchik continues:

[W]hile the predominant view among the world’s Muslims, insofar as we can learn from polls, rejects terrorism, a significant minority does not. If, on the whole, say, 20 percent of Muslims, a conservative estimate, . . . support terror “often” or “sometimes,” that amounts to 300 million people; and if, say, another 15 percent support it “rarely,” then the total base of support for at least occasional terror acts comes to 500 million. There is little comfort to be found in such figures.

They also make nonsense of the claim that it is unfair to speak of Islamic violence or terrorism and not of Christian or Jewish violence or terrorism, even though occasional terrible acts are committed in the names of the latter two faiths. The obvious answer is that there are no Christian or Jewish analogues to the Islamic State; the numbers of such outrages are an infinitesimal fraction of those committed by Muslims; and there is no equivalent base of support in the respective religious communities.

One of the Pew surveys asked a question not asked in the others, . . . bringing into view another important aspect of the issue of Islamic terrorism: its relation to Israel. . . . If all these polls suggest that Muslim attitudes toward terrorism are often equivocal, the case of Israel compounds the problem. For many Arabs and Muslims, Israelis are always fair game.

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.