The American branch of the Qatar-sponsored news network has experienced a series of setbacks, including a spate of firings, a lawsuit by a disgruntled former employee, and allegations of endemic workplace sexism and (unsurprisingly) anti-Semitism. Oren Kessler and David A. Weinberg write about the network’s larger problem:

Al Jazeera Arabic—the flagship of the Al Jazeera conglomerate—has long served as a mouthpiece for Qatar’s Islamist-driven regional agenda. During last summer’s Gaza war, the channel’s coverage seemed taken from Hamas’s own playbook (an unsurprising fact given Qatari support for the terrorist group), describing all Palestinian casualties, whether civilians or militants, as “martyrs.” Similarly, an article from February about last year’s slaughter of worshippers with a gun and a meat cleaver in a Jerusalem synagogue described the killers as “martyrs.”

Al Jazeera is by far the most-watched channel in the Arab world, and Al Jazeera English (the network’s English-language channel for everywhere but America) is available in 140 countries, including every European market.

But the network has never quite found a market in America. It ranked a dismal 104 out of 106 among ad-supported cable channels and, in the first quarter of 2015, averaged only 35,000 viewers. . . . Americans, it seems, simply aren’t buying what Al Jazeera is selling.

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.