Last week, Pamela Geller organized a “Draw Mohammed” contest that was unsuccessfully attacked by two terrorists. (Islamic State claimed responsibility.) A subsequent Washington Post headline declared: “Event organizer offers no apology after thwarted attack in Texas”—as if the intended victim of a terrorist attack should be required to apologize. Rich Lowry comments:

[I]t is no more legitimate to shoot someone for drawing Mohammed than it is to shoot a girl for going to school, or a Copt or a Shiite Muslim for his or her faith. Expecting apologies from these victims would be almost as perverse as expecting one from Pamela Geller.

Respectable opinion can’t bear the idea that she has become a symbol of free speech, which once upon a time was—and still is, when convenient—one of the highest values of the media and the left. If Geller were a groundbreaking pornographer like the loathsome Larry Flynt, someone would already be planning a celebratory biopic of her life. If she were a gadfly sticking it to a major Western religion rather than to Islam, she might be considered more socially acceptable. . . .

Scurrilous and even hateful speech and cartoons—sometimes involving religion—have been featured in Anglo-American history going back centuries. They are an inevitable part of a free society. In this context, a drawing of Mohammed is mild. The only reason it seems different is that some Muslim radicals are willing to kill over it. Which is exactly why Pamela Geller’s event wasn’t purposeless. The event was placing a stake in contested ground, in a way it wouldn’t have if it had offended Quakers or Roman Catholics, who don’t massacre people who insult them. It was a statement of defiance, of an unwillingness to abide by the rules of fanatics. . . .

For better or worse, we live in a society in which nothing is sacred. If we are to accept the assassin’s veto, the only exception (for now) will be depictions of Mohammed, which would be perverse. A free society can’t let the parameters of its speech be set by murderous extremists.

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.