Saudi rulers habitually condemn terrorist attacks when speaking to Western audiences; Saudi Arabia has also suppressed Islamist groups within its own borders and is assisting in the fight against Islamic State. However, the kingdom has a long history of supporting jihadists, and has been the major force behind the spread of the Wahhabi ideology from which Sunni Islamism springs. Carol and Jamsheed Choksy recount the deeply intertwined histories of Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism, and explain the role the kingdom still plays in exporting radical Islam:

[O]ver the past three years, in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and most recently Lebanon, the Saudi state has been able to utilize jihadis to launch a “proxy Sunni-Shiite war” aimed specifically against Iran and its Shiite and Alawite allies. . . . According to U.S. intelligence officials, in September 2013 “hundreds of millions” of dollars were still flowing to Muslim terrorists from private donors in the Arabian Peninsula. . . .

Likewise . . . Operation Decisive Storm, ostensibly a ten-country Sunni offensive against Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen, on the kingdom’s southern border, reinforces Sunni autocrats and widens the intra-Muslim rift rather than quashing Sunni extremists like Islamic State and al-Qaeda. It all fits squarely with current Saudi policy of ensuring the monarchy leads the world’s Muslims irrespective of negative consequences. . . .

Saudi Arabia complains that the U.S. is no longer the reliable ally who agreed in 1945 to guarantee the monarchy’s security. But as the cradle of Islamist terror, it has become a duplicitous friend as well. It should no longer be allowed to use its oil wealth to take its terror connections off the table.

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.