Prime Minister David Cameron recently delivered a rousing speech about the need to take seriously the dangers of radical Islam. Yet, his government has signed an agreement with Iran that will most likely allow that country to develop nuclear weapons. Douglas Murray writes:

Everybody who knows anything about foreign policy understands its complexities. Perhaps it is not surprising that behavior that would get you designated an “extremist,” “subversive,” and even “terrorist” at home might have to be viewed differently abroad. . . . Perhaps behavior that is extreme at home must be tolerated abroad. But the question really is not why the UK government is willing to maintain a double standard. The real question is why, when it comes to the most extreme, anti-Western nation-destroyer of them all—a country committed to the annihilation of a UN member state—Her Majesty’s government would not only permit it to have any nuclear project, but would trust the word of a regime with stated genocidal intent when it says that it is not pursuing genocidal weaponry?

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.