Sabri Essid, a French national, recently appeared in an Islamic State (IS) video alongside his own stepson, who is shown murdering an alleged Palestinian Mossad agent. Essid’s stepbrother, Mohammed Merah, killed three children and a teacher at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012. And last year, Merah’s sister Souad left France along with her four children to join jihadists—including her husband—in Syria. John Rosenthal reports:

In recordings made public in November 2012, Souad Merah declares that she is proud of her brother Mohammed and thinks highly of Osama bin Laden. Denouncing the “injustices” committed by “the Jews and the Americans,” Souad praises Salafists—adherents of the radical Islamic current of which both IS and al-Qaeda form a part—for taking action while others merely talk. . . .

Souad’s words were secretly recorded by another of her brothers, Abdelghani. The anti-Islamist “black sheep” of the family, Abdelghani has said he made the recordings to dissociate himself from the other Merahs and expose the anti-Semitism in which Mohammed was “immersed” from childhood. His own relationship with a woman of Jewish origin (now his wife) was, he says, such a profound source of discord in the family that, during an argument about it in 2003, [another of his brothers] stabbed him seven times, nearly killing him. According to Abdelghani, guests at a memorial service held at his mother’s home a few days after Mohammed Merah’s death [at the hands of police] broke into ululations of joy and, rather than offering condolences, congratulated his mother on her son’s actions.

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.