Islamic State (IS) has adopted rape and sexual enslavement as a weapon of war, a recruiting tool, and even a religious obligation. The very worst treatment is reserved for the Yazidis, followers of a syncretistic religion based in Iraq. Kyle Orton reports:

IS has used the enslavement of Yazidi women to recruit more foreign fighters. Casual sex, Western-style, does not exist in the Islamic world, and even prostitution isn’t easily accessible. With the youth unemployment rates of the Muslim world, many men do not have the money for a brothel. But IS promises young men guaranteed access to sex and religious permission to do exactly as they wish. . . .

Sexual slavery has been completely normalized in IS-held areas. . . . Individual Yazidi slaves are held in homes. . . . Other slaves are kept in public brothels.

“Men would come to buy girls [at slave markets] to rape them. . . . Once they took the girls out, they would rape them and bring them back to exchange for new girls. The girls’ ages ranged from eight to thirty years,” a Yazidi girl who managed to escape IS is recorded as saying in an intensely detailed report by Human Rights Watch. . . .

[Nor is] IS . . . the only actor using sexual violence. The Assad regime has used rape as a weapon of war on a scale that at the very least matches, but probably exceeds, what IS has done. Sexual torture . . . has been reported from regime prisons. The regime was also using rape against male children, usually in front of their families, in the earliest months of a peaceful uprising.

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.