So writes Eliot Cohen of the ongoing conflict between the West and radical Islam, of which the fight against Islamic State (IS) is only one theater:

What will it take to fight this war? Begin with endurance: this war will probably go on for the rest of my life, and well into my children’s. That is an unpleasant reality, but there it is. Politicians will have to explain just how high the stakes are. The president may be right in the narrowest sense when he says that IS is not an “existential threat,” but its actions can derange our politics and cause chaos in parts of the world that we care a great deal about. If they ever acquire weapons of mass destruction (which they would like to do), they can and will kill thousands and tens of thousands rather than tens and hundreds.

We will have to understand the ideology, or rather ideologies, of our enemies. . . . [In addition], we need to stop the circumlocutions. The “violent extremists” are in fact Islamists. We do not intend to “bring them to justice” or “take them off the battlefield,” but rather to capture or kill them. Although it is true one cannot kill one’s way out of an insurgency, we are going to have to a kill a great many people—thousands, not hundreds—before we break the back of IS and kindred movements. To that end we need a long-range plan not to “contain” but to crush them. It seems fairly evident that the [Obama] administration lacks such a plan, but if it exists it is plainly failing.

It will be a long, bloody, and costly process; what is at stake is not simply our way of life in the sense of rock concerts and alcohol in restaurants, but the more fundamental rights of freedom of speech and religion, the equality of women, and, most essentially, the freedom from fear and freedom to think.

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.