After January’s attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket—not to mention the jihadist attacks on New York, Madrid, London, and Mumbai, and the decades of terror in Israel—nobody should be surprised by Friday’s horrific events. Adam Kirsch writes:

There [is], in fact, a kind of syllogism of terror at work here: a movement that begins by targeting Jews and writers will end by targeting the West at large. Those who extenuated those earlier attacks by pointing to Israeli policies or cartoonists’ provocations may now realize that terrorism is not a form of critique, but a form of attack. Religious pluralism and free speech are the glories of liberalism, and so they are what the enemies of liberalism attack first.

By the same token, in the terrorists’ decision to target a football stadium and a concert hall, they declare a puritanical hatred for Western pleasures—just like the terrorists who blew up the Dolphinarium disco in Tel Aviv in 2001, and a nightclub in Bali the next year. This dimension of the Paris attacks seems especially resonant, since for Americans the French capital has long stood for a particular kind of pleasure—the pleasures of civilization, of cosmopolitanism, of the cultivation of grace. . . .

Fourteen years ago, after the 9/11 attacks, France joined much of the world in declaring “We are all Americans;” if Americans now say “We are all Parisians,” that is not just gratitude or sympathy or homage, but simple acknowledgment of fact.

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.