In his testimony last week before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Michael Weiss outlined the history of Islamic State (IS) from its previous incarnation as al-Qaeda in Iraq to the present, and explained the reasons for its success. Along the way, he noted that for some time IS has been connected to attacks on European Jews:

In the mid-2000s, Germany’s foreign-intelligence service . . . reportedly uncovered a cell [taking orders from IS’s founder, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi], operating in the Ruhr region of Germany, responsible for the manufacture of fake passports for use in Afghanistan. Agents of that cell were plotting grenade attacks against the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

As it happens, a decade later, a different Jewish Museum—this one in Brussels—was assaulted by one of Zarqawi’s heirs, the twenty-nine-year-old French-Algerian Mehdi Nemmouche, who shot and killed three people following his return from Syria, where he’d not only trained with IS but also acted as a prison guard and particularly zealous torturer of Western hostages.

As for the current American strategy to defeat Islamic State, Weiss contends that it is doomed to fail as long as the U.S. and its allies are seen as demonstrating callousness, or worse, toward Sunni Muslims:

IS presents itself as the sole custodian and defender of Sunni Islam, practitioners of which, it argues, have been systematically targeted for murder, dispossession, and disinheritance [with the approval or support of the United States] since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when a Sunni-minority regime led by Saddam Hussein was toppled and a Shiite-majority government came to power through democratic vote. . . .

Why else, [if not because of anti-Sunni animus, say IS propagandists], do American warplanes and drones bomb only Sunni extremists but not those extremists loyal to Bashar al-Assad, who have burned people alive, and ethnically cleansed villages, and disappeared tens of thousands in dungeons, and displaced millions either internally or externally, and killed hundreds of thousands using every weapon in his arsenal, including sarin gas and the specially devised “barrel bomb”?

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.