The much celebrated economist Thomas Piketty has recently proposed that the rise of Islamic State can be explained by income inequality. Benjamin Weingarten disagrees:

Piketty succumbs to the widely held belief that the global jihad can be understood through a Western prism rather than on the jihadists’ own terms. This Western prism is obscured by a materialist screen, which assumes that all peoples are ultimately driven by the same motives, desires, and ambitions—namely, economic ones. We in the West believe that a love of freedom is sown into the hearts of all men, and that we all seek a good job, a nice house, and a fine education. But liberty is not a universal ideal; upper-middle-class values aren’t shared by everyone.

For the pious Muslim, according to the jihadists, the great overarching goal is to bring the whole world into Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, ruled by sharia under Allah. Subscribers to theo-political Islamic-supremacist ideology are expansionistic because it is their religious duty to be so. . . .

That Piketty would come to such an ill-conceived conclusion . . . may be a mere reflection of his myopia—indeed, anyone heavily invested in a particular area of study may imagine linkages in other areas. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that a socialist interprets the jihad according to materialist first principles. But it should disturb us that many in the Western elite—including President Obama—either share such sentiments or are willing to mislead us for political purposes.

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.