Islamic State, writes Amir Taheri, has based its approach to warfare not only on the example of Algerian and Palestinian terrorists but also on the Quran. The U.S. and its allies have the ability to counter its tactics easily, if only they have the will to do so:

IS patterns its military strategy on that of the Prophet Muhammad, which is to say it organizes ghazwa (raids) against soft targets. The Muslim warrior has always been known as the ghazi, a man who takes part in a ghazwa. However, a ghazwa is regarded as religiously permissible only if the ghazis are more than 50-percent sure of victory. Otherwise, they should return and wait for a better day. That is what the prophet himself did in his only attempt at ghazwa against the Byzantines.

Waging at least one annual ghazwa became an almost religious obligation for Islamic caliphs and rulers from the 8th century onward. . . . It took the Persians and the Byzantines almost two centuries to learn the trick [of defeating it]. They understood that, facing no resistance, the ghazi moves rapidly ahead, like a knife through butter, but will come to a halt if he encounters something hard on his way. . . .

Continuing the tradition, IS goes where it is easy to go and flees from where it is difficult to resist. . . . So far, IS has been relatively successful because it has not hit anything hard on its way. The homeopathic air strikes reluctantly ordered by President Obama have boosted IS’s narrative of Islamic victimhood without doing much real damage. . . . If François Hollande manages to create a new coalition, something still uncertain at the time of this writing, the aim should be to wrest the initiative away from IS. . . .

If IS begins to lose its aura of easy winning, it would face numerous hostile armed groups [formerly] allied with it because, in the Middle East at least, everyone prefers to be on the side of the winner.

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.