After Douglas al-Bazi, an Iraqi Catholic priest, brought hundreds of refugees from Islamic State into his church in the city of Erbil, he reached out to contacts in the U.S. for help. Soon he was working with two CIA veterans, who in turn enlisted the assistance of Aron Shaviv, an Israeli political consultant. Shaviv convinced the Slovak government—which has vigorously protested EU pressure to accept refugees—to settle Bazi and over 100 members of his Aramaic-speaking flock within its borders. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

[Shaviv’s] team tried at least a dozen countries before getting a hearing in Slovakia. “My policy was the path of least resistance—the first country that showed any kind of positive leanings was Slovakia,” said Shaviv.

[He] explained that it was important in Slovakia, still a very traditional Catholic country, to get both the Vatican and its local religious authorities involved. “We thought that the right approach was to get the Slovak church to take ownership and say ‘these are our people,’” said Shaviv.

And after many trips to the Vatican, [the church] came on board in saving Iraqi Catholics. “The . . . messaging that got them to really identify and take ownership was that this is the last Christian community on earth that speaks the language of Jesus,” Shaviv commented.

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.