Four years ago, a twenty-three-year-old Frenchman of Algerian descent named Mohamed Merah carried out three terror attacks over the course of a nine-day period, killing three French soldiers as well as four civilians, three of them children, at a Jewish day school. He was subsequently shot and killed by French police following a 30-hour siege. Reviewing a new French book that tells Merah’s story, John Rosenthal notes his “mind-boggling” success in avoiding French authorities, who had him on their radar well before the attacks:

Merah, like many of his acolytes, was the object of an “S” file identifying him as a threat to national security. He had long been under surveillance and he was repeatedly called in for questioning by both the police and the DCRI, the French domestic intelligence agency (since re-baptized as the DGSI). Indeed, in the end, his contact with the DCRI was so regular that the question can be raised as to whether French intelligence was not in fact attempting to use Merah as a willing or unwilling informant. . . .

The story of Mohamed Merah is, in effect, that of a train wreck waiting to happen or, to paraphrase his brother Abdelghani, a ticking time bomb waiting to explode—while French intelligence looked on.

Indeed, in conversation with negotiators during the siege of his apartment, Merah himself expressed amazement at the fact that he was able to carry out his attacks unhindered, attributing his success—and the failure of French authorities—to the will of Allah. . ..

[T]he blindness and downright confusion of French authorities is already evident during the eighteen months Merah spent in prison between December 2007 and October 2009 (which included a brief period of work release). Like so many of the current generation of French jihadists, Merah’s path to jihad passed through an extended phase of delinquency and petty crime. . . .

A cellmate [of Merah’s from one of his incarcerations] reports that “from morning to night” Merah would “blast” a CD featuring Islamic chants and “sounds of explosions.” Nonetheless, prison officials did not note any particular signs of radicalization. More astonishingly still, they appear to have been unaware that Merah was in fact already the subject of an “S” file flagging him as a threat.

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.