A polling company last week released the results of a major survey of British Muslims who live in areas where they constitute at least 20 percent of the population. The results, according to Tom Wilson, are not encouraging:

What the findings of this poll point to is that there is now a sizable portion of the British Muslim community that holds views completely at odds with the pluralistic values that liberal democracies depend upon to function and survive. Take what British Muslims think about other minority groups such as Jews and homosexuals. In the . . . poll, 52 percent said they thought homosexuality should be made illegal in Britain. And what respondents had to say about Jews was no less shocking. Well over a third repeatedly endorsed wildly anti-Semitic statements.

No less than 44 percent of Muslims agreed that Jews have too much power in the business world, 38 percent said Jews have too much control over global affairs, 39 percent said Jews have too much influence over the media, and 26 percent said that Jews are responsible for most of the world’s wars. Additionally, 34 percent agreed that “Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.” However, when questioned, only 10 percent could accurately identify the number of Jews actually murdered in the Holocaust.

Cautious estimates from other research suggest that Muslims may be responsible for somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of anti-Semitic incidents in Britain, despite making up only 5 percent of the population. Yet talking honestly about this problem remains difficult. The notion that one minority group might be responsible for directing bigotry against another seems to be incomprehensible to polite opinion. The overarching narrative remains that racism happens only in one direction, from the Caucasian majority toward everyone else.

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.