Last month, Aslam Chowdhury, a high-ranking member of the Bangladeshi Nationalist party (BNP), the country’s largest opposition party, made an official visit to India where he met a Likud-affiliated Israeli Druze political consultant named Mendi Safadi. Photographs of the two shaking hands soon made their way into a Bangladeshi newspaper, leading to Chowdhurry’s arrest for sedition. Sebastian Bustle explains:

Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel. It is a country where Jews and the Israeli people are cursed in every Friday sermon, at more than 250,000 mosques. Imams across the country shout [in their sermons] that Jewish people are infidels. . . .

On May 15, police detectives arrested Chowdhury for alleged “involvement in a plot to oust the Bangladesh government with the support of Israeli intelligence Mossad [sic].” Bangladesh’s prime minister, Sheikha Hasina, accused two [major opposition] parties, BNP and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh, of being “so desperate that they are now conspiring with Israel to oust me. . . . They have joined hands with those who are frequently killing children and women in Palestine.”

The Bangladesh Nationalist party heavily depends on religious Muslim supporters, and Jamaat-e Islami Bangladesh is an Islamist political party that believes in Islamic revolution.

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.