President Obama, John Kerry, and a number of left-wing pundits have been in the habit of pronouncing Islamic State (IS) “not Islamic.” Now, in the rush to downplay the connection between the massacre in Orlando and radical Islam, some commentators have invoked the perpetrator’s impiety as reason to doubt his connection to IS in the first place. Abe Greenwald spots the contradiction:

If IS isn’t a true representation of Islam, and if Omar Mateen wasn’t a particularly devout Muslim, wouldn’t that make him—by progressives’ own logic—an exemplary IS terrorist?

Apparently not. As it turns out, Islamist terrorism is for confused Muslims only until a confused Muslim commits mass murder in the name of Islam. When that happens, Islamist terrorism turns out to be for the serious and devout, after all. . . .

What’s the benefit of deceiving on the matter of radical Islam? The answer is, it allows us to avoid our responsibilities and tell soothing stories while the world burns.

If we called things by their proper names, maybe we wouldn’t have spent the week after a terrorist attack straining and contorting in a national effort to deny the obvious. [What’s more], there’s dignity in facing the truth. Frankly, that’s benefit enough.

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.