Following the murder of a French priest by Islamic State-linked terrorists, a group of prominent French Muslims issued an unambiguous and strongly worded condemnation of this and previous attacks. Bernard-Henri Lévy was among many who greeted the statement with enthusiasm—observing that it contained “not a scintilla of denial”—until he noticed a troubling detail:

The letter begins with an enumeration of the recent terrorist acts that have beset France. It does not omit Charlie (“the murder of cartoonists”), Bataclan (“the murder of young people listening to music”), of Magnanville (“the murder of a pair of police officers”). Nor, of course, does it fail to mention Nice (“the murder of men, women, and children celebrating the national holiday”) or Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (“the murder of a priest celebrating Mass”). Clearly, it purported to present an exhaustive list of the attacks.

Except it left one out. And what it left out was the hostage-taking at the kosher supermarket on January 9, 2015, which occurred less than three years after Mohamed Merah’s murders at the Jewish school in Toulouse. . . .

[A] slip like this cannot be allowed to go unremarked. And, given the prominence of those who signed the letter, it cannot fail to be upsetting. . . . One cannot purport to oppose Islamic State’s intention to immerse France in blood and fire and then, when the time comes to count the dead, display selective memory.

And above all, one cannot claim to be seeking a way out of an “intolerable situation,” one in which denial feeds the problem and confusion sows seeds of division and suggests the possibility (God forbid) of the war of all against all, while at the same time soft-pedaling the anti-Semitism that is, like it or not, one of the signs and, perhaps, one of the sources of what Abdelwahab Meddeb, the great scholar of Tunisian origin, called the “malady of Islam.”

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.