Surveying the state of religious tolerance throughout the Muslim world, Daniel Philpott argues against those who claim Islam is fundamentally incompatible with freedom of religion. He notes that while there are regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran that ruthlessly repress deviation from official interpretations of Islam, there are important counter-examples:

Eight of the eleven religiously free majority-Muslim states are in West Africa. . . . The other three are Lebanon, Albania, and Kosovo. While religious freedom varies in this group—in Gambia, for instance, the government enforces some of the rulings of the Supreme Islamic Council, a non-governmental group of religious leaders—none of these divergences prevent these countries from being among the most religiously free in the world.

[These countries] are free not despite or apart from their Islam but because of their Islam. In most of these countries, Muslims are the vast majority while Christians are a significant minority. Islam in these countries typically has a tradition of tolerance toward other religions that goes back centuries and existed well before colonial times. Colonial governments historically allowed broad freedom to practice religion and collaborated with religious leaders. Today, interreligious harmony is common, marked by mutual attendance at religious celebrations, interfaith friendships, and—in some countries—interreligious marriage. . . .

If the religiously free states show that Islam can be free, [a] second pattern—secular repression—provides complementary evidence that Islam is not necessarily the cause of all of the religious repression in the Muslim world. . . . .

Most practitioners of the secular-repressive pattern have been highly authoritarian. . . . They seek to contain and control religion, typically “establishing” a moderate version of Islam and closely controlling the governance of mosques, seminaries, universities, and schools. . . . They will simultaneously suppress more traditional and radical forms of Islam. Secular leaders [such as Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or the Assads in Syria] have presented these religious figures as enemies of the state and used them to make the case for authoritarian rule.

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.