While nominally an American ally, the small nation uses its vast wealth to support terror and to cultivate anti-American sentiment. Daniel Rosen writes:

Qatar has provided clandestine financial and logistical support to Islamic State in recent years, as even Hillary Clinton acknowledged in a leaked email in August 2014. Moreover, Qatar funds Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda and is the main financial backer of Hamas. While this should have [been sufficient reason to] destroy Qatari-U.S. relations, the Arab state continues to host a large number of American troops on its soil, which protect it from Gulf rivals, domestic dissidents, and Iran.

Meanwhile, the Qatari-funded Al Jazeera network regularly chastises the United States for [alleged] human-rights abuses. This hypocrisy is very rich, since Qatar abuses migrant workers, flogs dissidents, and says that women’s testimony counts only half as much as men’s. . . . Equally outrageous are Qatar’s increasingly successful attempts to lure American think tanks and universities into its sphere of influence. . . .

This duplicity will only end when the U.S. forces Qatar to come clean. There is no strategic advantage for U.S. troops to be based in Qatar instead of on the soil of more genuine Gulf allies.

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.