The recent terrorist attack in Manchester has been greeted with outrage throughout the West. But fifteen years ago, similar attacks were deemed justifiable by the UN Human Rights Commission (UNHRC). Michael Rubin writes:

In an April 15, 2002 vote, 40 countries—including Austria, Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden—agreed that Palestinians could engage “all available means, including armed struggle” to establish a Palestinian state. That UNHRC resolution enshrined the right to conduct suicide bombing in international humanitarian law. After all, many academics, diplomats, and human-rights activists argue that the UN and its human-rights wings set the precedent that becomes the foundation for international humanitarian and human-rights law.

When the Human Rights Commission voted, Israel was weathering a months-long suicide bombing campaign that, at its height, saw multiple bombings of buses, cafes, and other public areas every week. . . . European diplomats and many academics may hold their noses and sneer at Israel and attacks on its citizens. A German court recently even ruled that the firebombing of a local synagogue was not anti-Semitic but rather an expression of anti-Israel protest. But they should recognize that Israel is not a pariah to isolate and condemn but rather the canary in the coal mine for the civilized world.

Violence that they legitimize inside Israel or against Jews will not be limited to Israel. Legitimacy is easy to grant, but once granted, it . . . is hard to take away.

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.