To release their new “Document of General Principles and Policies,” leaders of Hamas held a press conference at a hotel in Qatar, where the organization’s main office is located. Clifford May explains why Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, emir of the small but wealthy country, hosts the terrorist group:

[Sheikh al-Thani] is extraordinarily adept at playing both ends against the middle. He provides Hamas not just with a capital-in-exile but also with much of its funding. He supports other Muslim Brotherhood organizations throughout the region. Financiers of al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and other terrorist groups operate openly in Qatar. At the same time, the emir transmits Qatari perspectives—a less polite term would be Islamist propaganda—around the world through Al-Jazeera, the state-funded international television network.

But Qatar has another face. It hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East. It contributes millions of dollars to several Washington think tanks. And it lavishly subsidizes satellite campuses [in Qatar] for American universities. Among them are Georgetown, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Northwestern, Texas A&M, and Virginia Commonwealth.

The [satellite] campuses are located in “Education City,” where the main mosque regularly features Islamist clerics. For example: Mudassir Ahmed, who from the pulpit last year said: “Kill the infidels. . . . Count them in number and do not spare one!” Another preacher called for Allah to “render victorious our brothers the mujahedeen . . . in every place” and to “guide their shooting.”

What do the administrators of the American colleges say about this? Not a word. When it comes to Islamists, too many academics long ago gave up the struggle to see what’s in front of their noses.

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.