A recent poll conducted by the BBC shows that most Arab populations evince a strikingly low tolerance for homosexuality; a somewhat higher proportion find honor killings “acceptable.” The poll also uncovered predictable bigotry toward Jews and Israel. Ben Cohen comments:

The Arab population with the lowest tolerance for homosexuality is the Palestinians, just 5 percent of whom believe that being gay is “acceptable.” In Jordan, that number is seven percent, in Sudan 17 percent, and in Algeria, a comparatively open-minded 26 percent. . . . The fact that these [bigoted] views co-exist with anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and violent misogyny shows that a kind of reverse intersectionality prevails in the Arab world.

It isn’t an accident that hatred of Israel goes hand-in-hand with hatred of homosexuals and justification of the murder of females (25 percent of Moroccans, 21 percent of Jordanians, and 8 percent of Palestinians think this practice is “acceptable”). They go together because they are products of the prevailing political and religious environment. The same passions that animate opposition to the existence of Israel as a “colonial interloper” underlie the conviction that homosexuality is a distinctive sin of the West. It is, you might say, a strange mixture of pre-modern views about human freedom with post-modern views about the ills of Western imperialism. . . .

In 1979—40 years ago, that is—an Iranian feminist with the pseudonym “Atoussa H.” published a devastating critique of the Western left’s appeasement of the social conservatism that accompanied the Islamist revolution in Iran. “The left,” [she wrote], “should not let itself be seduced by a cure that is perhaps worse than the disease.” Recent history shows that the Western left was seduced. And nothing that Atoussa H. noted at that time has really changed.

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.