Just five years ago, Islamic State (IS) came into Mosul—Iraq’s third largest city—and began its attempt to rid it of its ancient Christian community. Now, two years’ after Mosul’s liberation, its Christian population has been reduced from about 15,000 to a little over 40, with large numbers having fled the region. Giulio Meotti writes:

This cultural genocide, thanks to the indifference of Europeans and many Western Christians more worried about not appearing “Islamophobic” than defending their own brothers, sadly worked. Father Ragheed Ganni, for instance, a Catholic priest from Mosul, had just finished celebrating mass in his church when Islamists killed him. In one of his last letters, Ganni wrote: “We are on the verge of collapse.” That was in 2007—almost ten years before IS eradicated the Christians of Mosul.

Traces of a lost Jewish past have also resurfaced in Mosul, where a Jewish community had lived for thousands of years. Now, 2,000 years later, both Judaism and Christianity have effectively been annihilated there. That life is over. . . . In Mosul alone, 45 churches were vandalized or destroyed. Not a single one was spared. Today there is only one church open in the city. . . . The fate of Mosul’s Christians is similar to those elsewhere in Iraq.

Shamefully, the West has been and still seems to be completely indifferent to the fate of Middle Eastern Christians. . . . As the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf noted, “People accuse the Occident of wanting to impose its values, but the real tragedy is its inability to transmit them. . . . Threats to pandas cause more emotion” than threats of the extinction of the Christians in the Middle East.

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.