In 2017, a Muslim man named Kobili Traoré broke into the Paris apartment of a Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi, tortured her for several hours, and then killed her by throwing her off a balcony—while police patiently waited on the street for backup to arrive. A French judge dropped the murder charges last week, ruling that Traoré was temporarily insane since he had smoked marijuana prior to committing his crimes. Annabelle Azade writes:

In Paris, where Kobili Traoré’s trial took place last week, anti-Semitism has been dramatically increasing, prompting an exodus of French Jews. Anti-Semitic incidents rose by 74 percent in one year, reaching 541 in 2018, from 311 in 2017, according to the French Interior Ministry. In July 2018 the New York Times found that, despite Jews making up less than 1 percent of the French population, “nearly 40 percent of violent acts classified as racially or religiously motivated were committed against Jews in 2017.”

On the night of the murder, [Traoré] had first broken into another family’s apartment before breaking into Halimi’s in Paris’ 11th arrondissement—reportedly the only Jewish person in her . . . apartment building. Claiming not to have recognized Halimi, Traoré told the French court: “I felt persecuted. When I saw the Torah and a chandelier in her home, I felt oppressed. I saw her face transforming.”

In addition to screaming “Allahu akbar” during his crime, Traoré was heard calling Halimi a shaitan—Arabic for Satan—before killing her. According to Halimi’s daughter, Traoré had called her a “dirty Jewess” two years before murdering her mother. Traoré had also attended the Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud mosque in Paris, a known hangout for Islamist radicals.

Yet, despite all of that evidence and the brutality of Traoré’s crime, French authorities and the French media effectively suppressed reports of the crime; . . . details of the crime that pointed to its anti-Semitic motive were initially not reported in the French press.

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.