While at least one Canadian politician has been boasting of her efforts to obtain permission for her Muslim constituents to broadcast the traditional call to prayer via loudspeaker, Tarek Fateh observes some negative consequences:

On May 16, one Firas Al Najim gave his own call to prayer using a loudspeaker in the parking lot of the Jaffari Islamic Center in the [Toronto suburb] of Vaughan, where he promoted the views of the Iraqi cleric Ayatollah al-Sistani and then launched into tirade against “Zionists.” . . . Al Najim didn’t stop there. He basically asked for the end of the state of Israel. . . . And then came the reference to the “lobbies” that supposedly frame Canada’s policies.

This is what Muslims who have fled the tyranny of Islamic regimes such as Iran and Pakistan had feared. And it happened sooner than anyone expected: the use of megaphones around mosques to spread hatred and to do so under the protection of city bylaws rushed through by a scared bunch of politicians worried that they might be tarred by that obnoxious word Islamophobia that is simply a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of anyone who dare critique the actions of certain Muslims or their clergy.

As for the Jaffari Center’s defense that it has no relationship with Al Najim, Fateh demonstrates that the claim does not hold up to scrutiny. Canadian Islamic organizations, meanwhile, shifted the blame to those concerned about Al Najim’s rant:

What was fascinating about this sad display of hate is the fact that Islamic groups, instead of denouncing Firas Al Najim, chose to attack a local [politician], Gila Martow, who had slammed the hatred disguised as a call to prayer. And in a demonstration of . . . bullying and political cowardice, it was Gila Martow who had to apologize to the mosque, not Faris Al Najim.

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.