Last Saturday, Khairi Saadallah fatally stabbed three homosexual men in the English town of Reading. Douglas Murray comments on the British media’s strange response:

It has since emerged that the twenty-five-year-old suspect, who is now in police custody, came to the UK from Libya in 2012. He is reported to have come to the attention of MI5 last year as an individual who had the potential to travel overseas for terrorism purposes. . . . So far, [however], there has been almost no interest expressed in the possible motives of the attacker. Quite possibly there is a mental-health component. . . . But anything else to see here? Any other reason why a migrant from Libya who was given asylum in the UK might want to go around stabbing gay men? Well who would even ask such questions? What do you want to find? Bigot.

But if the attacker from Saturday night had been a white skinhead, or a neo-Nazi, or had been wearing a big red MAGA hat, I am fairly confident that the gay press and all of the mainstream media would be crawling over every angle of this story by now with an unparalleled fury, hurling allegations of “adjacency” against all of their favorite enemies. As it is I am reminded of nothing so much as story after story over recent years. Stories like when Omar Mateen walked into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida four years ago and gunned down 49 people.

People know after a story like this that it isn’t good. . . . But they have made a very basic calculation. The calculation is that dead gays aren’t good. But they aren’t as bad—indeed they are a price worth paying—compared to asking any of the questions that sane people would ask after an attack like this. . . . The fear [is] that talking about Islamic homophobia as a potential motive in this case might increase prejudice of some other kind. It’s a calculation of a very cynical and inept kind.

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.