Daniel Johnson reviews a book on terrorism and religious fundamentalism by the former chief rabbi of Britain:

[Jonathan Sacks] deploys all his exegetical subtlety on the foundational texts of Abrahamic monotheism in the Hebrew Bible, especially the book of Genesis, to show us how figures such as Ishmael and Esau, ancient archetypes of divine rejection, are in fact the opposite. All faiths have “hard texts” that are too dangerous to read literally, Sacks suggests, but Judaism, Christianity, and Islam at least share a biblical basis for mutual toleration.

The thrust of Sacks’s book is all the more powerful because he eschews the wishful thinking that bedevils both sides of the secular/religious conflict. He makes no attempt to play down the pathology of terrorism and war inspired by the anger of those, especially Muslims, who “are determined to defeat the world by means of the word.” Now freed from the obligations of office, he can speak frankly about the betrayal by the secular West of its Judeo-Christian values, the moral relativism that fails to defend freedom, and the “altruistic evil” of radical, politicized religion.

The failure of the secular West to provide identity and meaning combines with the brute facts of demography to produce hydra-headed movements that defy even the smartest weapons and the most intelligent intelligence. After centuries of secularization, we are witnessing the return of religion with a vengeance. The answer to the Islamists who love death more than life cannot be solely military; it has to be theological, too.

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.