Mimicking a tactic favored by Islamic State, a young man in Toronto recently drove a truck into a crowd, killing ten and injuring several others. The perpetrator’s online activity made clear that he was an “incel”—a term meaning “involuntarily celibate”—and had committed his crime to get revenge on society in general and more specifically on women, whom he blamed for his own frustrations. The incident brought some attention to incels’ bizarre Internet culture. To Kevin Williamson, the answer to their woes might be attendance at church—a prescription that could probably be applied to synagogue as well:

In the 1960s and 1970s, there were some social disruptions touching marriage and family life. It was, they told us, a “sexual revolution.” The thing about revolutions is: somebody loses. The so-called incels are some of the losers in that revolution, though not the only ones or, socially speaking, the most significant ones. (Those would be the abandoned single mothers.) But their situation is worth considering. . . .

If you are a sexually frustrated young man, the smart play would be to join a church. . . . That advice won’t do much good for the guys toggling between anime porn and [the online forum] Reddit all night while concocting elaborate revenge fantasies. It probably is not the case that those guys are maladjusted fruitcakes because they can’t get a girl; more likely, they can’t get a girl because they’re maladjusted fruitcakes. But you more or less normal, nonpsychotic, workaday types having trouble meeting a girl: join a church. Today. Or Sunday. If you don’t know which one to go to, pick whichever one your parents or grandparents went to. . . .

All you have to do to clear that first hurdle is show up. You’re a man, you go to church, ergo you are a churchgoing man. Maybe you go for self-interested reasons. Most churches are [comfortable] with that. . . .

In the meantime, consider that there are women in the room who might not only be interested in dating you but who might be persuaded to make a public pledge—right there in the church—to have sex with you for the rest of your life, and enter into a legal arrangement fortifying that commitment. Marriage and fatherhood have been socially devalued. But that doesn’t mean you have to go along with it. And it probably wouldn’t kill you to listen to a sermon or two.

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.