Although the most recent acts of terror in Canada came as a surprise to most, they are not unprecedented: a large-scale attack was foiled in 2006, and two more in 2013. Canada is home to at least 80 individuals who returned after joining terrorist organizations abroad. The caliph of Islamic State recently called on Muslims in Canada (and elsewhere) to kill “non-believers,” and an IS video explicitly suggested running people over with cars. As Jonathan D. Halevi writes:

The choice of Canada as a terror target is part of the overall strategy of the Islamic State and the other radical Islamic organizations to weaken the West, dissuade it from a military campaign against radical Islam, and remove all Western presence from the Middle East and Muslim countries. The goal is to expand the caliphate’s borders so as to enable an anti-Western jihad campaign that will bring about global Islamization. The success of the terror attacks in Canada will likely encourage terror groups in the United States, which is Islamic State’s supreme target, to carry out domestic attacks.

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.