Radical Islam is at war with Western civilization, argues Ezra Levant, and has been for years. But many in the West have preferred to pretend otherwise—and in that respect, Israel is at an advantage:

It’s almost irrelevant whether or not you acknowledge there is a war. But it’s not totally irrelevant, because if you do not acknowledge you are in a war, you probably don’t stand a chance to win that war.

Last year alone, 6,000 Jews left France, many for Israel. Why would they leave France—a strong, free, liberal country of 66 million people in the heart of Europe, a nuclear power, a NATO power, a country with a seat on the UN Security Council—to go to Israel, a country of just 8 million, surrounded by hostile dictatorships and terrorist groups? Who would imagine that could be safer?

Israel is besieged, it’s surrounded. But it has one advantage over the West: it is not in denial. No one in Israel, not even the far left, pretends that there is no jihad; no one in Israel talks about terrorists being just “lone wolves” or “crazy”; no one in Israel, not even the left-wing media, starts the coverage of any terrorist attack by denying that a Muslim was really Muslim, or denying that terrorism was really terrorism. They don’t blame the victim—those cartoonists were so mean to Muhammad, what can you expect as a response to George W. Bush, et cetera, ad nauseam.

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.