The legacy of Edward Said and his acolytes, writes Michael Rubin, has rendered the discipline of Middle East studies incapable of addressing the actual problems facing the Middle East, with severe consequences for U.S. policymaking:

The reason why Said remains so popular on campuses . . . is that he justified prioritizing politics above scholarly rigor. No longer would radical professors need to prove truth; they could just assert it and make it so. Up was down, wrong was right, and power was original sin. Middle East studies scholars have become so insulated within their Saidian universe that they never challenge each other’s basic assumptions. . . .

Within the United States, the best example of this is Rashid Khalidi. A former PLO press attaché turned academic, Khalidi is now the Edward Said Chair at Columbia University in New York. . . . He preached the idea that the region’s root problems lie not in radical ideologies but rather in grievances born from Western intervention and the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .

Khalidi, Said, [and likeminded professors] all saw occupation and military intervention as the region’s core problems. President Obama followed their policy prescriptions to a “T.” He withdrew precipitously from Iraq and Afghanistan, “led from behind” in Libya, and allowed the Syrian conflict to metastasize. It might not fit in academe’s worldview, but Western power projection is the proverbial finger in the dike that prevents a deluge of chaos.

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.