Malia Bouattia, recently elected president of Britain’s National Union of Students (NUS), gave a speech in 2014 endorsing Palestinian terror in no uncertain terms and condemning those who would denounce it. Also on her résumé are a successful move to prevent the NUS from condemning Islamic State and a blog post in which she complained about the “large Jewish society” at Birmingham University. Maajid Nawaz laments the sorry state of British public discourse that allows such views to get a pass:

To those whom I call Europe’s regressive left, . . . jihadist terrorism has come to resemble an authentic expression of Muslim rage at Western colonial hegemony.

For—don’t you know?—we Muslims are angry. We are so angry, in fact, that we wish to enslave indigenous Yazidi women for sex [and] bury adulterers neck-deep in the ground and stone them to death, while throwing gays off tall buildings and burning our enemies alive. All because of . . . Israel.

For this regressive left—which has now penetrated U.S. circles, too—we Muslims are not expected to be civilized. And Muslim upstarts who dare to challenge this theocratic and far-left fascism are deemed nothing but an inconvenience to the pre-Nazi-like populism that screams simplistically, “It is all the West’s fault!”

It is my fellow Muslims who suffer most from such bad leadership.

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.