Pakistan has routinely targeted various terrorist groups operating within its borders, but its overall strategy, argues Bill Reggio in recent congressional testimony, is to support several other jihadist organizations both at home and in Afghanistan. Among the most prominent of these is Jaish-e-Mohammed, which was involved in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, and its ally Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT):

LeT operates openly inside Pakistan and has offices throughout the country. . . .[Its] headquarters, [located] near Lahore, is a sprawling complex that is used to indoctrinate future jihadists before they are sent off for military training. . . .

[LeT’s] terrorist infrastructure was used to conduct . . . terrorist attacks in India and Afghanistan. The most prominent attack took place in Mumbai, when a suicide assault team fanned out across the city and targeted multiple locations, including a theater, a train station, hotels, and a Jewish center, killing 164 people. The attack lasted for three days.

Indian intelligence traced phone calls back to handlers in Pakistan as the assault was ongoing. The handlers directed its fighters to execute non-Muslims, often brutally, and laughed when their instructions were carried out. After the attack, Interpol issued arrest warrants for two serving senior Pakistani army officers and a retired major.

Despite LeT’s overt ties to al-Qaeda and its campaign of terror in India and Afghanistan, the Pakistani government refuses to crack down on this group.

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.