Last April, a Parisian Muslim with a history of drug addiction and crime entered the apartment of his neighbor—a sixty-seven-year-old Jewish woman named Sarah Halimi—beat her savagely, and then threw her out the window to her death. The French authorities, along with the press, obscured evidence suggesting that Halimi’s killer had religious motivations. Now her family’s lawyer has released further information confirming that he sought out a Jewish victim and prayed before and after committing the murder. Marc Weitzmann comments:

The Halimi family is now calling for a reclassification of the murder as a terrorist act with torture and with anti-Semitism as an aggravating circumstance. Yet, if the anti-Jewish impulse is indisputable, describing the murder as terrorism seems dubious, as everything indicates that [the killer, known to the public only as] Kobili T., acted on impulse. In fact, Sarah Halimi’s murder looks a lot like the killing of Sébastien Selam [another Jew murdered by a Muslim] that occurred in 2003, coincidentally in the same neighborhood. . . . It is difficult to draw an equivalence between the sudden upsurge of a murderous impulse and a planned killing that came at the end of months of preparation and training.

What should be understood is how the violent anti-Semitic impulse serves as a base and a justification for subsequent terror planning. In 2014, the year preceding the major terror wave that continues to this day in France, the figures on spontaneous anti-Jewish aggressions as given by the Ministry of Interior reached 800—two a day, directed against a total population of 500,000 people. . . .

Isn’t it striking, also, that, from the Kouachi brothers [who carried out the Charlie Hebdo/Hypercacher killings] to the Bataclan commando members, the killers involved in recent terror attacks voiced their hatred of Jews and “Zionists” while committing their deeds, regardless of whether their actual targets were Jewish?

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.