The recent murder of Alberto Nisman, who was investigating the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, has brought renewed attention to Iran’s activities in South America. As Toby Dershowitz writes, those activities are hardly a matter of the past alone:

On January 8, an explosive device was found adjacent to the new embassy of Israel [in Montevideo, Uruguay]. And, some six weeks earlier, a suspicious suitcase was found near the former Israeli embassy there. The Uruguayan foreign ministry reportedly summoned Tehran’s ambassador, asking him why an Iranian diplomat, reported to be Ahmed Sabatgold, was seen parked in the vicinity of the suspicious suitcase. . . .

Sabatgold reportedly was a well-known Holocaust denier and often spoke out against Jews, according to Uruguayan media reports. They say Sabatgold had been instructing a group of Muslim converts who operated within the framework of the radical Unidad Popular party. . . .

Clearly, Nisman’s investigation was far from over. It continued to shed light on Iran’s long reach into Latin America. Recent plots in Montevideo indicate that Iran’s activities in the hemisphere appear to continue unabated to this day.

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.