In her address to the UN General Assembly two weeks ago, President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner of Argentina declared that her government “will continue tirelessly seeking the truth and justice in the AMIA case”—referring to Hizballah’s 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center. Not only is this statement patently false, writes Clifford May, but Kirchner’s government seems to be collaborating with Iran to cover up the latter’s role in the attack:

[The story of] the AMIA bombing and the murder of [the state-appointed prosecutor investigating the case, Alberto] Nisman, started with . . . an agreement Argentina made in the late 1980s to provide Iran with nuclear technology and assistance. Eventually, under pressure from the United States, the Argentine government did not give Iran’s revolutionary theocrats what they wanted.

One plausible theory—in essence, Nisman’s theory—is that the attack was Iran’s way of sending a message and a warning: “This time we kill Argentine Jews. Disappoint us again and who knows what our targets will be?”

While Kirchner originally supported Nisman’s efforts to uncover Iranian complicity in the bombing, by 2013 she had changed her tune and Nisman eventually came to believe that she herself was involved in the cover-up. May continues:

[I]t’s at least possible [Kirchner] came to believe that refusing to shield Iran was simply too dangerous. Perhaps she rationalized, too, that [whatever understanding she came to with Iran] was the best deal she could get and that even a bad deal was preferable to no deal—much as President Obama came to view the agreement he cut giving Iran’s rulers a long list of concessions in exchange for their vague promise to delay a nuclear-weapons program whose existence they refuse to acknowledge.

Whatever the reasons, Mrs. Kirchner’s Faustian bargain necessitated abandoning both the AMIA victims and Nisman. Did it necessitate something even worse? That remains an unsolved murder mystery.

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.