Last week, an Argentinian federal prosecutor submitted an official brief presenting evidence that the death of Alberto Nisman, the attorney investigating the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center, was a homicide rather than a suicide, contrary to the government’s initial claims. Lee Smith examines the implications:

The fact that Nisman was murdered virtually clinches his case regarding the 1994 bombing. If Iran wasn’t responsible then there was nothing for [former Argentine President Cristina] Kirchner to conceal. But he was, which may turn out to be an even bigger scandal than the fact that the attack on the Jewish Community Center was sponsored by [Iran], and covered up by the state Iran targeted. Now the task is to find out who is responsible for killing Nisman. Buenos Aires will have to sort out whether its own intelligence service murdered a man for revealing the authorship of a huge state-sponsored terrorist crime on its own soil that targeted Argentine citizens; or whether the murder was committed by the same foreign power that sponsored the original crime: Iran.

Perhaps the likeliest scenario would point to Iranian and Argentinian coordination. In any case, you can bet Cristina Kirchner is somewhere in the middle of it all. Now it’s up to her successor, Mauricio Macri, to win the justice that he promised Nisman’s daughters when he was elected in November.

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.