The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hizballah enjoys an extensive network throughout Latin America, mainly consisting of contacts and operatives in various Lebanese diaspora communities. These it uses both to raise funds and to carry out attacks, such as the 1993 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the murderous bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the same city the next year. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes the organization’s activities in the region, and outlines how the U.S. can combat them:

Over time, [Hizballah has] bought political influence among local elites, built alliances with organized crime, and offered financial services to both. As a result, today Latin America is a key center for Hizballah’s increasingly sophisticated global financial network.

The Trump administration should disrupt Hizballah’s Latin American sources of revenue by targeting its operatives and their businesses with a sustained sanctions campaign; it should strengthen the Drug Enforcement Administration’ efforts to try Hizballah operatives involved in drug trafficking; and it should punish local elites who facilitate Hizballah’s continuing presence in the region. . . .

Next, the continuing business activities of individuals and entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury occur because local governments are either reluctant to implement these sanctions or actively cooperate with the terrorists. The administration should demand that they either comply or face consequences. These should include . . . designating banking sectors of countries that facilitate Hizballah’s terror-finance as zones of primary money-laundering concern, working within international forums like the Financial Action Task Force to have such countries blacklisted, denying implicated politicians visas to the U.S., and making them personae non gratae in Washington.

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.