In February, South African authorities arrested two Lebanese civilians for attempting to purchase equipment for manufacturing drones, which they planned to send to Hizballah. In previous years, Iran-backed terrorists were arrested for planning attacks on Western and Israeli targets in Kenya, a Hizballah armory was discovered in Nigeria, and American officials identified an extensive Hizballah money-laundering effort in West Africa. Yet these are only small parts of Tehran’s massive effort to establish a foothold in Africa through charitable organizations, Muslim educational institutions, efforts to convert Sunni Muslims to Shiism, and attempts to gain the loyalty of African Shiites to Iran’s supreme leader. Hassan Dai writes:

To win the hearts and minds of African Muslims, the Iranian regime and its institutions organize conferences, conduct religious and political events, work with local partners, and run more than 100 Islamic centers, schools, seminaries, and mosques in more than 30 African countries with thousands of students, clerics and missionaries. In addition, Tehran has offered financial and economic incentives to African governments and used two of its charities, the Iranian Red Crescent and the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee, to provide a wide range of free social and health services in several African countries. . . .

These and other organizations disseminate Tehran’s fundamentalist ideology and generate grassroots support for its foreign policy, its position in the Islamic world, and its quest to dominate the Middle East. They also provide the regime with a recruiting pool for the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds Force and other Iranian institutions responsible for terrorism or military activities abroad. . . .

Tehran’s persistent export of its brand of Shiite Islamism to Africa poses a real threat to peace on the continent, not least since this ideology promotes the narrative that Islam is still at war with the West as the continuation of its millenarian struggle for world domination. In this context, Israel is depicted as a cancerous Western implant at the heart of the Islamic world that must be eradicated. Thousands of African clerics trained in the Iranian-owned seminaries promote this anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel animosity.

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.