In Lebanon, Hizballah runs multiple networks of private religious schools, and likely exerts influence over other educational institutions, both public and private. In an in-depth report, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) delves into the anti-Semitic propaganda that permeates the curricula of two of the Iran-backed terrorist group’s most prominent school systems. Herewith, a few examples:

[One sixth-grade] ancient-history textbook . . . is divided into chapters surveying various ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean with a rather notable exception: the Jewish people. Instead, the Jews are only discussed in chapters of this book about other civilizations. . . . It claims that Judaism teaches its adherents they are “the masters of the world and the emperors of the universe, which nobody is entitled to belong to, no matter his station” and that “this is what made them hated and outcast, and perhaps what intensified people’s aversion to them: their unjustness, their arrogance, their greed, and their monopolizing.”

The sixth-grade religion textbook called Islam Is Our Message [includes] a lesson about the Jews and Muslims of Medina that opens with [a] Quranic verse about the “animosity” of “the Jews.” [It] then jumps to the present day, telling of a family watching the news on television about “the crimes of the Zionists in Palestine.”

Notably, these textbooks use the term “Zionists” interchangeably with “Jews,” even using the former when discussing the Jews of the ancient world. A group of fifth-graders, meanwhile, concluded a lesson about the Balfour Declaration by chanting “Death to Israel, Death to America!” And then there are the Mahdi Scouts, a Hizballah youth organization, which teaches members that “the root of [Israel’s] existence is evil, and there is no cure for it except its eradication.” But, the ADL argues, Washington has some power to combat this incitement.

[S]everal of Hizballah’s educational institutions could be ripe targets for international sanctions because of their clear role in Hizballah’s system of terrorist recruitment, as a sort of conveyor belt for generating future members, combatants, and leaders. Such sanctions could be surprisingly effective in this case, in part because of a new  law passed by Congress in 2018 with the ADL’s encouragement that provides the U.S. government with added authorities to deter foreign transactions that benefit Hizballah. . . . [Moreover], sanctions could deter certain third-party actors in Lebanon from conducting business as usual with educational entities that benefit Hizballah.

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.