Since 2006, Washington has given some $2 billion in aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), hoping first to empower it to replace Hizballah in the southern part of the country, and later on to defend against al-Qaeda and Islamic State, and to prevent the spillover of the Syrian civil war into its territory. Yet not only has Hizballah grown stronger in the intervening years, but it now also exercises a great deal of control over the LAF—while building up its own ability to attack Israel and effecting a blood-soaked intervention in Syria. A bill currently before Congress would cut funding to the LAF—funding that ultimately benefits Hizballah—but a group of Democratic representatives has managed to neuter it, writes Adam Kredo:

While the original bill had bipartisan support in both chambers, House Democrats recently attached an amendment to their version of the legislation that nixed the funding cut [to the LAF]. The House last week passed a watered-down version of the bill that leaves the LAF funding fully intact. The wrangling over the legislation came just days before Hizballah launched a foiled attack on Israel from southern Lebanon, where the LAF and international forces have been tasked with stopping such terror strikes.

The Countering Hezbollah in Lebanon’s Military Act was passed out of a House committee late last week without key portions that would have conditioned U.S. aid to the LAF, effectively barring it from receiving money until it cleanses its ranks of Hizballah forces. . . . The final version now [merely] requires the State Department to issue a report detailing ways in which the United States can stop Hizballah’s smuggling of arms along its border with Israel.

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.