While perhaps best known for fighting and surviving two wars with Israel, the Iran-backed terrorist group Hizballah is currently in the headlines because of the devastating blast in Beirut, an at-best-indirect result of its power and influence in Lebanon. But Hizballah is in fact global in reach, fighting wars in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen, laundering money in Hong Kong, Detroit, and Benin, and plotting terrorist attacks everywhere from South America to Germany to Southeast Asia. The extent and complexity of its operations are made clear in an interactive map and timeline composed by Matthew Levitt, in which one can learn—to mention but a few examples—about the failed bombing of a Buddhist Temple in Indonesia in 1985, a plan to attack the Warsaw synagogue in 1992, and a thwarted bombing outside La Paz, Bolivia. Not to mention, of course, the organization’s many successful acts of terror, which have claimed hundreds of lives.

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.