In 2007, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) discovered that Hizballah, in cooperation with Colombian cartels, was arranging for the export of massive amounts of cocaine from Latin America to the Middle East. After many years of investigation—and the discovery of a vast global network of drug-dealing and money-laundering—the DEA and European agencies managed to roll up a large portion of the terrorist group’s operation in Colombia. Yet, writes Emanuele Ottolenghi, Hizballah’s criminal enterprises are still up and running, especially its export of “black cocaine”—a form of the drug ingeniously disguised as charcoal briquettes:

With cartels constantly trying to outsmart authorities in their game of hide-and-seek, it is possible that, after temporarily losing [its base of operations in] Colombia, Hizballah saw the Tri-Border Area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay—with its well-established money-laundering infrastructure—as the ideal place to rebuild the black-cocaine supply lines that [the DEA] had temporarily disrupted. The region has been described as having “the largest illicit economy in the world.”

Hizballah, after all, continues to be a key partner to cartels in Latin America. . . . Other criminal organizations are adept at producing drugs, running protection rackets, and monopolizing illicit businesses, but they lack global networks for shipping and distributing goods and laundering the proceeds. That is where Hizballah comes in, along with its willing collaborators in various Lebanese diaspora communities around the world.

Interdicting these shipments is not just part of the war on drugs and the battle against transnational criminal networks in America’s backyard. It is about disrupting terror finance as well—the lifeblood of terror plots that have killed and threaten to kill more Americans.

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.