The Iranian-backed terrorist group Hizballah enjoys an extensive network throughout Latin America, mainly consisting of contacts and operatives in various Lebanese diaspora communities. These it uses both to raise funds and to carry out attacks, such as the 1993 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and the murderous bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the same city the next year. Emanuele Ottolenghi describes the organization’s activities in the region, and outlines how the U.S. can combat them:

Over time, [Hizballah has] bought political influence among local elites, built alliances with organized crime, and offered financial services to both. As a result, today Latin America is a key center for Hizballah’s increasingly sophisticated global financial network.

The Trump administration should disrupt Hizballah’s Latin American sources of revenue by targeting its operatives and their businesses with a sustained sanctions campaign; it should strengthen the Drug Enforcement Administration’ efforts to try Hizballah operatives involved in drug trafficking; and it should punish local elites who facilitate Hizballah’s continuing presence in the region. . . .

Next, the continuing business activities of individuals and entities sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury occur because local governments are either reluctant to implement these sanctions or actively cooperate with the terrorists. The administration should demand that they either comply or face consequences. These should include . . . designating banking sectors of countries that facilitate Hizballah’s terror-finance as zones of primary money-laundering concern, working within international forums like the Financial Action Task Force to have such countries blacklisted, denying implicated politicians visas to the U.S., and making them personae non gratae in Washington.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.