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.

In 1946, Julius Streicher, a high-ranking SS-officer and a chief Nazi propagandist, was sentenced to death at Nuremberg. Just before he was executed, he called out “Heil Hitler!” and the odd phrase “Purimfest, 1946!” It seems the his hanging alongside that of his fellow convicts put him in mind of the hanging of Haman and his ten sons described in the book of Esther. As Emmanuel Bloch and Zvi Ron wrote in 2022:

Julius Streicher, . . . founder and editor-in-chief of the weekly German newspaper Der Stürmer (“The Stormer”), featured a lengthy report on March 1934: “The Night of the Murder: The Secret of the Jewish Holiday of Purim is Unveiled.” On the day after Kristallnacht (November 10, 1938), Streicher gave a speech to more than 100,000 people in Nuremberg in which he justified the violence against the Jews with the claim that the Jews had murdered 75,000 Persians in one night, and that the Germans would have the same fate if the Jews had been able to accomplish their plan to institute a new murderous “Purim” in Germany.

In 1940, the best-known Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda film, Der Ewige Jude (“The Eternal Jew”), took up the same theme. Hitler even identified himself with the villains of the Esther story in a radio broadcast speech on January 30, 1944, where he stated that if the Nazis were defeated, the Jews “could celebrate the destruction of Europe in a second triumphant Purim festival.”

As we’ll see below, Jews really did celebrate the Nazi defeat on a subsequent Purim, although it was far from a joyous one. But the Nazis weren’t the first ones to see in the story of Esther—in which, to prevent their extermination, the Jews get permission from the king to slay those who would have them killed—an archetypal tale of Jewish vengefulness and bloodlust. Martin Luther, an anti-Semite himself, was so disturbed by the book that he wished he could remove it from the Bible altogether, although he decided he had no authority to do so.

More recently, a few Jews have taken up a similar argument, seeing in the Purim story, and the figure of 75,000 enemies slain by Persian Jews, a tale of the evils of vengeance, and tying it directly to what they imagine is the cruelty and vengefulness of Israel’s war against Hamas. The implication is that what’s wrong with Israel is something that’s wrong with Judaism itself. Jonathan Tobin comments on three such articles:

This group is right in one sense. In much the same way as the Jews of ancient Persia, Israelis have answered Hamas’s attempt at Jewish genocide with a counterattack aimed at eradicating the terrorists. The Palestinian invasion of southern Israel on Oct. 7 was a trailer for what they wished to do to the rest of Israel. Thanks to the courage of those who fought back, they failed in that attempt, even though 1,200 men, women and children were murdered, and 250 were kidnapped and dragged back into captivity in Gaza.

Those Jews who have fetishized the powerlessness that led to 2,000 years of Jewish suffering and persecution don’t merely smear Israel. They reject the whole concept of Jews choosing not to be victims and instead take control of their destiny.