Written by Jack Elbaum

What’s happening: Brazil’s Federal Police and Israel’s Mossad recently thwarted a Hezbollah terrorist plot against Jewish synagogues and other Israeli targets in Brazil. The Lebanon-based terrorist organization, which is funded by the mullahs in Iran, was caught red-handed recruiting Brazilians for the attack.

Not the first: There’s already been two terror attacks since the outbreak of the Hamas-Israel war — one in France and one in Belgium. They are fueling concern additional attacks are coming.

• Heightened awareness: Secretary of State Antony Blinken has warned of new lone-wolf terrorist attacks in the U.S. This lines up with a recent Upward News report detailing similar warnings from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security concerns that members of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad may try to enter illegally through Mexico.
• There’s more: The number of people apprehended at our southern border who are on the terrorist watchlist has exploded from two in 2017 to 151 so far in 2023.

Why it matters: Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel inspired an unprecedented level of unapologetic support for terrorism. Polls show a majority of young people and Muslim Americans believe Hamas’s attack was justified, and large anti-Israel rallies especially on college campuses demonstrate that kind of support for Hamas.

Context: Terror attacks against Jews in Latin America are not new. A Hezbollah-linked Palestinian jihadist group killed 29 in a 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Argentina. Then, in 1994, it killed 85 in a suicide bombing in Buenos Aires. That same year the group killed 21 in Panama by blowing up a plane.