There are also many instances of anti-Israel posters and cartoons employing shockingly anti-Semitic language and imagery, including the old "Christ killer" label. A cartoon in the respectable Italian newspaper La Stampa showed an infant Jesus lying in front of an Israeli tank, the caption saying, "Don't tell me they want to kill me again."
Far more common is the ploy of equating the Israelis with the Nazis: posters depicting Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon with a swastika armband, comments about "the Zionist S.S.," comparisons of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians to the Holocaust. Calling Sharon a hard-liner or a warmonger is hardly anti-Semitic, contrary to what Schoenfeld seems to imply -- but comparing the head of the Jewish state to Hitler, who sought to exterminate the Jews, is beyond obscenity.
As Schoenfeld points out, it is a mistake to think that "real" anti-Semitism has to involve a naked hostility to Jews simply for being Jews, whether based on religion or ethnicity. In the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-Semitism was often associated both with anti-capitalism (since the Jews were seen as the epitome of the money-grubbing bourgeoisie) and with anti-communism (since the Jews were seen as the vanguard of Bolsheviks and other radicals).
Today, all too often, extremist anti-Israeli rhetoric becomes a vehicle for the kind of bigotry that one might have hoped was extinct in the civilized world. Critics of Israeli policies have a special responsibility to condemn it.
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