We’ve had Israel as apartheid South Africa, Israel as Nazi Germany, and now there’s “#JSIL”: Israel as the “Jewish State in the Levant.” And this campaign has a particularly pernicious edge to it, as Ben Cohen writes:

Just this week, Deutsche Welle, the taxpayer-funded German broadcaster, published an article on its website that cast American Jews volunteering for the IDF in the same light as Muslims from Europe and elsewhere joining the Islamic State terrorists.

If we, rightly, seek to criminalize those among our Muslim citizens who join the Islamic State onslaughts, we open ourselves up to the contention that foreign Jews fighting with the IDF should be treated in the same manner. Certainly, Israel’s enemies and their anti-Semitic cohorts will argue that such individuals are war criminals—and what the Deutsche Welle piece demonstrates is how easily this clumsy, morally illiterate argument can penetrate the mainstream.

Commenting on the wave of anti-Hamas demonstrations in the Gaza Strip, Seth Mandel writes:

Gazans have not have been fully honest in public. There’s a reason for that. To take just one example, Amin Abed was nearly beaten to death with hammers for criticizing Hamas. Abed was saved by bystanders, so presumably the intention was to finish him off. During the cease-fire, Hamas members bragged about executing “collaborators” and filmed themselves shooting civilians.

Which is what makes yesterday’s protests all the more significant. To protest Hamas in public is to take one’s life in one’s hands. That is especially true because the protests were bound to be filmed, in order to get the message out to the world. The reason the world needs to hear that message is that Westerners have been Hamas’s willing propaganda tools. The protests on campus are not “pro-Palestinian,” they are pro-Hamas—and the people of Gaza are Hamas’s victims.