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.
Read more on JNS: http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2014/10/1/another-obscene-israel-analogy