Yet another obscene Israel analogy

We all know about the ludicrous and insulting parallel drawn between Israel and the former apartheid regime in South Africa. It was precisely that parallel that underpinned the notorious U.N. General Assembly resolution of 1975, which has since been rescinded, equating Zionism with racism.

And we know, too, of the obscene comparison between Israel and Nazi Germany. Among those who have endorsed this ghastly canard, which takes the Nazi Holocaust as its starting point in order to trivialize the mass murder of 6 million Jews, is the newly elected Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who opined at the height of the Gaza war over the summer that Israel was “worse” than Hitler.

But now there’s a new analogy—and it’s one that attacks Israel by using a contemporary reference. Appropriately for our digital age, it takes the form of a Twitter hashtag: #JSIL.

If it’s not immediately clear what that means, JSIL is a spinoff of ISIL, referring to the “Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant,” the barbaric jihadist terrorist organization (now simply known as Islamic State) with whom we are now at war. JSIL, meanwhile, stands for “Jewish State in the Levant.”

Yes, you read that correctly. There are people out there who are seriously equating a gang of rapists, decapitators, slave traders, and genocidal killers with a democratic state that takes the trouble, whenever it is dragged into an armed conflict, of informing civilians on the other side when and where it will be launching an attack so that they can get themselves to safety.