Last Word in Anti-Semitism

Yet the foulest epithet in any language -- "Nazi" -- is hurled not against any of the perpetrators of those crimes but, uniquely and systematically, against Israel.

It's not as if the real horrors are hard to find. To see a state-sponsored genocidal campaign, go to Sudan, where troops of the Muslim Arab government in Khartoum, and the Arab militias supplied by that government, are systematically targeting black tribes. Thousands have been murdered and a million driven from their homes by a program of bombing villages, shooting men, women and children, widespread rape and forced thirst and starvation. Yet the word "Nazi" isn't commonly used against the Sudanese authorities, whether by Arab countries or any others, just as it wasn't used against the Rwandan authorities who organized the genocide of about 800,000 Tutsis.

Deliberate massacres of civilians are even easier to find. During the last three years in the streets of Israel, numerous city buses, cafes and restaurants have been turned into bomb chambers by Palestinian organizations whose stated goal is to eradicate Israel and make the area free of Jews. In this way, they've systematically killed a dozen Israelis here, two dozen there, spraying arms, legs, lungs, livers, brains and strips of skin and muscle all over that country's streets. And at the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, as many innocents were murdered as during a day's gassing in Auschwitz. All of these actions, though they don't justify the term "Nazi," have been deliberate exterminations of civilians by organizations with clearly stated agendas of mass murder. Yet the epithet "Nazi" hasn't been commonly used against the organizers of these or other massacres around the world.

The word "Nazi" is, however, regularly thrown at Israel, even though that country's policy is to avoid killing Palestinian civilians. It's hurled, first of all, by Palestinians and their Arab and other Muslim allies. And it's hurled by European critics of Israel. "What is happening in Ramallah," Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago said in 2002, "is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz." Jewish settlers in the West Bank, the Oxford poet Tom Paulin said a year later, "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." That same year, the Irish writer Tom McGurk approved of the comparison between Israel's assault on Jenin with the Nazi destruction of the Warsaw ghetto. "How extraordinary," he wrote, "that so many in the liberal democratic West should feel so strangely muted, so emotionally strangled in the face of Nazi-style barbarism toward the Palestinians by the state of Israel."