OMG!

I want to talk about this image.

Those of you who read here know that I sometimes use the BDS Nazi Eagle for open threads. And, you can be sure, I have received complaints about it.

We even got a comment from an anonymous source saying something to the effect of, "Geez, Karma, are you actually an anti-Zionist trying to make pro-Israel people look bad?" Or, something quite like that.

But I want to think on that image a little and maybe you guys will help me do so.

What we have is a Nazi swastika and eagle with the acronym "BDS" emblazoned before it.

I have been told that this is offensive because it demeans the Holocaust, that it cheapens the memory of the 6 million. I have to tell you, I take this criticism very seriously, which is why we haven't seen the BDS Nazi Eagle lately.

What I wonder, tho, is if the designation "Nazi" is reasonably assignable to anyone who was never registered with the National Socialists of early-mid twentieth century Germany?

In other words what I am asking is what makes a Nazi a Nazi?

That's the question.

One thing that I know for certain is that no actual professional historian would ever use the word "Nazi" to mean anything other then Hitler's political party.

But this is a personal blog concerned with American Jewish politics and the I-P conflict. What it is not is an academic blog.

We're just people hanging out and talking.

I am, however, an American Jew who lost half of his family when the Nazis overran the Ukraine. A "Nazi" for me is thus someone who advances ideas that traditionally tend to see Jews dead. That's what counts, really. Anti-Semitism, as a deadly political inclination, long preceded German National Socialism and the peculiar thing about anti-Semitism, as a form of racism, is that it is genocidal, which is why Jewish numbers remain so small.

This is why left-liberal Jew hatred is so odious.  The hypocrisy of the allegedly anti-racist movement indulging in such outright racism is a little hard to stomach, particularly to those of us who have lost family to the very racism that the Left often indulges in.

To repeat, part of the reason that there are so few Jews today is because anti-Semitism is a genocidal form of racism.

The only thing unique, from the perspective of this Jew, about German National Socialism is how successful it was in its ability to slaughter us and that it was carried out in an industrial manner.

But the Nazis represent a culmination of a trend. That's the thing. They did not represent either the beginning of that trend, nor the end of it. And therefore when I see people carrying that political trend forward today they are to my mind Nazis.

In this way the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel is essentially Nazi. It is the continuation of the same war. The Jews of the Middle East have been under constant siege for almost one hundred years. They are 5.5 million people surrounded by 300 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims who, for the most part, do not want them there.

Within that vast Arab sea surrounding the tiny Jewish nation are any number of people who despise Jews for religious-ideological reasons.

So how can we not see them as Nazis particularly when we know that their major organizations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood have a lineage that goes to Nazi Germany?

If you want to boycott the Jewish state of Israel or if you otherwise want to challenge it or harm it or divest from it or generally blame it for all the horrors of the lands around it then, yes, you are a Nazi.

If you think in such terms then you are scapegoating, just as the Nazis did in 1930s Germany.

The big difference now is that we Jews have the capability of standing up for ourselves.

{And thank God for that.}

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By the way, I still haven't decided whether or not to keep the BDS Nazi Eagle.

I kind of like the damn thing.