We learn that Israelis are Nazis in an August 4, 2006 letter from Linda Stewart:

Anyone in Congress who supports this genocide does not represent me and many others in this country. Destroying a country’s infrastructure, killing millions of innocent civilians, including children, is inexcusable. I will never vote for anyone who supports this insanity. What Israel is doing to Lebanon is worse than what Hitler did in Germany. Hezbollah is merely an excuse for Israel to wipe out Palestine.

Recent Hard Left Demonstration in San Francisco

Millions? That would be worse than Bosnia, Congo, Rwanda and Darfur combined.  The actual number of Palestinian civilian deaths resulting from the  Second Intifada in 2000  and since is, by anyone counts, even their own, in the low thousands.   Similarly, in an October 2, 2008 letter, Marc Sapir makes the case that it is okay to paint swastikas on Jewish Stars since this is clearly aimed at Israel and not at Jews, and is therefore not anti-Semitic:

When someone’s graffiti equates the Star of David with the Nazi swastika, anyone may voice their strong disagreement with that equation. They are free to disagree. But the attempt to label that equation anti-Semitic is a ruse, a lie.

Here is another letter that equates Zionism with Nazism (Ronald Branch, July 29, 2005):

Doesn’t anybody care that arch Zionazi Henry J. Kaiser dumped his Richmond factories of death and destruction into the bay creating what is now known as the Albany Bulb? Walk along the shoreline at low tide and check out the tons and tons of heavy industrial waste that was dumped as close and as cheaply as possible.

If you’re really adventurous visit the interior; if you see any steel pipes coming out of the ground, get close and take a whiff. There is some real nasty stuff buried under there. No wonder the fish aren’t edible.

Henry J. Kaiser Co. is responsible and should have to pay a big fine as well as clean it up. This is a good indicator of the character of the people who drafted over 10 million men to do their dirty work in Europe and Asia. More civilian workers died—58,000-plus—in World War II than all American casualties in Vietnam. Thank you Rosie, hope you enjoyed the good times with the Big Bands and all.

If the crude equation drawn between Zionism and Nazism did not give Becky O’Malley pause before publishing this letter, perhaps the fact that Henry Kaiser was neither a Jew nor a known Zionist might have.  Facts never seem to get in the way when it comes to O’Malley’s monomaniacal anti-Israelism.

The Berkeley Daily Planet’s foreign affairs analyst, Conn Hallinan (who, incidentally, is a life long Communist), also makes the equation between Israel and the Nazis.  Here, for example, are two titles he has chosen for articles that condemn Israel on fallacious evidence:

“Israel Treated Gaza Like Its Own Private Death Laboratory,” intentionally evoking the memory of Joseph Mengele; and

"Ethnic Cleansing and Israel," here evoking the specter of Bosnia, the closest brush Europe has had with actual Nazism since World War II. 

Reasonable criticism of Israel for this or that policy is, well, reasonable.  What country is perfect?  However, a crude equation between Israel and Nazism is utterly false, and it is maliciously false.  If Israel is a Nazi state, then surely it is unremittingly evil.  There would be no reason to negotiate with it and no reason to compromise with it.   It would have to be destroyed, pure and simple.  This is exactly what those who make this equation mean.  The Nazis killed Jews because they imagined that they were each and every one of them born purely evil.  The hard left would destroy Israel using the same imagery of pure evil, though now, cunningly, couched in the post-Nazi term for such pure evil, namely, Nazism itself.

Worse than simple anti-Semitism, as in not-in-our-country-club, this is an actual call to genocide.  For if Israel is a Nazi state then any and all means must be used to destroy it.   This is why Conn Hallinan, who likens Israelis to Nazis, as we will show elsewhere, seems to relish the thought of Iran attacking Israel with nuclear weapons.  In the alternate universe of Hallinan and O’Malley, no more tears need be shed over an incinerated Tel Aviv than over Dresden.

Is Israel a Nazi state?  If so, surely it would not have its free press or its independent judiciary; it would have long ago rounded up of its leftist citizens; its Arab citizens would have been denied employment, the right to vote, and the right to serve in its Parliament (Knesset); Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem would be the site where organs were harvested from murdered Arabs; gays would be murdered instead of allowed to serve openly in the armed forces; and, of course, the landscape would be dotted with extermination camps.  If it were merely an Apartheid state, rather than a Nazi state, then surely there would be no Arabs in Israel’s universities or army (there are plenty in both); no Arab doctors or patients in its hospitals (there are plenty of both); and if there were Arabs they would have their separate water coolers (absurd!).

We could go on and on defending Israel against the ludicrous charge of Nazism and Apartheid.  But why?  One cannot argue with this as though it were a rational argument.  It is not.  It is naked irrational hatred.  One way we know this is that it is leveled by people who would never dream to use the term, “Nazi,” against, say, Sudan, which has launched two very real racial and genocidal wars, causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands, namely, against Christians and animists in the south, and more recently against blacks in Darfur.  Nor is the term ever leveled by the Daily Planet against Hamas, whose Charter repeatedly calls for the “obliteration” of Israel, actually quotes from the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,”  and reads exactly like “Mein Kampf.”  No, the term, “Nazi,” is used only against democratic, free, and liberal Israel. 

The hard left and the far right have very much in common in their endless construction of enemy lists, their willful ignorance of facts, their diffuse white knuckled hatred spewed in all directions, and their conspiracy theories.  When the extreme right labeled Dr. George Tiller a Nazi for providing legal abortion services, it was, in effect, placing a death sentence upon him.  We now see right wing demonstrators equating Barack Obama with Adolph Hitler because he is trying to foist “death panels” upon the innocent citizenry.  Not surprisingly, the Secret Service has registered more threats against President Obama’s life than against any prior president.  When Berkeley’s hard left and the Berkeley Daily Planet employ this same Nazi equivalency, are they not also inviting, even seeking, a violent outcome? 

Is Becky O’Malley required to publish calls to genocide in the name of free speech?  Counter to O’Malley’s faulty understanding of the Constitution, there is no absolute right of free speech in America.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously wrote that the right of free speech stops when it comes to incitement to violence or yelling “fire” in a theater.   The Daily Planet’s insistence on equating Israel with Nazism is just this sort of yelling “fire” in the crowded theater of Berkeley.