The picture speaks for itself. The most diabolical accusation that is leveled against Zionists and Jews is that we are Nazis or like Nazis (see Is Zionism Nazism?).

The people who make this comparison, and who often juxtapose the Jewish star with the swastika, are undoubtedly repulsive and degenerate hate mongers. But the revolting logo pictured above is not taken from an openly antisemitic or anti-Zionist Web site. It is taken from zionists.com, which claims to be "Zionist." With supporters like that, who needs enemies?

This zionists.com Web site announces that it is copyright by the "Kahanist National Zionist Party (KNZP)." and its banner tells visitors that "Zionism is National Socialism for Jews." The site has a single article apparently, and links to some "interesting" friends. In addition to the Jewish Defense League, a link we might expect, there is something called the "Jewish Task Force," which, we are told, is "Fighting to keep non-whites out of America and Israel's enemies far away." The link takes us to a site that is now called, "Jews against Obama." You can visit that site and judge for yourself. Zionists.com also links to the Baruch Goldstein memorial Web sites, and to "Nazis for Zionism."

The Zionists.com site is registered through throne.net, a "free speech" host that provides anonymous hosting. It would be difficult to find out who is behind this obscenity. The site is retrieved as listing number 12 when searching for from Israel in Google, a great achievement. Google search rankings are supposed to be based on "authority" of the Web site - as shown by the size of the site and the number and importance of pages that link to it. However, the entire site has only about 3 pages, and only a few pages link to it. Nonetheless, zionists.com has a Google page rank of 3.

Google lists only four pages that link to it - a fellow named Baxter, a former Yeshiva student who links to it from his Myspace Web page, and a virulently anti-Semitic Web log called "Jewish Racism" that links to it from three pages. Yahoo! Site Explorer, which usually shows most links to a Web domain, lists only 3 obscure pages that link to zionists.com: GUNpriestKnight, a Kahanists page at a forum and a right wing Zionist site called "Zionist.com" (not to be confused with "Zionists.com.") One of the mysteries of the Google algorithm is that it has a tendency to elevate hate Web sites to prominent positions in the Google search, though there is no apparent technical reason for this prominence.

The person or group who created this site is either an anti-Semitic provocateur or someone with the judgment of a child - perhaps mentally deranged. They can do a lot of damage, because of the distorted way that that the Web distorts and misrepresents public opinion, so that extremist views get disproportionate attention. Those three Web pages can be grist for the mills of thousands of anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist Web sites and Web loggers, and there is no easy way for real Zionists to disown them.

In 1983, Woody Allen produced the comedy film Zelig. Zelig was a Jewish mental patient who had phenomenal powers of mimicry and a dissociative personality disorder. He who found himself participating in a Nazi rally in Germany. It was wonderful comedy, but when life imitates art, the results are often not funny at all. When the same idea affects masses of people, it is no longer called mental illness. Zionists.com is only the most extreme expression, and logical outcome, of views that we can see expressed in other Web sites and organizations. where you can read "plans" to 'solve" the problem of Gaza by bombing civilians to oblivion, plans to drop nuclear weapons on Mecca, plans to eliminate the Arabs of Israel and similar violent or racist ideas.

It is easy to be carried away by emotion when we are subject to a constant barrage of hate and violence, but there is no excuse for the policies advocated by some of these media and groups, any more than there can be an excuse for putting a swastika inside a Magen David. The various groups and persons who pretend to represent "Zionism" make extreme, racist and violent declarations on behalf of "Zionists" - advocating murder of civilians, genocide, Jewish fascism, Jewish racial superiority and the like are libeling Zionism and the Jewish people, intentionally or otherwise.

One characteristic that has distinguished mainstream Zionism from its pro-Palestinian opponents for most of the last century is that Zionism was not founded in hatred for any person or group. Anti-Zionists like to invent the myth that Zionists planned to dispossess the Arabs of Palestine, but it was just a myth. It was the Arabs who planned to murder the Jews, and it was their hate and unrealistic extremism that helped ensure their defeat in the past. The infection of Zionism with sick extremism would be our downfall. The history of the twentieth century didn't prove that nice guys finish last. It showed that nice guys have the last laugh. Hitler, Stalin, Tojo, Nasser and the Nazi Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini are all relegated to the scrap heap of history. Among the twentieth century ideologies, only Zionism survived, because it was not suffused with hate.

Friends of Israel and Zionism must be on guard. Next time you feel tempted to laud an article or support a group that advocates violence, revenge or race hate, that insists that the Israel government are traitors, remember the swastika inside the Jewish star.

Update and PS: The Zionists.com Web site was off line for a while, but it seems to be back now. It doesn't seem to be a 'fake' as it links to several extremist sites with views that are not very different.

Ami Isseroff