The "Star of David = Swastika" flag got to be so tiresome at Palestinian demonstrations that they seem to have retired it, or maybe they lost it. (Now they just hold up their children, dolled up with fake guns and cardboard dynamite.) But in Europe, I read, it's become so popular in intellectual circles to identify Israel with the Third Reich that it passes for a test of political correctness. And you can still get an eye-full of the "Star of David = Swastika" banners over here in the U.S., in the hands of "non-conformists" who seem to regard this symbolic connection as an inspiration of wisdom, rather than what it is: a lie so absurd as to be puke-making.

The other day, a co-worker insisted I listen to a Celtic-accented "folk song" called "When Oppressed Becomes Oppressor" (or something like that; that was the repeated line in the chorus, anyway) in which, yet again, a parallel was drawn between the genocide of the Jews in Europe in the 1940s and the hardships of Palestinians today.

Let's just take half a second and do some comparisons.

Bulldozers do not equal gas chambers. A concrete barrier does not equal a crematorium.

The paranoias about Jews running the world, enshrined in the forged "Protocols" does not couterbalance the very real vows of Hamas and others that govern the Palestinians to "drive Israel into the sea."

The false claim that Jews burned the Reichstag does not equate to the blood and bone strewn on the pavement after bombings of buses and discos in Tel Aviv.

But Jews leaving all their property behind in a desperate bid to escape the Third Reich, to any country that would take them, offers an interesting parallel to the Palestinian Authority's insistence on a "right of return," for its people to live under the yoke of the despised "Zionist entity."

Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not recall Jews lined up every morning on the borders of 1939 Germany, clamoring to get in for construction jobs and medical care.

All this nonsense usually comes, of course, from people who cherish their democratic right of vocal and public dissent, who like to live in a country where you can be openly gay or atheist or flaunt your belly-button ring. Try that anywhere in the Middle East except Israel; see how long you last.