In the latest ill-advised ISIS comparison of the last few days, some Twitter activists have begun comparing Israel to the terrorist group using its alternate name, ISIL. The #JSIL hashtag first appeared on Sunday, a day before Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a similarly exaggerated comparison between ISIS and Hamas.
Netanyahu wasn’t quite right, relying on the old “Westerners-get-confused-easily-when-talking-about-the–Middle East” trick. Among other differences, Hamas is (sort of) willing to work within an existing political system and is more of a political party than an aspiring absolute authority.
And yet the other side doesn’t do any better with its leaps of logic. Regardless of your opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — and, in particular, whether the extent of force used during this summer’s Operation Protective Edge was justified — it’s not a rogue terror group, slaying everyone who’s different and forcing everyone else to live under a narrow moral code. In the fact of Netanyahu’s own rhetorical stretches, there’s at least room for dissent.
