Clifford May of the indispensable Foundation for Defense of Democracies weighs in on the Oliphant cartoon:
Let’s not call the political cartoonist Pat Oliphant an anti-Semite or even an Israel-basher. Let’s just be clear about what he is doing: encouraging those whose intentions are genocidal. …
The symbolism here is unoriginal. Dehumanizing Jews in cartoons is a tradition that dates back at least to Germany in the 1930s and has been maintained in the Arab press ever since. Nor is it novel to equate 21st-century Jews with their 20th-century executioners. But until now, such images have rarely, if ever, been so legitimized in the mainstream media. A corner has been turned.