Caution should be exercised when using analogies in political debates

The recent uproar over a class e-mail by Professor William I. Robinson of the University of California Santa Barbara, which drew an analogy between the Holocaust and the Israeli blockade and recent war in Gaza, “Israel’s Warsaw… (and) a slow-motion process of genocide,” is not a new one among a long list of “˜martyred’ Jewish academics. Professor Robinson, who is Jewish, used juxtaposed images of children behind barbed wire in Gaza and Poland to illustrate his argument for the analogy and drew the knee-jerk denunciation of being anti-Semitic by hawkish observers.