“Don’t buy from Jews.” This is neither a decree of the Third Reich, nor is it a chant from a neo-fascist rally. Rather, this is the latest campaign of Flaica-unit-Cub, a left-wing trade union in Italy, to protest against Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip.

This is just one of the many signs of the times that anti-Semitism is reaching its highest point in the West since the second World War.

Across Europe, synagogues and Jewish cultural centers are being vandalized while the press remains silent about these abuses.

When I recently studied abroad in Spain, I was surprised to see graffiti of a swastika and “Viva Palestina” written next to it.

Yet this disturbing trend is not limited to Europe. In 2007, Columbia University hosted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a guest speaker. Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, is known for being a Holocaust denier and has explicitly verbalized his desire that the State of Israel be decimated.

Fascinatingly, a significant portion of the American and European Left would more or less agree with Ahmadinejad. The belief that Israel does not deserve to be recognized as a state is much less marginal than anyone would like to believe.

It is no secret that Israel has few allies, and that number is waning.

The Israeli government and military have a long record of human rights abuses, and it is possible and even necessary to speak out against them.

Yet disagreement with Israel’s policies can never justify this disgusting policy of appeasement towards anti-Semitic hooliganism by the left-wing intellectual elites.

Furthermore, all who criticize the policies of Israel must keep in mind that the Arab-Israeli conflict is extremely complicated and that neither side is innocent.

Commenting on Palestinian terrorists, Jean-Paul Sartre stated that violence is the only weapon of the poor. Although he said this over three decades ago, this accurately describes the attitude of much of the intellectual Left with regards to Hamas today.

This is a sad justification for the actions of an organization of fanatics who have made the lives of countless civilians living hell.

The actions of the Israeli military can only be evaluated while remembering the horrors of Palestinian suicide bombers.

And recent history proves that nonviolent resistance can have revolutionary political effects.

Furthermore, Israel is not the only state in need of moral repair. Every single national, religious, and ethnic group on earth has bloody episodes in its history it should be ashamed of. This simply results from human nature.

Therefore nobody in a pluralistic society should feel discriminated against on the basis of membership in a greater community.

I urge everyone who is critical of Israel’s policies to honor the victims of the Shoah by always having the courage to speak out against anti-Semitism and by respecting the Jewish people’s desire to finally have their own homeland after millennia of persecution.

May their flawed human nature not be an obstacle to freedom.