Accusations of anti-Semitisms should be used with the greatest of care, especially when aimed at critics of Israel and some of its policies. Yet, there is also a a growing awareness that such criticism all too often does cross the line and morphs into anti-Semitism.So how does one distinguish perfectly permissible criticism of Israel from downright anti-Semitism? The latest such attempt comes courtesy of the U.S. State Department, which just issued a stern warning about "significant increases of anti-Semitism around the world." One such strain of anti-Semitism was described at an international conference in Ottawa on new and old forms of anti-Semitism by Hannah Rosenthal, a State Department official who holds the rank of special U.S. envoy to monitor and combat anti-Semitism. The State Department, she announced, uses Natan Sharansky's framework for identifying when someone, or some institution, or some government crosses the line into anti-Semitism? So what are these...(Read Full Post)