Anti-Semitic

Opposition to the secular political institution of the state of Israel is conflated with racial or religious hatred for Jewish people or members of the Jewish faith. For some, this could be lazy shorthand to avoid difficult topics, but for others it is obviously dishonesty. Imagine someone arguing that opposition to the British empire was inherently hatred of all Englishmen. It's obviously absurd, right? Why is this concept suddenly so muddled when the topic is Israel?

I am skeptical of those who seek to downplay the evils of Nazi Germany and the 6 million deaths, but I freely admit my knowledge of those numbers is hearsay. Suppose the Nazis "only" killed 600,000 Jews. Does that make their totalitarian regime 90% less evil? Hitler was still a totalitarian xenophobic military expansionist who believed in a command economy. I'm also bothered by how little attention is paid to the Nazi atrocities against other groups as well. The Nazis also hated the Slavic people, political dissidents, and anyone they saw as sexual deviants.

Another thought comes to mind: when I condemn the Allied firebombings of German and Japanese cities or the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings as a brutal violation of millions who had no role in the war or the atrocities committed by their rulers, I am told I need to accept the idea of collective guilt. These people get upset when I mention the inverse idea (by that same logic I do not accept in the first place) that all Americans were valid targets of Al-Qaida or all Israelis are guilty of whatever atrocities the government of Israel may commit. They don't tend to like their reasoning applied to topics that are uncomfortably close to home