Today's cartoon borders on the anti-Semitic. And it is slanderous history as well.

The Confederacy did not defend slavery out of religious conviction, let alone religious fanatacism. It advocated slavery for reasons of economic self-interest. While the church, to its eternal shame, too often acted as apologist for an immoral system, those slave holders were not ultra-devout Christians, just very greedy and verry immoral.

As for the "religious fanatics" on the left and right of the cartoon - the comparison is simply false.

Islamists maintain that Allah advocates the indiscriminate murder of random innocent victims to score political points on behalf of a radical religious ideology.

The most extreme religious Zionists maintain that God has given a particular piece of land to the Jewish people, and that they have a right to live on that land and to defend it. None argues that God approves the indiscriminate murder of random innocent people (terrorism) to further this cause. [Not to mention, most of those who reside in the disputed territories are hardly religious fanatics. And what kind of mind relates mass murder and slavery with someone just wanting to live in a certain neighborhood? -Sol]

The reason why this cartoon smells of anti-semitism is the clothing. The Islamist in the cartoon is dressed in a cariciture of the kind of clothing that actual Islamists wear.

The Jew is dressed as an ultra-religious Jew. Yet the ideology being caricatured is that of the religious Zionists, who do not wear sidecurls, old-fashioned black hats, or old-fashioned black suits.

So, the cartoonist is either slandering ultra-religious Jews, who do not live in Gaza nor advocate the settlement of the entire Biblical land, or he is mocking all Jews by the most stereotyped of "Jewish" dress styles. Either is illegitimate and both make this reader suspect that his motives may be anti-Semitic after all.