To the Editor:

For more than 2,000 years, haters of Jews have never struggled to find a rationale for blaming their victims:  the Jews are too rich, too poor, they are communists, they are capitalists, they are rootless, parasitic foreigners without their own land, they are nationalists (Zionists) with a country of their own. For anti-Semites and their apologists, the trouble with Jews is simply that they are.

Englehart joins these misguided apologists with a cartoon that blames Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for contemporary anti-Semitism, while at the same time trivializing the concerns of Christians and Jews that the a-historic and stereotypical portrayal of Jews in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" could fuel anti-Jewish prejudice and reinforce anti-Jewish stereotypes. This linkage provides insight into Englehart's irrational thinking. The cartoon is not mere criticism of Israeli policy. Ariel Sharon has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that for centuries (during which the State of Israel did not exist) the charge that "the Jews" killed Jesus, most vividly expressed in Passion plays, was used by some to foment violence against Jewish communities.

Anti-Semitism, the hatred of the Jews, has never been and still is not a result of the actions or inactions of the Jewish people. Rather, it is a cancer that attacks periodically and without reason. Providing justification for it is merely an attempt to rationalize the irrational. Anti-Semitism today is no more the result of Ariel Sharon's policies than the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people was the result of Hitler's dislike of Albert Einstein's scientific theories. When synagogues are blown up in Turkey or Jews attacked in Europe, it is the terrorists who are responsible. Does Englehart blame the September 11^th attacks on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush? By his logic, they, not Osama bin-Laden and Al-Qaeda, would be at fault.

It is unconscionable to blame the victims of hatred for causing that hatred, whether they are Jewish, Christian, Muslim, African-American, gay or female. It is the teachers and practitioners of hate who bear the responsibility for their actions. As all Americans were reminded on September 11, the victims of hate never, ever, "ask for it."