Israel's newspapers yesterday contrasted the Muslim world's furious response to the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed with the restrained way it reacted to anti-Semitic caricatures in Arab media.
Hook-nosed Jews manipulating American foreign policy, Ariel Sharon, the prime minister, drinking the blood of Palestinian children and Israelis wearing swastikas have all been depicted in newspapers across the Arab world in recent years.
The caricatures are largely ignored save by organisations such as The Anti-Defamation League, which campaigns in the courts and through the media against anti-Semitism and discrimination against Jews.
The contrast with the mob violence seen across the Muslim world in recent days was the focus yesterday of the editorial in the Jerusalem Post.
"If anyone wants to appreciate why the West views with such suspicion the weapons programmes of Muslim states such as Iran, they need look no further than the intolerance Muslim regimes exhibit to these cartoons, and what this portends," it said.
"Globalism demands that points of contact between Islam and the West be multicultural havens, not flashpoints. For that to happen, tolerance must be a two-way street."
Just days after a small group of Palestinian gunmen briefly surrounded the European Union building in Gaza to protest at the Danish cartoons, the Post carried the facsimile of the Danish newspaper page at the centre of the row.
A protest rally against the cartoons was held in Nazareth over the weekend but it failed to attract more than a few hundred people.
Haaretz, another leading Israeli newspaper, was more sympathetic towards Muslims expressing their outrage at the cartoons. "No society can remain apathetic to offensive publications that insult values held sacred by certain groups within it," an editorial said.
"The Arab media publish an endless stream of cartoons, television series and books whose anti-Jewish character falls little short of the infamous caricatures and publications of the Nazi Der Sturmer.
"These publications should be unequivocally condemned."
