An op-ed compared a basketball team to Israel as underdog success stories. Then the threats poured in.
With the reigning champion Oklahoma City Thunder fighting to return to the NBA Finals, one bold writer dug deep for an analogy: The Thunder, he wrote, is like the state of Israel — a former…
Assessment
A newspaper column drawing a parallel between a basketball team's rise to power and Israel's trajectory has triggered a wave of threatening responses. The speed and intensity of the backlash expose how charged any favorable comparison to Israel has become in public discourse, especially in non-political settings like sports. The incident suggests that even metaphorical endorsements of Israel's success now carry real-world risks for writers, raising questions about the boundaries of acceptable analogy in American opinion journalism.