I'm absolutely not offended. I am not Jewish. All in all, I'm not even particularly a big fan of the Israeli government, but that has to do with the government's behavior and not their heritage. Overall I feel that there is plenty of justification for Jews to share land with the Palestinians, but as is typical of we human beings politics, greed, corruption, and backdoor deals (google "Balfour declaration" for some starting material) got in the way and the whole list of good intentions eventually escalated into a blood-for-blood war that has persisted for nearly 60 years.
Two things come to my mind. First, Da Ali G Show. He had a skit which I'll label, "Throw the Jews in the well", a song he performed in a Texas honky-tonk bar. Yeah, it was weird. Second, Bill Maher's interview with former CIA head of Bin Laden unit saying, "Jerusalem is not worth an American dollar or life"(loose recollection, not a direct quote).
I've only ever discussed Da Ali G skit with a close friend that was a drug-addled, wealthy person of Jewish descent. He introduced the topic, not I. My friend's rant/response was that the world blamed the Jewish community for going against the law of the Bible and lending money to unwealthy pp, putting them in debt and enriching the Jewish community. Honestly, sounds like Capitalism to me.
What your friend is talking about is the practice if usury. In Jewish orthodoxy, it is not permitted to lend money to another Jewish person under an agreement of usury (which means expecting interest on the loan). It is either offered and returned or the lender must either take the issue up with the keepers of law (judges) or forgive the debt. However, this practice does not extend to Gentiles (everyone who is not Jewish). While I'm sure that there are plenty of people who might claim this or use it as an excuse, there is a much more innocuous reason that has permeated some of the worst treatment of Jews in history: the crucifixion of Jesus.
For over 1500 years, the Jews had been considered the ones responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. Up until a Vatican Council in the 20th century, there was even the phrase "pernicious Jews" in the liturgy for Easter. One of the hotly-debated issues that many people have with a lot of Passion plays has to do with the characterization of the Jews as the ones who convinced Pilate to put Jesus to death, and it was Jews who mocked and spit on him during his march to be hung on the cross. This is objected to by Jews because of the obvious: it pretty much characterizes most Jews and Jewish the religious leadership (at the time, the Sanheidrin) as attempted God-killers. This is objected to by many historians because it is completely out of character for how Pontius Pilate is remembered: he was a ruthless governor who hated being in the region, he supposedly crucified many people (one account has him nearly surrounding Jerusalem with crucified corpses), and
he was a pious Roman citizen-- meaning he looked down on conquered lands like Judea as populated by lesser beings, so he more likely would have had the heads of the Sanheidrin on pikes if they tried to pull what is documented in the bible.
I mention the book
Constantine's Sword as a worthwhile read because it goes into this in far more detail (with thousands of citations, each equally worthwhile) and better wording than I can put here. The idea behind the concept of deicide is, as explained by Carroll in the book, a product of Roman conversion and subsequent control of the destiny of the faith. The title, "Constantine's Sword", is a metaphor for the sign of the cross that the emperor Constantine claimed to have seen in a dream, which is the 'lowercase-T' sign of the cross as we know it today. It was under Constantine that the Nicene Council took place, ostensibly under the direction of Constantine himself, and this was the beginning of what we know today as the Roman Catholic Church. During this time the systematic destruction of any "apostate" Christian sects (those who didn't join the Council) began. Many of the apocrypha-- 'books' accepted as biblical by churches who were not in line with the established canon of the Council or Nicene Creed-- and other similar works from churches that were equally as old as (or older than) the four Gospels we know of today, were destroyed. At times throughout history, Jews were treated as a sub-class of humans, and there were times when they were forced to either convert or be destroyed. At the risk of invoking Godwin, many Jews even escaped concentration camps by producing fake baptismal documents from sympathetic priests during the Second World War. Even in protestant doctrine in recent centuries, Jews were always described as having betrayed and forsaken Jesus. Judas became the archetype for the Jews, his story ending with his innards being spilt on rocks in an act of suicide as an ancient affront to Jewish burial practices.
The xenophobic literature I spoke of was partially literature by groups like the Klu Klux Klan, but were not isolated to just them. Many of the robber-barons of old and union movement leaders of the time were accused of being in league with "Jewish international bankers" to take money from honest, hard-working American Protestants. In the first Red Scare after the end of the Great War (WWI), Russian Jews were often ostracized and the target of heavy bigotry (which was made worse by Stalin's massacre of Jews that exceeded that of the Nazis). Even following WWII, Christian burial markers were placed in sites of concentration camps, an act which has drawn objections even up to recent years (the last time I read about it was in 2004).
To sum it up, the Jews have had a bad rap for a long, long time.
Bill Maher's interview ties into Ahmadnejad's speech at Columbia. Denying the Holocaust is bizarre, but seems fueled by an intense desire to justify wanting Jewish pp out of Israel. Personally, as an outsider looking in, I really don't understand why it is America's right or responsibility to place or protect Jewish pp in a land that had not been their's for how long(?).
The reason people get antsy at the slightest sign of anti-semitism nowadays is because WWII showed most of the world just how monstrous we (human beings) can be to other groups of human beings for practically arbitrary reasons. Even though I don't like much of the Israeli government and blame the Jewish settlers for many of the root problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (though Britain and France had a documented part in setting the tone of betrayal to the Palestinian and other Arab people), I still am very wary of and conscious to identify any roots of antisemitism that can threaten to take hold.
Ahmadenijad most likely does not actually believe his claims regarding the Holocaust (called
the shoah in Hebrew, becaus the Greek for 'holocaust' means "burnt offering"). Instead, I tend to think he is intentionally playing favor for the Palestinian people in a pretty poor fashion. He's playing to the Palestinians to gain favor with the Arab states, as well as with the Arab population within his own country (who make up a large percentage). He's being as ham-handed and hyperbolic as he is because his country has been hamstrung for the last twenty-two years, and he wants a piece of the attention pie for his country with the ruckus in the Middle East. Regardless of his rhetoric, he is mostly a castrated dictator who is forced to defer to the wishes of the Ayatollah in the end, but he has a long leash. He seems to fully intend to dance as far as his leash will allow him to prod Western powers, especially the United States, because he seems pretty sure that America wouldn't dare attack (and for good reasons). The problem with his madman behavior is that it is likely going to prove too effective, because he's gone way past the point of being able to establish any credibility in the event the US government does decide to try and attack the country.
But I digress. Whole books have been written on these subjects and whole threads (and forums) could be dedicated to talking about just those things.