Daily Blog – Antisemitic Cartoon Response
The Daily Blog – Response to ongoing publication of antisemitic Cartoon, 9 May 2021
We need to talk about THAT cartoon. The one that depicts Zionism as a virus, with a familiar-looking Nazi-style “S”. The one by Malcom Evans, who claims he was dumped by the NZ Herald for an anti-Israel cartoon, although the Herald has refuted that.
First, let’s start with what we can all agree on. It is not antisemitic to criticise Israel in the same way you would criticise any other country. Israel can and should be criticised like any other country, indeed I do it myself.
But not everything negative you hear about Israel constitutes “criticism”. Lies, conspiracy theories, a denial of history and facts, a refusal to acknowledge that Israel exists or a call for it to be dismantled or destroyed alone among all the nations in the world…none of these are “criticism” of Israel. It’s strawmanning to pass it off as such.
For example, saying that Israel was behind 9/11 is not criticism of Israel. Neither is declaring that Israel’s spy agency Mossad and “Zionist business houses” were behind the Christchurch mosque attacks, as the chairman of New Zealand’s biggest mosque did at an “anti-racism” rally just after those attacks.
But if they don’t mention Jews or the Jewish people, can those assertions be antisemitic – expressing or manifesting hostility or hatred towards Jews?
Yes. As with any form of racism and prejudice, antisemitism is sometimes expressed through what is known as a “dog whistle” – a codeword, basically. “Rothschild” and “Soros” have become two such antisemitic dog whistles. They can, of course, still be used legitimately. It depends on context.
Likewise, “Israel” as the world’s largest collectivity of Jewish people can be used as proxy for the Jewish people. So too can “Zionism”, which Jews define as their movement of self-determination, which for the vast majority of Jews is integral to Judaism, embedded in millennia of prayer, literature and observance. Israel, Zionism and the Jewish people are inextricably linked, in people’s consciousness, in Jewish identity, in history and in contemporary reality.
This means that the symbols, images and conspiracy theories of antisemitism are sometimes applied to the state of Israel, Zionism or Zionists as proxies for Jews. So what are they?
Antisemitism, sometimes described as the oldest hatred, mutates over time but, at its crux, is a conspiracy theory in which a shadowy cabal of Jews (who comprise just 0.2% of the world population) exercise outsize power to pursue a nefarious agenda and inflict it on unsuspecting non-Jews. This goes back as far as the crucifixion of Christ, when Christianity propagated the idea that Jews had manipulated Romans into doing their bidding – a calumny that has been responsible for countless antisemitic attacks, pogroms and murders through the ages. In the early 1900s, the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, arguably the most damaging antisemitic document of the modern era, which heavily influenced Hitler, widely propagated the idea that Jews were conspiring to overthrow the world order and control global economies and governments.
Jews are, in this worldview, “rootless cosmopolitans” worming their way into societies and leeching off and polluting their hosts, bloodthirsty and blood-sucking. In the Middle Ages, the “usurious Jew” was said to suck the blood out of the people (Christians were forbidden from usury, and Jews were prohibited from most occupations, and only permitted to do those Christians were barred from, so often ended up in money-lending), and the blood libel was prolific, according to which Jews would use the blood of Christian children for ritual purposes.
But this view of the Jew as parasite is not just metaphorical. Another longstanding canard about Jews is that they are disease-carriers. We have all heard the phrase “dirty Jew”. In the Middle Ages, they were scapegoated for spreading the Black Plague through the “poisoning of wells” (Jews tended to be less affected by the plague, possibly because they were isolated in ghettos and because of their ritual hygiene practices). Pogroms spread throughout Europe. Over 500 communities were destroyed. In Nazi propaganda, Jews were equated with and depicted as vermin, to be exterminated. More recently, Jews have been accused of spreading COVID -19.
The cartoon depicting Zionism as a virus invokes the trope of Jews as virus-carriers, polluters, parasites (and used, the first time, alongside a headline that read “The Final Crucifixion of Jeremy Corbyn”, as Christ-killers). It used the font for the “S” that we recognise in the Nazi “SS”, presumably to equate Nazis with Zionists. I am not even going to merit that with an explanation of why invoking the Nazis is completely inapposite and calculated to be as offensive as possible. I will say, though, that such Holocaust inversion is what Deborah Lipstadt, the Holocaust scholar who defeated the Holocaust denier David Irving in court, labels “soft-core Holocaust denial”. The cartoon is antisemitic.
You may not agree with me. You may think you know more than Jews about what antisemitism is, or are as well-equipped to identify it, although in that case you can’t plead ignorance when you traffic in antisemitic stereotypes or conspiracy theories. You may disagree with the Macpherson principle that minorities have the right to define what is prejudice towards themselves. But if you think only Jews don’t have that right, or your starting point is that Jews conspire to make accusations of antisemitism in bad faith to suppress criticism of Israel even when there it is no “criticism” of Israel, and aren’t willing to hear them out and consider the kinds of arguments that I make here, you might want to ask yourself why that is.
I don’t make accusations of antisemitism lightly. If anything, I avoid them, because I know I will be pilloried for making them. I do try to give people the benefit of the doubt, not assume ill intent. I would like to be given the same treatment.
I started with something we can all agree on, and I will finish with something I hope we can agree on. The best way to address perceived racism or prejudice of any sort is through education, dialogue and debate, through more speech not less, but that depends on engaging in good faith. That is how we learn and challenge ourselves, and that is why I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the cartoon here.
Juliet Moses, Spokesperson – NZJC