A NOTORIOUSLY ANTI-JEWISH NEW YORK rag recently published a blatantly anti-Israel and anti-Republican cartoon.
Then it apologized.
Like all such people, the fish-wrapper’s staff thought that would suffice to shut up the Jews and conservatives.
It did not.
A FEW DAYS LATER, the same rag published another cartoon, this time strictly “anti-Netanyahu.”
Again, a number of Jews, presumably Netanyahu supporters, took umbrage.
This cartoon, by Norwegian cartoonist Roar Hagen, depicts, according to Israel HaYom1, Netanyahu with sinister eyes taking a picture of himself with a selfie-stick, carrying in what appears to be an empty desert with a tablet featuring the Israeli flag painted on it.
Honest Reporting1 contends that Whatever your interpretation of this particular image, we can only conclude that the New York Times is deliberately giving the Jewish community the proverbial finger while it apologies for the other cartoon.
I CONFESS, I am not a fan of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Because I do not support everything Netanyahu does, or doesn’t do, perhaps I don’t find the Hagen cartoon particularly offensive.
To MY MIND, the cartoon is simply editorial comment.
It is neither anti-Jewish nor anti-Israel.
Anti-Netanyahu, to be certain, but cartoonists do worse things to President Trump and many members of Congress — on both sides of the aisle.
Politicians, even Israeli politicians, should not be above a cartoonist’s poison pen.
Politicians, even Jewish politicians — even ones who deny their Jewishness — should not be above a cartoonist’s poison pen.
Likewise liberals and conservatives.
But editorializing with a cartoonist’s pen is no different than editorializing with the printed, or spoken, word.
If the editorial lacks any grain of truth, then umbrage is appropriate. But when there IS that grain of truth, then the target of the editorial is fair game.
The Netanyahu cartoon could as appropriately been applied to Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and something similar may have been). I’m certain Democrats would have risen to the bait, just as, in my opinion, overly sensitive Jews took the bait for the Netanyahu cartoon.
There is no question, no debate, that the original cartoon in the New York fish-wrapper was — is — both anti-Israel and anti-Trump as well as being in poor taste, albeit not as bad as the New York Daily News’ front page attack on President Trump (not to mention an insult to Pastor Martin Niemöller and his poem, First they came.)2
It is true that the nazis slaughtered six million Jews, but the nazis ALSO murdered six million others, including almost all the Roma, Communists, Socialists, aged and infirm, and mentally deficient. Too many Jews tend to forget “the others” and claim the holocaust as their own.
We — Jews — are a people subject to the same abuse from cartoonists and editorial writers as any other people.
There are times to challenge others canards and there are times when we over-react.
I believe we over-reacted to the Hagen cartoon.
The reaction to the cartoon in the fish-wrapper and bird cage-liner is, in my opinion, wholly appropriate.
But then the rag in which it appeared only is being true to it’s anti-Jewish history.
Sources
1. http://tinyurl.com/yxtvmut4
2. http://tinyurl.com/yaj53q57
PLAGIARISM is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another, or parts or passages of his writings, or the ideas or language of the same, and passing them off as the product of one’s own mind.
Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.
