Sunday, February 15, 2004
The Washington Post today uses Dave Brown's controversial cartoon of Ariel Sharon as a hook for a decent discussion of British "Judeohphobia."
British Drawing Stirs Anti-Semitism Debate
What he drew was so shocking to some readers, it is still reverberating a year after it appeared.
Patterning his cartoon after a Goya painting from the 1820s, Brown drew a naked Sharon, his private parts covered by a "Vote Likud" badge, kneeling in the rubble of Gaza City and about to take a bite from an infant. "What's wrong. . . . you never seen a politician kissing babies before?" the cartoon Sharon asked.
Many British Jews reacted with revulsion, accusing Brown and the newspaper of anti-Semitism. Some said the drawing echoed the virulent Jew-hatred of cartoons that appeared in Nazi publications such as Der Stuermer before and during World War II, while the Israeli Embassy here contended it perpetuated the ancient "blood libel" that Jews prey on non-Jewish children...
My previous item on the cartoon is here. I hadn't posted a lot on the subject at the time in spite of giving it a lot of thought because I'd really had a lot of mixed emotions about it. With some things I've seen and read, I'm now more on the side of its being antisemitic than I was then.
The article itself is a decent short primer on the issue generally, and covers a lot of ground familiar to blog readers.
Oh, BTW, if you were also one of the people who didn't like the cartoon, it would appear you were not alone:
"The phone didn't stop ringing," Benson said. "People were telling us we were Nazi swine, while we also had Nazi sympathizers congratulating us."
Benson said he expected the fuss to resume when the cartoon goes on display this summer as part of a collection of political drawings on the Middle East conflict. "We're prepared to put it under bulletproof glass," he said.
