The other day, a good friend of mine who’s half Jewish said matter of factly that he’s of the belief that within 10-15 years, we’ll see another Holocaust. I was surprised to find myself not entirely in disagreement. Anyone who’s been following European (and of course Muslim) political discourse recently could tell you of the shocking level of Jew-hatred that’s pretty much taken for granted at this point.
Case in point: this cartoon has just won an award from the British Political Cartoon Society. I know, I know, we go through this little two-step every time some hack shits out a sledgehammer-subtle indictment of Ariel Sharon & Israel–“he’s criticizing a man/a government, not being an anti-Semite!” And as usual, I call bullshit: Anti-Semitism has always presented “legitimate” political concerns as a false face (anti-capitalism, anti-Communism, pacifism, protectionism, and on and on). Moreover, such cartoons inevitably tap into a centuries-deep resevoir of anti-Jew imagery (hook noses, money-grubbing, puppet-mastery, the blood libel), or compare the Jewish state to the anti-Jewish state, namely Nazi Germany, or indeed swipe ideas directly from the Nazis themselves. And this one, in which Ariel Sharon is show devouring a Palestinian baby, is no exception. However noxious you happen to find Sharon or his policies, this is the equivalent of, say, drawing Colin Powell in a loincloth, chucking a spear at Iraq while raping a white woman. It’s anti-Semitism in its new, more respectable outfit: anti-Israelism. So much classier than brown shirts and armbands, isn’t it?
But what’s even more troubling than the fact that this cartoon was drawn and then published by people who one imagines are not drunken skinheads but respected members of the political journalism community, is that that same community saw fit to say that this is The Best of what they have to offer. The cartoon came out and was widely criticized, and you know what the British Political Cartoon Society thought? They thought that not only did this cartoon deserve to be defended, but that a message needed to be sent to the world at large: This is truth. This is courage. This is the way the world should be viewed. We should look at a drawing that would be at home in the most grotesque propaganda of pogroms and Inquisitions past, and think to ourselves, “bravo.”
It’s got me thinking something very, very different.