In this piece for ZNet, referred to me by reader Pat, Omar Barghouti asks:
To put it bluntly, would the west accept or tolerate cartoons which are anti-Semitic, novels which deny the Holocaust, or poetry which favorably evokes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
This from Jason Zengerle at TNR’s “The Plank” includes the following rundown from the Jerusalem Post:
In Spain, for example, on June 4, 2001–just three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 21 young Israelis at a disco, in the midst of a unilateral Israeli cease-fire–the liberal magazine Cambio 16 published a cartoon of Sharon with a hook nose he does not have, wearing a skull cap he does not usually wear, sporting a swastika inside a Star of David on his chest, and proclaiming: “At least Hitler taught me how to invade a country and destroy every living insect.”
A week earlier El Pais, Spain’s equivalent of The New York Times, published a cartoon of an allegorical figure carrying a small rectangular-shaped black mustache, flying through the air toward Sharon’s upper lip. The caption read: “Clio, the muse of history, puts Hitler’s mustache on Ariel Sharon.”
Cartoons in the Greek press in 2004 showed Sharon as a Nazi officer. One of Italy’s leading papers, Corriere Della Sera, ran a cartoon on March 31, 2002 showing Sharon killing Jesus.
Then there’s “The Passion of the Christ,” which is arguably a very long antisemitic cartoon. As far as I know, the only violent rhetoric in that controversy came from Mel Gibson, who threatened to kill Frank Rich’s dog.
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