Here's a story about the NYT cartoon. Not a word about blind people,
however.
Miriam
On The New York Times Cartoon Ban
July 2, 2019
Daniel Lazare looks into the Times overreaction to charges of
anti-Semitism.
By Daniel Lazare
Special to Consortium News
The New York Times was so sorry last month for publishing an allegedly
anti-Semitic cartoon showing Benjamin Netanyahu as a guide dog leading a
blind Donald Trump, that its decided never to run any satirical cartoon on
any topic again.
Based on five minutes of googling, the consensus seems to be that its a
gross overreaction. But the reason the Times cant stop apologizing is that
the cartoon shows the Israeli prime minister with a blue Star of David
around his neck and Trump with a yarmulke atop his orange hairdo. Using
such symbols in this way makes many people uncomfortable, which is
understandable.
But imagine, if you will, a cartoon showing Canadian President Justin
Trudeau with a maple leaf on his shirt, Angela Merkel with a German eagle,
Frances Emmanuel Macron dressed up like Napoleon, or Britains Theresa May
draped in a British flag? Why dont any of those stir an outcry?
Netanyahu and Trump in Israel, 2017. (StateofIsrael via Flickr)
The reason, one might counter, is that those images are political whereas
the Star of David is religious. True, but thats precisely the point.
Canada, France, and Germany are all secular societies in which church and
state are firmly separate. (Britain is a bit more complicated thanks to the
queens role as head of the Church of England, but thats another story.)
But the upshot is zero overlap as far as political and religious imagery are
concerned.
Indeed, for all its sins, the same is true even for the United States.
Think of America and what comes to mind Uncle Sam, a bald eagle, or a
missile-laden F-16? Perhaps. What does not come to mind is the cross even
though 75 percent of Americans identify as Christian, a higher portion than
Canadians (67.3 percent), Germans (64.2), Brits (59.5), or French (51.1).
Thanks to the First Amendment and a succession of Supreme Court cases
dealing with things like school prayer, the U.S. government has been
de-religionized and the very idea of America has been de-religionized as
well.
But its not true for Israel. To the contrary, the same Star of David that
appears in the cartoon also appears on the national flag while the yarmulke
is also virtually a national symbol thanks to the growing ultra-orthodox
influence. Instead of separation of church and state, the consequence is an
ever-closer union. Back in 2003, the late historian Tony Judt stirred a
hornets nest by pointing out that Israel has less in common in this respect
with other postwar nations than it does with the ethno-religious states of
the 1920s and 30s. As he put it in The New York Review of Books:
At the dawn of the twentieth century, in the twilight of the continental
empires, Europes subject peoples dreamed of forming nation-states,
territorial homelands where Poles, Czechs, Serbs, Armenians, and others
might live free, masters of their own fate. When the Habsburg and Romanov
empires collapsed after World War I, their leaders seized the opportunity.
A flurry of new states emerged; and the first thing they did was set about
privileging their national, ethnic majority defined by language, or
religion, or antiquity, or all three at the expense of inconvenient local
minorities, who were consigned to second-class status: permanently resident
strangers in their own home.
Ethno States
Ironically, the most inconvenient local minority of all was the Jews, who
were all but obliterated when the same ethno-states were taken over by
fascism during World War II. Yet, under the Zionists, Israel has reduced
Palestinians to strangers in their own land as well.
Indeed, the situation is far worse than when Judt wrote. Where Israel
risks falling into the camp of belligerently intolerant, faith-driven
ethno-states, as he put it, its now the leader of the pack, a role model
for up-and-coming ethno-authoritarians like Hungarys Viktor Orbán, Brazils
Jair Bolsonaro, or, of course, Trump, as they make their way through an
increasingly illiberal political landscape.
Flags flying for Trumps arrival in Israel, 2017. (White House/Andrea Hanks)
One purpose of an ethno-state is to dazzle, confuse, and disarm. There are
many reasons that the Star of David appears on the Israeli flag, but one of
the most important is to de-legitimize the criticism of de-legitimization by
making it all but impossible to attack the Jewish state without attacking
Jews. Outsiders wind up damned if they do and damned if they dont,
spineless apologists for an increasingly brutal regime if they keep their
mouths shut, and anti-Jewish bigots if they dare to speak up.
This is the boat that António Moreira Antunes, the unfortunate Portuguese
artist behind the Times cartoon, finds himself in now that hes been branded
as anti-Semite across the globe. Antunes says he merely wanted to use
Israeli national symbols to make a point, which is that Trumps erratic,
destructive and often blind politics encouraged the expansionist radicalism
of Netanyahu. Yet he found himself running headlong into a buzz saw of
condemnation almost before he laid down his pen.
Not only does such doubled-edged symbolism make honest criticism more
difficult it also makes real anti-Semitism easier. Traditionally,
anti-Semites have hidden their bigotry behind seemingly legitimate criticism
of the Jewish state. Going on about this or that crime against the
Palestinians is supposedly a way of going on and on about the Jews without
quite saying so. But as the British anti-Zionist campaigner Tony Green
stein points out, todays anti-Semites are good deal cleverer. Instead of
hiding behind criticism, they hide behind support.
Hungarys Orban: Eager for Israels approval. (President of Russia)
This is why someone like Orbán is so eager for Israeli approval even as he
goes about rehabilitating Miklós Horthy, the Hungarian dictator from 1920 to
1944 who was a key Nazi ally and who, according to the historian Raphael
Patai, bragged of being an anti-Semite throughout my life. All Orbán
wants is for Netanyahu to sprinkle him with a little holy water, so to
speak, so he can continue with his neo-Horthyite goal of creating an
ethnically pure Greater Hungary in which Muslim refugees are prohibited.
When the Hungarian president visited Jerusalems Yad Vashem Holocaust
memorial last summer, furious demonstrators blocked his motorcade shouting,
Never again! and Shame on you! and denouncing Yad Vashem for hosting
him.
Favorite Target
Bad as this is, the real story is even worse. Orbáns favorite target, the
key to his success in fact, turns out to be the Hungarian-American financier
George Soros. Soros is a major funder of liberal causes and organizations
throughout the world, including the Free University in Budapest, a liberal
bastion that has long been a thorn in Orbáns side. Soros also happens to
be Jewish. For the Hungarian president, therefore, hes straight out of
central casting, an international Jew who can be blamed for everything from
the migrant crisis to the economic slowdown and know-it-all foreign critics.
A recent government-funded poster campaign showed Soross portrait along
with the inscription, Lets not let George Soros have the last laugh a
reference, Tony Greensteins suggests, to a famous speech that Hitler gave
in January 1939:
I have often been a prophet in my life and was generally laughed at. During
my struggle for power, the Jews primarily received with laughter my
prophecies that I would someday assume the leadership of the state and
then, among many other things, achieve a solution of the Jewish problem. I
suppose that meanwhile the then surrounding laughter of Jewry in Germany is
now choking in their throats.
Just as Hitler didnt want Jews to have the last laugh, Orbán doesnt want
them to either.
Soros: Orbans favorite target. (Harald Dettenborn, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia
Commons)
But Orbán didnt dream up the anti-Soros campaign on his own. To the
contrary, a pair of rightwing American Jewish political consultants named
Arthur Finkelstein and George Birnbaum thought it up for him. After
Finkelstein and Birnbaum helped Netanyahu become prime minister in 1996, he
returned the favor by recommending their services to his old friend in
Budapest. Amid the economic devastation caused by the 2008 financial
blowout, they helped him win re-election, Hannes Grassegger reports in
Buzzfeed, by persuading him to target bureaucrats and foreign capital. When
Orbán needed a fresh enemy to consolidate his control, they then came up
with another target. Following their advice to the letter, Orbán sailed
into Soros at the height of the 2015 refugee crisis:
His name is perhaps the strongest example of those who support anything
that weakens nation states, they support everything that changes the
traditional European lifestyle. These activists who support immigrants
inadvertently become part of this international human-smuggling network.
This was the international Jew as enemy of the nation, tradition, and
Christianity an angle of attack that a couple of Netanyahu emissaries not
only inspired but designed. Instead of defending Jews, Israel was egging on
their attackers. Not for nothing does Israeli dissident Ronnie Barkan argue
that the greatest anti-Semitic force in the world today is the state of
Israel.
Yet the only thing The New York Times can do in response is to shoot the
messenger by forever banning political cartoons from its pages. By
censoring critics, editorial page editor James Bennet, the genius behind the
new policy, hopes that maybe the problem will just go away. But it wont of
course. Hes guilty, rather, of a hear-no-evil strategy that will only make
matters worse. The Timess definition of all the news thats fit to print
grows narrower and more distortedby the day.
Daniel Lazare is the author of The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is
Paralyzing Democracy (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American
politics. He has written for a wide variety of publications from The Nation
to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs about the Constitution and related
matters at Daniellazare.com.
