Political cartoonist Daryl Cagle went on a U.S. State Department tour of the Middle East. Over at hisblog, he describes an encounter with Egyptian journalists: At my first event in Cairo I spoke to a group of Egyptian journalists who brought a newspaper up to me, proudly pointing out that in Egypt, editorial cartoons are often printed big and in color on the front page of the newspaper. The cartoon they showed me would make an American editor choke; it showed a spitting snake, in the shape of a Star of David; inside the snake/star was a peace dove, behind bars, and above the snake, in Arabic, were the words, “It’s not about the bird flu, it’s about the swine flu.” I explained that in America this cartoon would be regarded as anti-Semitic, and it would never be printed. The Egyptian journalists were emphatic, explaining to me that the cartoon was about Israel, not about Jews – an important distinction to them. “Israel isn’t mentioned anywhere in the cartoon,” I said. “But we all know the Jewish star is the symbol of Israel,” they responded. I said, “It is a religious symbol. It is the same as if I took the star and crescent off of the flag of Pakistan and drew a similar cartoon, saying it was about Pakistan.” They didn’t respond to me, my comment was such nonsense. I continued, “The cartoon seems to say that Jews are like snakes and pigs.” “No, no! We have lots of symbols for Israel that we all know, like the Jew with black clothes and a big hooked nose!” one of the Egyptian journalists insisted with some passion. “We like Jews, we just don’t like Israel!” Damian Thompson, the blogs editor of the Telegraph Media Group, has an announcement for the anti-semitic trolls who frequent the comments pages: It’s such a pain in the arse, it really is. So I’ve been wondering what to do about it. One answer would be to approve all posts before they appear – but why should the rest of you have to put up with a delay just because a couple of nutters are so obsessed with Jews that they can’t join a supermarket checkout queue without scanning it for Zionist secret agents? So here’s my plan. For every anti-Semitic comment that appears on this blog, I will make a small donation to a Jewish charity. How much? Which charity? I think I’ll keep those details to myself for the time being. It’s my little conspiracy. I’d recommend a similar policy for the Guardian, BBC, and the Huffington Post…but they’d go bankrupt within a week.
Tuesday 12 January 2010
On January 2, 2010, In Anti-semitism, Media, By judeosphere
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