Anti-Israeli cartoons

from the summer of 2006

THE following are a cross-section of anti-Israeli (and often overtly anti-Semitic) cartoons from the international media from the summer of 2006. The cartoons here, selected from South Africa, New Zealand, Spain, Britain, Norway, Poland, Russia, Brazil, Syria and China, are only a small sampling of works from five continents over a one-month period.

While many in the Islamic world and in the West have strongly condemned cartoons deemed offensive to Muslims, such as those that appeared in a Danish paper caricaturing Mohammed, there is near-silence among western media and NGOs about anti-Semitic cartoons that are spreading across the globe.

I mention several of these cartoons in the article “The media war against Israel.”

Click here for more Cartoons from the Arab world.

-- Tom Gross

This cartoon by Yaskin Alkhali, Syria (September 2006)
equates the Jews with Hitler.

This cartoon by Raul Erkimbaev, Russia (August 10, 2006) not
only demonizes Jews but insults one of their sacred books too.

This cartoon by Morhaf Youssef, Syria (August 16, 2006) draws a grotesque parallel between the Jewish holy sign the Star of David, and the Nazi swastika, the symbol under which Jewish adults, children and babies were, in living memory, tortured and gassed.

This cartoon from Britain’s best-selling quality daily, The Daily Telegraph (July 29, 2006), equates what was in fact minor bombing of the Hizbullah positions in Tyre with the mass murders of the Warsaw ghetto. The bombing in Tyre, which resulted in very few casualties, was aimed at destroying the Hizbullah rockets which were then raining down on northern Israel. The Warsaw ghetto, established in October 1940, occupied an area less than three square miles. Over 400,000 Jews were then crammed into it, about 30 percent of the population of Warsaw. 254,000 were sent to Treblinka where they were exterminated. Most of the rest were murdered in other ways. The ghetto was completely cleared of Jews by the end of May 1943.

This cartoon from Dagbladet, Norway’s third largest paper (July 2006) compares Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to the infamous Nazi commander SS Major Amon Goeth. Among other crimes, Goeth indiscriminately murdered Jews by firing at them from his balcony – as depicted by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. (A month earlier Dagbladet published an article, “The Third Tower,” which questioned whether Muslims were really responsible for the September 11 attacks.)

This cartoon by Jonathan Shapiro (aka Zapiro), of The South African Sunday Times (July 2006), depicts Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, whose policy is to create a viable Palestinian state, chopping up body parts.

This cartoon by Tom Scott, New Zealand (July 19, 2006)
equates Israel with al-Qaeda.

Once liberal British newspaper, The Guardian, has, like much other coverage of Israel in the British media, a virulence which is hard to distinguish from outright anti-Semitism. This cartoon by Martin Rowson (July 19, 2006) is arguably anti-Semitic. Here Stars of David are being used as knuckle dusters on a bloody fist to both punch a young boy and to crush George Bush, the American president.

This cartoon by Hou Xiao Qiang, China (July 18, 2006)
shows a white dove of peace being crucified on the Star of David.

This cartoon by Omar Perez, Spain (August 9, 2006)
depicts the Israeli flag drenched in blood.

This cartoon by Jaroslaw Wojtasinski, Poland (August 5, 2006) suggests that Israelis are the enemies of peace and that the Star of David is the symbol of trigger-happy military oppression. Needless to say, Poland is the country where millions of Jews were gassed to death after being made to forcibly wear yellow Stars of David.

This cartoon by Carlos Latuff, Brazil (July 25, 2006)
proclaims that Israel is guilty of committing war crimes.

This cartoon by Carlos Latuff, Brazil (July 16, 2006)
alleges that Israel randomly kills civilian populations.

This cartoon by Amorim, Brazil (July 14, 2006) suggests that
Israel has kidnapped Palestinian children, whereas in fact at this
time Palestinian militia were kidnapping and murdering Israelis.

This cartoon from Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Gaza (July 9, 2006) shows a Hassidic
Jew opening a window in the American flag and randomly murdering people.