Politico’s got a lot of competition these days in the Jew-hatred sweepstakes, but it’s definitely in the running (hat tip: commenter “TJ”):
Politico published a cartoon on Friday featuring anti-Semitic imagery in an attempt to criticize the war in Iran. The image depicts President Donald Trump, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Republican members of Congress wearing blood-covered Jewish prayer shawls and yarmulkes.
The cartoon, drawn by former New York Post cartoonist Sean Delonas, depicts the lawmakers aboard a rowboat labeled “Ship of Neocons”—a play on the Hieronymus Bosch painting Ship of Fools—that is about to plummet over a waterfall. A bag of blood-smeared money crowns the mast, and the word “Amalek,” a reference to a historical enemy of the Jewish people from the Hebrew Bible, appears in the background.
Netanyahu, depicted with an exaggerated nose, is also shown wearing a blood-covered Jewish prayer shawl and eating from a table covered in blood, while Trump, also in a Jewish prayer shawl, is drawn underneath the word “Amalek.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who is not Jewish, is depicted wearing a yarmulke and a Jewish prayer shawl and holding a bottle of blood. Graham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), also drawn in a blood-covered Jewish prayer shawl, have supported the Iran war and are longtime supporters of Israel.
Follow the link to see the cartoon.
This sort of Jew-hating propaganda is not extraordinary. On the contrary, it’s ordinary in the sense of having a long history. It shocks us because most of that history has been outside the US, but the appearance of such a cartoon in Politico, which is not a traditionally anti-Semitic site, is both a sign of how mainstream Jew-hating has become (at least, among what passes for our political punditry) and how dedicated many people are to spreading and promoting it further.
The cartoon was removed, but only in response to a furor from readers. I believe that Jew-hating is still very much a minority view among people in the US but that it’s growing, especially among young people. And there’s no dearth of people trying to spread it and mainstream it in the media and social media. Some of them are foreign actors with their own agenda and some are homegrown.
Even in the US, this has been building for a long time. It’s not just an old story that harks back to Nazis and way earlier, it’s been a story even during the time frame in which I’ve been writing this blog. For example, Trump and Netanyahu got similar treatment in a 2019 cartoon published in the international edition of the NY Times, for European consumption. You can see it here (and if you have X, you can see the revolting responses even back then, very typical of online Jew-hatred and its intensity and vile nature):
I wrote this post about that cartoon at the time. I also wrote this on the subject. That latter post also features a 2003 cartoon about Sharon which is bloodcurdling and based on a Goya etching. I suggest you read both posts, but here’s part of the latter:
It was early in 2003, during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians had been deliberately targeting and blowing up Israelis civilians (including Israeli children) at a rapid clip for three years. The wall had been started but was far from completion at the time the cartoon was published (January of 2003). One would think that if anyone was going to be depicted as deliberate and ghoulish child killers it would be the Palestinians, who not only supported suicide bombers who murdered children but who purposely used their own children as sacrifices, putting them in harm’s way (see also this) to make it more likely that defensive retaliatory measures by the Israelis would result in the inadvertent death of Palestinian children.
But ghoulish Palestinians wasn’t the image Brown was after (and here the reference is to the famous Goya work “Saturn Devouring His Son“):
See? He’s naked, except for that little Likud rosette instead of a fig leaf. Not a kippah or a Jewish star in sight. So that makes the blood libel perfectly okay.
The cartoon was so highly thought of that it was awarded the 2003 first prize by the British Political Cartoon Society. In his acceptance speech, “Brown thanked the Israeli Embassy for its angry reaction to the cartoon, which he said had contributed greatly to its publicity.”
To repeat: I wrote that in 2019 about something that happened in 2003.
Now for a few words about Jew-hating itself. It puzzles a lot of people, and rightly so, despite the gazillions of words that have been written on the subject trying to explain it. Today, commenter Richard Aubrey asked:
Thomas Sowell has suggested that the Jews have been the “minority middleman” in a number of societies. The same is true of Indians in Africa, Chinese in SEA, Cubans in the Caribbean. Some of the same difficulties are encountered; “clannish, money grubbers, snobs, etc” And, sometimes, violence.
But Jews have about two thousand years’ of hate-generated tactics and accusations to be used against them. It’s different when there’s such a supply to draw from, I suspect.
That being said, why does it light up like kerosene when introduced onto a campus? Is there some need to hate, awaiting only a suggested target? Wny?
I probably will write more on the entire subject, but for now I’ll keep it very brief and say that it’s multi-determined and serves many needs in the haters, and although it waxes and wanes it morphs and persists. But in terms of that first paragraph about the Sowell quote, hating Chinese or Indians involves groups that are among the most numerous on earth. Hating Jews involves hating a very tiny but very prominent group. The Jews – both as a group in terms of monotheism, and as individuals in terms of achievement in fields such as science or popular music – have been far more influential on human history than would might expect from their actual numbers (numbers which people tend to greatly overestimate). Despite their tiny numbers, Jews have been dispersed around the world, and so their small size, prominence, and geographic spread have been fertile soil in which the hatred can grow.
But in the end, explanations which have a spiritual dimension are also compelling. If you believe in the demonic, Jew-hatred partakes of the demonic. It also has historic roots in the two religions it gave birth to, Christianity and Islam, although that has waxed and waned and changed over time, too (I probably will write at greater length about that at some future point, too). It often rears up in societies that are troubled, because Jew-hating is an easy and parsimonious way to cast blame and channel frustration. And the US is certainly troubled at the moment.
NOTE: I doubt Politico would publish any cartoons critical of Mohammed, because they know that could get them killed.
