Israel to Demand Apology for ‘Anti-Semitic’ Netanyahu CartoonThe Sunday Times ‘crossed a red line,’ says Ambassador to UK Daniel Taub; Knesset Speaker Rivlin lodges complaint with British counterpart
By Raphael Ahren
January 29, 2013 "Times Of Israel" -- Israel is planning to demand an apology for a controversial cartoon that appeared in the British Sunday Times, Israel’s ambassador to London said Monday, while one minister mulled steps against the paper.
One day after the caricature sparked outrage among Jewish groups for its depiction of a bloodthirsty Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building a wall with the blood and bodies of Palestinians, leading Israelis joined the chorus of condemnation.
“The newspaper should apologize for this. We’re not going to let this stand as it is,” Israeli Ambassador to London Daniel Taub told The Times of Israel in a telephone interview. “We genuinely think that a red line has been crossed and the obligation on the newspaper is to correct that.”
Taub added that he was going to meet with the newspaper’s editor “at the earliest opportunity, perhaps already today,” to express the government’s concern about a cartoon that draws “on classical anti-Semitic themes.”
In a meeting Monday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair, the representative of the Middle East quartet who’s also a former British premier, deplored the caricature, noting the timing of its publication on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, according to a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office
Earlier on Monday, Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Minister Yuli Edelstein told Army Radio that the government would probably refrain from filing an official complaint with the London-based paper. However, he said, “We will think about how to act against the paper’s representative here in Israel.”
The cartoon is “certainly” anti-Semitic, Edelstein asserted. “I don’t think there is any other possible way to interpret it,” he said, adding that its publication on International Holocaust Remembrance Day was particularly hurtful, a sentiment shared by Taub.
Responding to an outcry from Jewish groups — Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Israel office, called the cartoon “absolutely disgusting” and said it “makes all the talk of fighting anti-Semitism seem irrelevant,” and Michael Salberg of the Anti-Defamation League said “The Sunday Times has clearly lost its moral bearings — a spokesman for the newspaper told The Times of Israel Sunday the cartoon was not anti-Semitic but critical of the prime minister’s policies, as it was “aimed squarely at Mr. Netanyahu and his policies, not at Israel, let alone at Jewish people.”
Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin wrote a letter Monday to his British counterpart, Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, expressing the Israeli people’s “extreme outrage” at the cartoon, which was drawn by veteran caricaturist Gerald Scarfe.
“For me and for other Israelis, this cartoon was reminiscent of the vicious journalism during one of the darkest periods in human history,” Rivlin wrote. While government authorities should not attempt to control the media and must grant freedom of speech, many Israelis are “shocked that such cartoons can be published in such a respectable newspaper in the Great Britain of today, fearing that such an event is testimony to sick undercurrents in British society.”
Scarfe’s cartoon, captioned “Israeli elections: Will cementing peace continue?”, “blatantly crossed the line of freedom of expression,” Rivlin added.
Jewish Agency chairman Natan Sharansky drew a direct connection between the cartoon and the increase in anti-Semitic violence that took place in 2012.
“There is a very tragic alliance between primitive, anti-democratic, nationalist, racist, fundamentalist forces who are committing most of the violence, and enlightened, liberal, intellectual representatives of the intelligentsia in Europe,” Sharansky told The Times of Israel. By using clear double standards towards Israel, Western intellectuals evidently accept the delegitimization of Israel and are thus “helping to justify” anti-Jewish violence, he said. While Israel respects other nations’ right to freedom of speech, it is was “necessary and important” to label people such as Scarfe, the cartoonist, as anti-Semites, he added.
Some Israelis came to Scarfe’s defense. Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer listed several reasons the cartoon was “not anti-Semitic by any standard”: the cartoon, he argued, isn’t directed at Jews, features no Jewish symbols and does not use Holocaust imagery.
Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire CEO of News Corp., which owns The Times, nevertheless tweeted a harshly worded apology.
Rupert Murdoch Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon. |
Nissim “Nusko” Hezkiyahu, one of Israel’s most famous caricaturists, defended Scarfe. While Sunday’s cartoon turned his stomach, it is not anti-Semitic, Hezkiyahu told Army Radio. “You need to know this man. He wasn’t born yesterday nor did he start publishing caricatures yesterday,” Hezkiyahu said. “We’re talking about Gerald Scarfe, one of the world’s most famous caricaturists, who doesn’t just make fun of Bibi” but of many politicians, and he treats them all equally disrespectfully. “If you look at the other caricatures, Bibi came off easy.”
“To say that this caricature shows Bibi with a big nose — compared to all the caricatures that are published here, I think that was the smallest nose he ever had,” Hezkiyahu said.
The fact that the cartoon was published on a day on which the world remembers the Holocaust was unfortunate, but most likely not the fault of the cartoonist but of the editor, Hezkiyahu added.
Taub, Israel’s ambassador in London, acknowledged that Scarfe is famous for politically incorrect drawings but said that the depiction of Netanyahu went too far. “Scarfe is known to be provocative, but I think that even according to his own provocative standards, this is a cartoon that crosses any line,” Taub said. “What is very troubling is that fact that these are things that we have become accustomed to see only really only at the extreme end of society, the most extreme elements on the fringes. And to see them in a respected newspaper like the Sunday Times, which is really in the heart of mainstream, is very troubling indeed.”
http://www.boldfacenews.com/blood-libel/
or IDF soldiers intentionally killing Palestinian children.
They have maimed and killed Palestinian adults in the tens of thousands, and continue to do so, but for day-to day entertainment they seem to prefer children, even unborn ones.
Is it because they are cowards?
Is it because they are blood-thirsty sadists and if they are neither settlers nor in the IDF, they and their women, all massacre voyeurs, enjoy carnage tourism?
Is it because they are reared in Judaism (Kill all the Amaleks: men, women, children, and their animals, in 1 Samuel 15:7)?
Yes, they kill the “Amaleks”‘s animals too:
In the Torah there are several instances of God telling Israel to completely wipe out the peoples who inhabited the land they coveted (e.g. Deut 7:1-4,16,24). In other words it is “God” who directs them to carry out genocide…
What about “secular” Jews who profess to be atheists? If they are not obeying “God”s command (make that “g-d,” the Jews piously avoid blasphemy), what is their ideological support for committing or supporting genocide? Is it their pathologic “Jewish identity” that is, as Atzmon puts it, “celebrating its symptoms”?
So, are the Israelis and all the Jews worldwide who support them blood-thirsty murderers or is it “blood libel” to think so?
Richard Edmondson, in the article reproduced below shows the sadism with which they bait Palestinians children in order to kill them.
“Your Mothers Are Dogs and Adulteresses, Say Israeli Soldiers
by Richard Edmondson
How would any 16-year old boy react to someone insulting his mother in terms like the above? You can pretty well imagine. Now suppose the boy is a Palestinian, and the persons doing the insulting are a group of Israeli soldiers? And suppose also that the soldiers are deliberately trying to provoke the boy so as to justify shooting him? Put it all together and what have you got?
“A Palestinian schoolboy killed by Israeli gunfire near the West Bank separation barrier had been reacting to insults shouted by soldiers with loudhailers before he was shot, eyewitnesses have said.” So reports the British newspaper, The Telegraph. Aside from the unfortunate choice of words in the above paragraph (“separation barrier” instead of apartheid wall), the story goes on to report some very pertinent details, like that the soldiers were in the village of Boudros, that they were shouting through loudspeakers at a nearby school, and that their words were deliberately designed to incite and provoke the students at the school.
“They were shouting ‘Come dogs, Come to the wall,’” one witness, a 10-year-old boy, reported. “They were also calling us sons-of-bitches and saying your mothers are dogs and adulteresses. They were shouting on the loudspeakers before Samir left his class.” The name of the boy killed was Samir Awad. That’s his photo on the poster in the image above. The woman holding the poster is his mother, Sidiqya Khalaf Awad—the lady the soldiers were calling a whore and a dog. Be comforted, good woman. Jews have also called the mother of Jesus a whore. You can click here and read the full story, written by Robert Tait—not bad reporting actually, for mainstream media covering Israel. The Israeli military responded as they always do when media occasionally mention something particularly odious and atrocious such as the killing of Palestinian children—that it’s “under investigation.” And then, of course, that’s usually the last word you hear about it.
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Editor”s Note
Necrophilia, as I stated elsewhere, is a black running thread in the Jewish identity syndrome.
Hematophilia must be added too: an obsessive drive to spill the blood of non-Jews, while resorting to the most repugnant rituals to avoid letting a drop of “Jewish” blood … go to waste (look up “mohels”).
If you area a non-Jew a proper prayer of thanks should be:
Thank God/the gods/my lucky stars (take your pick) that I was neither raised as a Jew nor did I ever allow myself to become a Shabbat Goy.
If you are an ex-Jew the thanks should be given because although raised as a Jew you had the mental capacity and the moral fortitude to leave the Tribe and become a moral member of humanity.
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