All the Anti-Semitism That’s Fit to Print

Stand for Israel  |  April 30, 2019

The New York Times recently posted a cartoon depicting Israeli PM Netanyahu and Donald Trump, a cartoon that was not only unfunny, but also contained age-old anti-Semitic tropes. Writing for the Gatestone Institute, Alan Dershowitz asks what the reaction would have been had the target of the paper’s hatred had been a Muslim, a lesbian, an African American, or a Mexican, instead of a Jew:

Imagine if the New York Times cartoon that depicted Israel’s Prime Minister as a dog had, instead, depicted the leader of another ethnic or gender group in a similar manner? If you think that is hard to imagine, you are absolutely right. It would be inconceivable for a Times editor to have allowed the portrayal of a Muslim leader as a dog; or the leader of any other ethnic or gender group in so dehumanizing a manner.

What is it, then, about Jews that allowed such a degrading cartoon about one of their leaders? One would think that in light of the history of the Holocaust, which is being commemorated this week, the last group that a mainstream newspaper would demonize by employing a caricature right out of the Nazi playbook, would be the Jews. But no. Only three-quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them, we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.

The New York Times should be especially sensitive to this issue, because they were on the wrong side of history when it came to reporting the Holocaust. They deliberately buried the story because their Jewish owners wanted to distance themselves from Jewish concerns. They were also on the wrong side of history when it came to the establishment of the nation-state of the Jewish people, following the Holocaust. When it comes to Jews and Israel, the New York Times is still on the wrong side of history…