The Muslim World’s Own Cartoon Offenses
In Palestinian towns this week and last, thousands of demonstrators took to the streets seeking vengeance and international apologizes for blasphemy. The same scene was repeated, with alarming regularity and furor, in Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia as Muslims clamored indignantly and threatened death to those who had perpetrated these horrific acts against Islam. Jordan’s mass-circulation daily, ad-Dustour, among others, urged Muslims everywhere to confront the 'onslaught on Islam and its symbols' by protest, boycott, opprobrium, and revenge for the unrestrained attacks on its faith.
And what was the offending act that caused world-wide response and anger? It was, incredulously, the publication of twelve relatively tame cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad, first appearing in September in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten and, more recently, in newspapers in Norway, France, Germany and other countries. Adherents of ‘the religion of peace’ apparently felt that those who created caricatures of Mohammad, which in Islam is considered blasphemous (even if he is depicted favorably), not only had no right to freedom of expression, but in fact would have to die for their journalistic and artistic transgressions.
Even the U.S. State Department, employing some disingenuous diplomacy, seemed to cave in on honoring protected speech. "Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable," press officer Janelle Hironimus scolded, all the while urging press responsibility—that is, self-imposed restraint. "We call for tolerance and respect for all communities,” she said, “and for their religious beliefs and practices."
These are admirable and reasonable sentiments, of course, whether from the U.S. State Department or the Pakistani parliament, which characterized the cartoons as a "vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign" designed "hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world."
That Muslims’ ‘feelings have been hurt’ and their sensibilities offended by the cartoons is certainly unfortunate, save for a few dramatic ironies that seemed to have escaped the moral self-examination of those Islamic voices calling for the suppression of free speech and a contempt for religious and civil rights in the rest of the world: namely, that while Muslims are outraged by innocuous cartoons which suggest a link between the faith of Islam and the spread of Islamofacism, they see no trace of hypocrisy in their how their indignation over this offense has deteriorated into homicidal madness—clearly devoid of religiosity, faith, and understanding—in which imams, mobs, and demonstrators throughout the Muslim world have called for jihad, beheadings, and deaths for citizens in the West.
More ironic, still, is the fact that while such groups as the Council of American- Islamic Relations (CAIR) have been loudly condemning the cartoons as yet another instance of anti-Muslim expression, the Arab press has long allowed and encouraged the practice of publishing cartoons and caricatures of their own that, with a unrelentingly hateful, racist, and homicidal tone, target almost exclusively one group for this journalistic malevolence: Jews and the State of Israel. These cartoons regularly demonize Israel, depict its citizens as having become virtual Nazis, show Jews as animals and subhuman sadists manipulating the United States and subjugating the Muslim world, suggest them as controlling world media and committing any global crime for financial gain, and render Jews with same perverse physical traits once seen in classic European and Nazi anti-Semitism.
The extent of the hatred and libelous accusations towards Israel in the Arab media, and towards Jews worldwide, is so prevalent it has stunned observers of the world press. Harold Evans, former editor of the Sunday Times of London, for instance, noted how the use of these themes in Arab cartoons help fuel the long-standing, corrosive myths which not only make Jew hatred possible but inevitable. “The Muslim world’s relentless caricatures of the Jew are boringly on the same one note,” Evans said. “Jews are always dirty, hook-nosed, money-grubbing, vindictive and scheming parasites. They are barbarians who deliberately spread vice, drugs and prostitution, and poison water.”
But unlike Muslims, Israelis and Jews in other countries never seem to react to the publication of these works by taking to the streets, denouncing Islam, and calling for the beheading of the offending cartoonists or the bombing of mosques. The U.S. State Department has never publicly scolded the Arab press and cautioned them that Israeli’s “feelings might be hurt” with this type of journalistic attack. And The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, has never made a public pronouncement, as she did in response to the Danish cartoons, that she finds “alarming any behaviors that disregard the beliefs of others. This kind of thing is unacceptable.”
The ubiquity of these vicious cartoons in the Arab press has been exhaustively studied and made into a book by Dr. Joël Kotek, a political scientist at the Free University of Brussels, In the Name of Anti-Semitism: The Image of the Jews and Israel in the Caricature Since the Second Intifada. Kotek’s two and half-year search identified some 2000 cartoons, "the main recurrent theme [of which] is 'the devilish Jew,'” Kotek said. Repetition of these caustic themes, no matter how false or fantastic, has the desired cumulative effect of debasing and dehumanizing an entire ethnic group. “By extension,” he says, “this image suggests that the Jewish religion must be diabolic, and the entire Jewish people evil.”
One cruel and prevalent way Arab cartoons express the morally-debased nature of Israel and Jews is the recurring theme which depicts the Nazification of Israel, the notion that Israel—a country founded as a result of Nazi oppression and genocide—has now itself become a Nazi state. For Israel in particular, of course, this is the ultimate libel, stirring up as it does not only painful memories of the Holocaust, but also the fact that its is now being defined as morally equivalent to one of history’s most homicidal and notorious regimes. Even more sadistically ironic is the fact that the Arab press has been inspired by the very anti-Semitic images and stereotypes used by the Nazis in their own invidious propaganda. The intent of both, says Arieh Stav, Director of the Ariel Center for Policy Research, is the same, “a convenient way for the Arab propaganda machine to fulfill its primary goal of dehumanizing the Jew.”
“The anti-Semitic caricature is entirely devoid of the element of humor inherent in caricature as an art form,” Stav writes, “and it is unique in its Nazi and Arab expressions, in that it presents its object, the Jewish human being, both as an individual and in his generality, as worthy of physical annihilation.” Thus, every recent Israeli prime minister has been depicted in Arab cartoons as being a Nazi, Hitleresque, or inspired by Nazi ideology; a bloody, demonic Ariel Sharon is shown slaughtering Palestinian children with a swastika-shaped axe; a new incantation of Auschwitz is drawn in which, this time, the Israeli flag flies over a concentration camp for Palestinians; or, as appeared in a 2005 cartoon in Qatar’s Al-Watan, Israeli jets, in swastika formation, drop bombs over Gaza.
Even as Mohammad Khatami, president of Iran, questions publicly whether the Holocaust happened at all, Arab cartoonists mine this rich source of symbolic hatred for their own purposes, “ based on two contradictory allegations” which, according to Kotek, “the Islamists try to reconcile. Their first claim is that the Shoah never happened. Their second contention is that if it did, it has caused more damage to the Palestinians because they believe they are being treated worse than the Nazis treated the Jews.”
Kotek identified another recurring theme in Arab cartoons which serves a similar purpose of debasing—and therefore dehumanizing—Jews and Israel: their portrayal as animals and monsters. This motif of zoomorphism, Kotek says, is effective because “to abuse one's adversaries, one dehumanizes them by turning them into animals.” The Koran itself calls Jews the ‘descendents of apes and pigs,’ so it is not surprising that caricatures would enlarge on that theme. Comparison to a pig, Kotek notes, is a “classic dehumanizing motif [that] has its origins in the Middle Ages, though everybody knew that the pig was a forbidden animal to the Jews,” and is therefore doubly offensive.
The image of the Jew as ape was used in another cartoon to reinforce a second prevalent anti-Semitic accusation: that Jews, as depicted in the noxious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and in hate literature worldwide, completely and selfishly control the world. In this drawing, a monstrous ape, wearing the Star of David on his chest lest there be any confusion, sits atop the globe while the Pope and an Arab figure look on, powerlessly. “Jerusalem: from New York City to Kuala Lumpur, undivided, eternal capital of Israel,” the ape says in the cartoon, “everything else is negotiable,” stressing the traditional manifestation of Jew-hatred that Richard Hofstadter once defined as the ‘paranoid style of politics,’ in which omnipotent, omni-present, and omniscient Jews have total control of geopolitics, media, and world banks.
Perhaps the most damning and invidious accusation made in Arab cartoons about Jews—one that has also gained great credibility in articles and speeches of ‘experts’ throughout the Muslim world—is the ‘blood libel’ myth imported from Christian Europe, the perfidious charge that Jews regularly drink the blood of non-Jews (often Arab and Palestinian children) as part of a core Jewish ritual. Kopek noted that this myth’s “claim is that the Jew is evil, as his religion forces him to drink blood. In today's Arab world this image of unbridled hatred has mutated into the alleged quest for Palestinian blood.”
Thus, one typical rendition appeared on the web site of the Palestinian Authority State Information center and depicted a sadistic Ariel Sharon as a butcher over the body of a dead Palestinian child, signs behind him advertising a sale on Palestinian blood. For Kopek, the merging of the blood libel myth with the image of infanticide turns the Jew into a horrific, sub-human monster for whom animus and annihilation are justified and for whom no world sympathy should ever be received. “The concept that the Jews not only murder, but preferably target children, is what the cartoonists try to convey through their imagery,” he says. “This depicts the Palestinians primarily as children or babies. Thus, Arab and Muslim propagandists turn Palestinian children into the paradigm of the victim, despite the fact that most of their dead are adults."
Radical Islam, a movement that has hijacked the Muslim faith and exploited some of its tenets to justify terror and aggression, may well be responsible for the negative depictions of Mohammad in the cartoons that have caused worldwide protest from adamant believers. But before they take to the streets to protest, Muslims everywhere—and their apologists and ideological partners—might want to step back and see if the debasement of Jews and the State of Israel in the Arab press, done in Islam’s name and without self-examination or censure, is not as equally offensive of the injustice they now accuse others of perpetrating on them.