Guardian cartoon row: how antisemitism smears are intended to throttle the left
JVL Introduction
In the wake of the Rowson cartoon incident, Jonathan Cook has produced an important analysis of how tropes function and how they are manipulated “to reinforce the limits of public discourse”.
It is a nuanced discussion, the kind that is now virtually disallowed if you try to deconstruct cartoons in a different way from that done by those who police the boundaries of the permissible.
You do not have to agree with Cook’s readings of each of the cartoons portrayed to support his conclusion that the language and imagery we are allowed to deploy on the left is being increasingly restricted. So much so that one wonders if any person who happens to be Jewish can ever be legitimately lampooned in a cartoon.
As Cook writes:
Nowadays, simply using expressions like “the ruling class”, “bankers”, the “establishment” or “a global elite” is likely to get one denounced as an antisemite, as though anyone referencing these predatory groups representing global capital must also believe that Jews are a cabal controlling the world.”
The result?
Punches must be pulled, gloves must be kept on, the caricatures kept to a minimum, implications of greed, predatory behaviour and power removed, even if the targets of the cartoon are greedy, powerful and predatory.
This article was originally published by Substack on Fri 5 May 2023. Read the original here.
Guardian cartoon row: how antisemitism smears are intended to throttle the left
Scapegoating Jews by twisting the left’s lexicon against elites, the far-right has handed the establishment a slur that keeps on giving
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Jonathan Cook suggests, doubtless correctly, that the Guardian’s editor-in-chief Katherine Viner is compliant enough with ruling orthodoxy that she will not lose her job over the current hysterical attacks on Rowson’s innocuous, (but in my opinion mediocre), cartoon. Nevertheless it should be noted that that her dismissal is exactly what the rightwing zealots of the so-called “Campaign Against Antisemitism” are calling for: see
https://antisemitism.org/the-guardian-editor-katherine-viner-must-resign-following-the-newspapers-publication-of-an-antisemitic-cartoon/
Doubtless this is intended merely as a warning shot. There is however a submerged history here to this hostility, because Katherine Viner was once quite openly defiant in her rejection of censorship of criticism of Israel’s colonial barbarism, before she appears to have been brought into line. She was, with Alan Rickman, one of the two producers of the play “My Name is Rachel Corrie” based on the diaries of Rachel Corrie, the American peace activist brutally killed by the IDF, a theatre production which caused unhinged fury amongst the supporters of Israel’s settler colonialism. When in 2006 the play could not be staged in New York because of the protests Viner even wrote a piece for the Guardian entitled “Surely Americans will not put up with this censorship?”
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2006/mar/01/theatre.usa
Excellent by Jonathan Cook. This article needed to be written and no one better to do it. It is, in fact, antisemitic to ‘other’ Jews for what they are not – better or worse than anyone else. What next: Bernie Madoff a misunderstood character instead of the perpetrator of the biggest ever Ponzi scheme?
What we are getting now is the continued weaponisation of fake antisemitism – anyone who says this was all over when Corbyn went is delusional.
Also a shout out to Heather Mendick who has gone through the cruel and unusual punishment of reviewing JLM/Labour’s ‘antisemitism training’.
https://youtu.be/y0PUARDDiGE
David Rosenberg has it to a T here writing about Siobhan MdDonagh:
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/anti-anti-semitism-actually-promotes-jew-hating
I heard John Humphrys talking to this intellectually challenged Labour brain donor at the time and thought: “oh, oh, here we go, from now on in, no holds are barred.”
The campaign against Rowson is just another chapter in the same saga. Sadly, like so many others, he chose to make things worse by “confessing.”
The middle ages, complete with witches, animal familiars, witch-hunters and burning at the stake, are back with a vengeance.
I’m Jewish and saw the cartoon and didn’t see the Sharp figure as a Jewish caricature – and I hadn’t known he was Jewish till the apology came.
I’m afraid yet again it takes the right-wing Jewish groups claiming to represent jewry (which they don’t) to point the finger and repress free expression
Steve Bell was one of the reasons I stuck with the Guardian. It is sad that the G has gone down hill so fast under Viner. I have withdrawn my Support to the G. .. There is not much left in MSM literally that one can safely read and expect any form of objectivity.
Noses as THE salient feature of all peoples faces. Had the cartoon depicted Sharp with a retrousee nose would this not also have summoned up calls of anti-semitism by denying his Jewish roots? The usual suspects have enjoyed their whinge and now time for them to grow up. All cartoons are caricatures.
I just went on to The Guardian’s website to find (and read) the Dave Rich article mentioned above, and THIS is the message – the spiel – that came up initially:
Support the Guardian
The free press is in peril the world over. We must protect it, revive it. To let it die is to let people like Putin, Trump, Erdogan and Xi spread their toxic version of reality. Let’s stop the rot. Support the Guardian’s independent, quality, robust journalism…… Armed with accurate information, we can stand in solidarity against propaganda, censorship and misinformation.
As I said in a recent post, millions of people pay for the entity that lies to them and misleads and disinforms them, whether it be the BBC and/or The Guardian or the Sun or the Mail or the Express or Times or Telegraph etc, and also pay indirectly to some degree or other for the advertisements that most of these entities depend on to exist.
Yes, and as with much of the MSM at the time, Dave Rich falsely implies all six of the bankers in the mural were Jewish. And you can be 150% certain that Rich and the CST – along with all the other saboteurs of democracy who conspired in the A/S black op – KNEW that much of the MSM did that – ie deceived and duped their readers etc.
Anyway, here’s a link to the Dave Rich article, which – being a propagandist – he couldn’t possibly not refer to Jeremy Corbyn, which he saves for the last paragraph:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/may/01/richard-sharp-guardian-martin-rowson-cartoon-antisemitism
What I would like to throw in the mix is, I helped out at a Bar Mitzvah when I was around 20, it was quite an experience, the hall was very large and it was full of happy Jewish people, I was helping the Chef in the kitchen, along with his wife and daughter (my girlfriend at the time) and another qualified chef. We could see the guests through a large service hatch, they were dancing and singing, it was a really happy event. If I hadn’t been told that they were all Jewish I wouldn’t have guessed, they all looked as different as any group at a wedding. I do remember that there was a dozen or so Orthodox Jews there but other than those, as I said they all looked different.
At college there were 2 Jewish lads and they were as different as chalk and cheese, I became friends with one of them and we sometimes met up outside of College, his family invited me over for tea and to watch Wimbledon on their new colour television, which at the time quite exciting, few people had them. He had 2 brothers and a sister and they were as different as my brothers and myself. Take Alan Sugar and Richard Sharp, they look completely different, take all the Jewish female MPs in the Labour Party they look nothing like each other. My point is how can they say they all look Jewish in the Mural, can someone explain how this all came about?
Simon Heffer: “Corbyn wants to reopen Auschwitz”*
Stephen Pollard: “Corbyn’s criticism of bankers is basically antisemitism”.
Siobhain McDonagh: “Anticapitalism is antisemitism”.
This is the game. The successful demonisation of Corbyn has pointed the way. Anything that deviates from the rotten status quo is now “antisemitism”.
To my mind, this is endangering Jewish people because vested interests are defending themselves by falsely and deliberately identifying the status quo with Jewish people.
“Antisemitism” has become the ultimate non sequitur.
* How can a prominent journalist get away with such an outrageous and disgusting slur, particularly when the State of Israel openly courts genuine antisemites in Hungary and Poland?
Perhaps intimidating and alarming European Jewry is “a price worth paying” to encourage migration to Israel in order to maintain the racial balance in Israel.
Similar accusations of antisemitism arose when Richard Desmond was accused of buying influence with the cabinet when he donated £12k to the party two weeks after minister Jenrick had rushed through planning permission for a £1bn development on the Isle of Dogs so Desmond could avoid paying a £45 million community charge to the local council which was due to come into effect a few days later. Desmond is a Jew. Who knew?
Brilliant and brave from Jonathan as usual. There is also a simple point to be made here: we know that all texts need to be read. Some are easy to understand and others not. A picture is just another text and needs to be read by its observer – and how this is done depends on what your experience of such texts is, whether you’re any good at reading, where you’re standing at the time, what your intention in posting a reading is and so on.
With the Mere One cartoon, I have disagreed strongly with a friend (who happens to be Jewish, unlike me) as to whether it is antisemitic or not. I never felt it was – just seeing it as a none too subtle caricature of capitalism, pretty suitable for a wall. I didn’t even get what the all-seeing eye was meant to suggest.
Jonathan suggests that the Thought Police are active and after us. I think he may be right.
I am seriously not persuaded by this argument. The left needs to be more conscious, perceptive and self-critical. Enough own goals being defensive when this is not appropriate. We have no need of the tools and tired racist imagery of the far right to critique power and oppression.
As an aside the Octopus is an intelligent creature…making its repeated use in this way doubly depressing……
Ironic that a critic of the cartoon in the G referenced David Baddiel’s book about anti-semitic tropes. The David Baddiel who famously had to apologise for his racist mocking of a black footballer’s hair and in yesterday’s G was accused by Marc Almond of making ‘deeply homophobic’ ‘jokes’ about him in the 90s. By your friends shall ye be judged.
Thanks so much for actually letting us see this cartoon. To date I’d only seen the repeated grovelling apology in the Guardian , as I don’t buy the paper regularly for the same reasons many other JVL members have given. The image is not antisemitic, and (for instance) the pink octopus is part of Rowson’s bestiary of mutant animals and blasted landscapes which he uses to survey the devastation of the present.
However I take issue with Jonathan Cook’s defence of ‘the traditional lexicon of the left’ . Images and vocabulary always need to be renewed. To my mind Rowson often succeeds in doing that – sometimes not, at the start of his career when you could see the influences of Scarfe and others , but now he is forging his own path. Possibly Steve Bell’s strip cartoons, with their weird carnival of political animals, also helped here.
The mural by contrast is pretty gross, hack , kitsch even. Quite true the bankers don’t look particularly Jewish and nor, strangely, do they look particularly posh (thankfully no more top hats and tailcoats here), but it is the depiction of faceless workers with muscles straining under the table, and the Masonic pyramid above, that I particularly object to.
We do need new and recognisable language to express our outrage, we can’t fall back on the ‘lexicon’. It’s shameful that two cartoonists who have really made moves in this direction are being victimised like this.
PS the Evening Standard’s cartoonist has produced Stürmer-like cartoons of Suella Braverman lately. There has to be a way of showing the ugliness of her politics without just drawing on the ‘ugly hooknosed witch’ stereotype.
PPS I’d also appreciate it if Cook (and maybe JVL too) didn’t assume that all of us oppose the defence of Ukraine.
I am not persuaded by Jonathon Cook’s argument. I think we need to be able to perceive antisemitic imagery where it arises, however unintentionally, be able to discuss this openly, defend when this is not the case, but learn from when it is/ or could genuinely be perceived to be. I include Mear One’s mural as drawing on antisemitic imagery, Jeremy rightly reflectively recognised this and I fully support him.
We need to be more perceptive, aware, crítical/self-critical ……..the left can find new ways of symbolising oppression without sharing the tools or the tired conspiratorial imagery of the far right.
This is no disadvantage or limiting of satirists or the left….in fact it is a significant creative opportunity…..
As an aside I find it doubly depressing ( not only because of link to far right imagery) to keep seeing the Octopus, a wonderful intelligent fellow creature, being portrayed as embodying evil/blood-sucking tentacles etc as seen in repeated images and again week on the May Day March through London……The left can be more imaginative…….and get out of a symbolic rut.
If calling anyone a parasite means you are anti-Semitic, when people have finally had it with parasites, who is going to get it?
If you read the article you’ll see it isn’t an octopus but a squid, a reference to a description of Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid when it was a leader in the financial derivates that caused the crash of 2008. You could argue that a huge public investment bank cannot be associated with a supposed antisemitic creature just because it was founded by Jews but in fact the octopus image has been widely used in non-Jewish contexts.
So: if Sharp wasn’t Jewish, and we changed the name of the bank on the box as the only change to the cartoon, would it still be antisemitic?
What amazed me was how often the Guardian felt it had to apologise for a small feature of a cartoon. We had the half-page Dave Rich article, a full page one by the readers’ editor, half a page of letters all saying much the same thing, and finally (needless to say) a page of Jonathan Freedland. It’s disturbing that a minor issue worries them so much when bigger issues are hardly noticed.
………………..but will JVL continue to use the Guardian as its primary source?
To adopt the Sir William Macpherson of Cluny Report criteria on investigating Racism, if anyone says that the cartoon is anti-Semitic then it must be interpreted in those terms.
The decision to honour Nancy Astor caused no such outrage despite her obvious anti-Semitism and pro-Hitler sympathies.
This is a good article with some very apt comments. It cannot be repeated too often that seeing socialism as inherently antisemitic only makes sense on the assumption that Jews are inherently capitalistic.
What interests me however is the way in which the thinking of people like Rich mirrors that of conspiracy theorists, with their assumption that nothing actually means what it appears to but that everything is actually a coded way of saying something else. The analytical approach applied by Rich to the cartoon evokes the ability of QAnon followers to find predictions of the coming apocalypse in any random set of tweets. At the end of it he takes a cartoon showing Sharp as a defeated, pathetic and rather ridiculous figure and concludes that it presents him as part of a “fantastical Jewish power network … its tentacles reaching into every part of society”.
A reason for not arguing with conspiracy theorists is that some of their assertions, taken individually, seem vaguely plausible. It is not impossible to see the portrayal of Sharp as antisemitic, though this does not seem to have struck anyone who was not looking for it. For it to be significant, however, one has to postulate that it would be possible to draw an effective cartoon showing Sharp leaving the BBC which people like Rich would not see as antisemitic. Does anyone really believe this?
Antisemitism is an extremely flexible concept. As others have pointed out the cartoon also shows Rishi Sunak with an extremely large nose and Boris Johnson sitting enthroned on a pile of shit surrounded by bags of money. Had either of them been Jewish Rich would undoubtedly have seen these portrayals as part of the “anti-Jewish visual lexicon”.
So, because I am a Jew, I can do whatever I like, regardless of morality and of consequences, and justify my actions on the grounds that because I am a Jew I can do no wrong. I can go further; I can accuse those who accuse me of doing wrong of being Jew-haters simply because they think that what I’m doing is wrong. The wrong lies with their accusations, not with my acts. That’s very handy to know.