SmokeyTA wrote:Nonsense just complete nonsense. Lets see you back up the point, lets see the similarities that exist only between the holocaust and the israel-palestinian conflict. Not vague nonsense like above which could probably apply to any conflict over the last thousand years, but real and tangible links between only the holocaust and the israel-palestine conflict that means they are valid and useful parallels. Well some seem to think that the Israelis are carrying on an obvious policy of Ghettoisation ( the outcome for the Palestinians maybe different from say Warsaw) but the techniques are similar and the eventual outcome is the creating for the Israeli state Lebensraum. http://www.zcommunications.org/palestin ... amira-hass ( written by a Jewish woman) who is not anti semitic but then again if your a jewish and you argue against Israeli policies against the Palestinians you are probably just described as being self hating.

SmokeyTA wrote:Nonsense just complete nonsense. Lets see you back up the point, lets see the similarities that exist only between the holocaust and the israel-palestinian conflict. Not vague nonsense like above which could probably apply to any conflict over the last thousand years, but real and tangible links between only the holocaust and the israel-palestine conflict that means they are valid and useful parallels. Well some seem to think that the Israelis are carrying on an obvious policy of Ghettoisation ( the outcome for the Palestinians maybe different from say Warsaw) but the techniques are similar and the eventual outcome is the creating for the Israeli state Lebensraum. http://www.zcommunications.org/palestin ... amira-hass ( written by a Jewish woman) who is not anti semitic but then again if your a jewish and you argue against Israeli policies against the Palestinians you are probably just described as being self hating.

clearly he didnt or he wouldnt have needed to clarify it. If he needed to clarify it then it is obvious there is a better way of communicating what he was trying to communicate, one which didnt rely on the clarification.

Durham Giant wrote:Well some seem to think that the Israelis are carrying on an obvious policy of Ghettoisation ( the outcome for the Palestinians maybe different from say Warsaw) but the techniques are similar and the eventual outcome is the creating for the Israeli state Lebensraum. http://www.zcommunications.org/palestin ... amira-hass ( written by a Jewish woman) who is not anti semitic but then again if your a jewish and you argue against Israeli policies against the Palestinians you are probably just described as being self hating. But that hasnt happened only during the holocaust. It doesnt accurately describe the situation to say it is like the holocaust and i repeat, if Israel wasnt a Jewish state, nobody would compare it to the holocaust.

Durham Giant wrote:Well some seem to think that the Israelis are carrying on an obvious policy of Ghettoisation ( the outcome for the Palestinians maybe different from say Warsaw) but the techniques are similar and the eventual outcome is the creating for the Israeli state Lebensraum. http://www.zcommunications.org/palestin ... amira-hass ( written by a Jewish woman) who is not anti semitic but then again if your a jewish and you argue against Israeli policies against the Palestinians you are probably just described as being self hating. But that hasnt happened only during the holocaust. It doesnt accurately describe the situation to say it is like the holocaust and i repeat, if Israel wasnt a Jewish state, nobody would compare it to the holocaust.

Why the cartoon was not anti-semitic, why Murdoch is a prat – and some questions about some of Israel's right-wing supporters Smokey and Melanie Phillips, eh?

Why the cartoon was not anti-semitic, why Murdoch is a prat – and some questions about some of Israel's right-wing supporters Smokey and Melanie Phillips, eh?

Just a reminder: it is/was not 'the Jewish Holocaust'. A quarter of the Nazis' victims were not killed because they were Jewish, but for other reasons, including but not limited to their ethnicity, their politics, their sexuality.

The people whinging about the cartoon are the Board of Deputies of British Jews.
How thick does that board have to be to equate a picture of Netanyahu with themselves?
Their reasoning is that the cartoon was "shockingly reminiscent of the blood libel imagery …" (the BBC article explains that the term "blood libel" refers to myths dating back to the Middle Ages that Jews murdered children to use their blood during religious rituals.)
So, they are saying that ANY imagery objecting to ANY Jew doing harm to children (whether it is clear that the image is not about Jews in general or not … or specifically about an Israeli leader or not) is going to be met with wails about being similar to medieval stories.

By not limiting their complaint to the Holocaust Day timing, they are, frankly, deliberately missing the point and no cartoonist can avoid that.
I’d have more respect for them if they distanced themselves from Netanyahu’s acts.
There must be an awful lot of Jews in Britain who just wish the board of Deputies of British Jews would just shut up.

Only the deliberately obtuse and the professionally offended have misconstrued his message. Nothing he could have done would have avoided this. There are some people that you simply can't communicate with unless it's exclusively on their terms, and that is not the job of artists in general and political cartoonists in particular.

Honestly, you have to be pretty stupid not to be able to tell what the cartoon was about. Or someone with an agenda. Neither group is worth engaging with.

To add, not long ago, Scarfe produced a cartoon about Assad being responsible for 60,000 deaths.

Now I may be wrong, but I don't recall his being accused of racism or people pretending they didn't 'understand' the cartoon in question.

This.

If anyone deserves to be in the firing line, that would be whoever decided to publish the cartoon on Holocaust memorial day. Which was not Scarfe.

That co-incidence meant certain groups could choose to make inferences and connections beyond anything that was in the actual published cartoon, since I can understand why someone would naturally assume that that cartoon appearing on that particular day was deliberate rather than pure accident.

Despite the half-witted nature of some of the criticisms, arguments and conclusions that have been raised, the fact remains that if Scarfe's caricature had appeared on any other day, no reasonable person could have misconstrued what the cartoon was saying. It is the publication on holocaust memorial day which introduced the possibility that there was a deliberate intention to publish that cartoon on that particular day, thereby creating a deliberate link between the two.

I do not know if there was any such intention. It does seem hard to credit that no person with responsibility over publishing could have been ignorant of the date, but that is beside the point; which is that Scarfe had ZERO input in, knowledge of or control over the decision to publish on that date.

What SmokeyTA seems to comprehensively miss is that any holocaust connotations, or the possibility of making them, are 100% because of the date of publication, and 0% because of any ambiguity in the cartoon.

Holocausts a term has more meaning than as a euphemism for the "The Final Solution (to the Jewish Question)" which is the Nazi's literal term for what they did. There was the Armenian Holocaust around 1917 the killed about 1.5m Armenians. It's basically a term for genocide.

Whether it should apply to Isreal's actions is debatable but it certainly gets used outside of that context and was used to liken what went on the Balkans recently to what happened in WWII to the Jewish people. So to say it only gets used because Israel is a Jewish state is rubbish.

Personally I prefer the term ethnic cleansing to describe what Israel is up to. Whether you can achieve that without genocide and therefore by implication without the implementation of what could be described as a holocaust remains to be seen.

Why are you surprised the term gets used anyway given the history of the Jewish people in Europe? They suffered such injustice people are amazed they meat out the kind of treatment they do to others. You should simply not be surprised the term holocaust gets brought up because of the Jewish peoples own history whether it is semantically correct to do so or not when the state of Israel behaves as it does.