Jewish group denounces political cartoon: The Independent
Thursday, 26 March 2009SHAREPRINT ARTICLE EMAIL ARTICLE TEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
A Jewish human rights group has denounced a political cartoon as anti-Semitic, comparing it to Nazi imagery of the 1930s that led up to the Holocaust. The syndicated cartoon published by Pat Oliphant yesterday in newspapers across the US depicts a goose-stepping uniformed figure wheeling a fanged Star of David that menaces a small female figure labelled “Gaza.” The Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish rights group with more than 400,000 members in the United States, said the cartoon is meant to denigrate and demonise Israel. “The imagery in this cartoon mimics the venomous anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi and Soviet eras,” Wiesenthal Center officials said in a statement. “It is cartoons like this that inspired millions of people to hate in the 1930s and help set the stage for the Nazi genocide.”
The centre called on the New York Times and other online outlets to remove the cartoon from their websites. A New York Times spokeswoman didn’t immediately respond to a phone or e-mail message left after office hours. Universal Press Syndicate, which distributes Oliphant’s cartoons, did not immediately return messages left late last night.
