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Opinion

Hypocrisy at core of cartoon riots

Richard L. Cravatts
Guest Columnist

For several weeks now, thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets to seek vengeance and international apologies 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.

And what was the offending act that caused worldwide response and anger? It was, incredibly, the publication of 12 relatively tame cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, 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 those who created caricatures of Muhammad, 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.

That Muslims' feelings may have been hurt and that the cartoons offended their sensibilities is certainly unfortunate. However, a few dramatic ironies seem to have escaped the moral self-examination of those Islamic voices calling for the suppression of free speech and contempt for religious and civil rights in the rest of the world. For example, while Muslims are outraged by innocuous cartoons which suggest a link between the faith of Islam and the spread of Islamofacism, the Arab press has long allowed and encouraged the practice of publishing cartoons and caricatures of their own that, with an unrelentingly hateful, racist and homicidal tone, target almost exclusively one group for its journalistic malevolence: Jews and Israel. 

The ubiquity of these vicious cartoons in the Arab press has been exhaustively studied and made into a book by 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 2,000 cartoons, "the main recurrent theme (of which) is ‘the devilish Jew.'" Repetition of these caustic themes, no matter how false or fantastic, has the desired cumulative effect of debasing and dehumanizing an entire ethnic group.

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. 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, said 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, or a new incantation of Auschwitz is drawn in which, this time, the Israeli flag flies over a concentration camp for Palestinians.

Kotek identified another recurring theme in Arab cartoons that serves a similar purpose of debasing 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 Quran itself calls Jews the "descendents of apes and pigs," so it is not surprising that caricatures would enlarge on that theme.

The image of the Jew as an 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, omnipresent 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 appears on the Web site of the Palestinian Authority State Information center that depicts a sadistic Sharon as a butcher over the body of dead Palestinian child, with 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.

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 Muhammad 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.

Cravatts, a guest columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu