same posting as:
 http://uk.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=22404&group=webcast
(you must have forgotten you uploaded it to uk while you were uploading it to all the other sites)

wasnt a repeat, but you still hid it. I only posted it out of a wish to get people to read anew one of the most controversial artcles ever written on the british left. please restore it !

Is this cartoon by Latuff, published at indymedia-switzerland, anti-Semitic?
An analysis.
 http://www.akdh.ch/latuff2.htm
in german --->  http://www.akdh.ch/latuff.htm

The cartoon evokes a clear association of a WWII ghetto in Poland. The figure shown is obviously based on the image from the infamous photograph of the little boy who is threatened by an SS-man armed with a gun. Hardly any other picture from any ghetto has the same symbolic and emotional impact.
Further associations are stirred up. A Jewish community, living in Poland for centuries, is brutally violenced and detained to a Ghetto for one single reason: Because they are Jews. There is no political or strategic military goal behind this "ghettoization", only the thorough extermination of the Jewish population. The ghettos in Eastern Europe are part of the holocaust; they are the waiting room for the extermination camps.
The caption in the bubble "I am Palestinian" picks up the figure of the devastated Jewish child and transforms it into a different one. Now the Palestinians are the ghetto-child whose fate is in the hands of oppressors who clearly intend his extinction. But the oppressors, too, are in the picture. Through the sentence "I am Palestinian" it is made clear that the ghetto wardens of today are not the Nazis anymore, but the Israelis. The picture conveys the clear association that the Jews themselves do nowexactly the same what the Nazis did to them in the Thirties and Forties of the last century. From a psychological point of view this means that the Jews suffer from an obsessive-compulsive urge to re-stage the ghetto trauma again and again to be able to face it at all and thus may have the trace of a chance to free themselves from it. For this purpose all means seem justifiable to the Jews = Israelis. The "Jews" are the "Germans" of the Middle East, the murderous invaders who attack as well - and foremost - children. Their only goal is the total extermination of the Palestinian people.
Enough said about the heavy symbolism of the picture's antagonism between the "people", symbolized by a child, and the "black wall" (execution wall at Auschwitz?). It is part of the above explanation.
Jews are reduced to a symbol here and the holocaust thus intrumentalized as a clever catchphrase to insinuate that the holocaust a) was not a singular experience and b) that the Israelis do exactly the same, i.e. follow a comprehensive genocidal agenda. Jews are "allotted" just victim-status, which they have to live by. If they don't, they are automatically labelled with the "global conspiracy" stereotype, which portrays them as aspiring tyrant rulers of the world.
The emblematic set-up of the Israelis = Nazis symbol has become a much-used topos within the Arab world since the foundation of Israel 1948. It is published regularly in Arab newspapers, although in a much more direct way (Moshe Dayan meets Hitler and gets a compliment as his (Hitler's) "best disciple"). In the picture we are discussing here this is done much more subtly, but not any less anti-Semitic.

The icon of the "global Jewish plotter" who poses as a victim, yet is a perpetrator, is a figure frequently used in the 19th and early 20th century. Depending on the point of view of the critic, Jews were either revolutionaries threatening law and order or cannibal exploitative abusers. Both of those images imply that "the Jews" are following an agenda of taking over global power.
The relativation of the holocaust and the denial of its singularity is a further anti-Semitic symbol, which allows to intrumentalize the extremely emotional topic of the holocaust in a populist and polemic fashion for other purposes and which implies invariably elements of excuse for German society as well.
The cartoon abuses, polemically, sensationally and luridly, the suffering of the Jewish people in the holocaust to cast the Jews as the evil incarnated in the Middle East. This is no cartoonist, legitimate larger-than-life illustration to make a point, this puts an end to any dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis. No communication is possible between the mutely murderous black wall and the helpless child. The only solution is a demolition of the wall and as the wall stands for Israel = Jewry, when all is said and done, the cartoon stands for the extermination of the Jewish people and the state of Israel.

AKdH

So...no complaints about Sharon et al. being compared to U.S. slavers, South African apartheid era governments, U.S. troops murdering Vietnamese civilians, murderous Chinese governments, U.S. cavalrymen murdering Native Americans, or Mexican troops oppressing the Chiapas people then?

Just checking.

>There is no political or strategic military goal behind this "ghettoization", only the
>thorough extermination of the Jewish population.

There is always a political reason in genocideS and holocaustS which can be explained on many
levels. Jewish were chosen by nazis because they were historically exploitable as scapegoats for
the terrible economic situation.
There is no trascendece in jewish extermination because there is no relation between god and
history. The idea of god, of any god, is unuseful and dangerous to rationally explain history
and has brought to the worst events of human history.
Unluckly making genocides and holocausts is a possibility of human nature present in past
and future history. This is why we have to fight Sharon as well as we fought (and fight) nazis.

These days there's an evident plan, shared by many politicians and militars in the state of
Israel, to kill all the palestinians. This is a plan of genocide similar to that carried out by
the US against the american indians.

The equation anti-semitism = anti-zionism = anti-Israel is totally false. There are atheist
citizen of Israel as there are anti-nationalist zionists. There are racist zionist and
non-racist zionist (even if a minority these days). Semitis do not exist and are an ideological
invention of bilogical racists like Adolf Hitler.
Israel is recognized by the international community as a laic state, not as a theocracy.


>Jews are reduced to a symbol here and the holocaust thus intrumentalized as a clever
>catchphrase to insinuate that the holocaust a) was not a singular experience and b) that the
>Israelis do exactly the same, i.e. follow a comprehensive genocidal agenda.


Every historic event is singular and every historic event isn't monopoly of anyone except of
human race. Holocausts are no one's property!
The Holocaust regards jewish as gipsy as homosexuals as communists and is an offence to humanity in its entirety.

Singularity doesn' imply trascendece of any kind.
Not Israelis, but israelian government and militar establishment are willing to do something
very similar to the palestinians.


>The relativation of the holocaust and the denial of its singularity is a further anti-Semitic
>symbol, which allows to intrumentalize the extremely emotional topic of the holocaust in a
>populist and polemic fashion for other purposes and which implies invariably elements of
>excuse for German society as well.


Each historical event is relative to others and, at the same time, is singular.
This hasn't nothing to do with with populism or excuses for German society.
You can't forbid historical analysys of any historical event!

It is unfortunate that AKdH have failed to take this cartoon in context:

'No communication is possible between the mutely murderous black wall and the helpless child. The only solution is a demolition of the wall'

The cartoons were clearly meant as a series, and the same cannot be said of other cartoons, in particular the one depicting the civil rights struggle of black Americans, where largely peaceful struggle and 'communication' were victorious in overturning years of human rights abuses.

AKdH have failed to make the link between the cartoon and anti-semitism, and have merely resorted to knee-jerk reaction against a powerful image. To paraphrase Alan Rusbridger, editor of the respected Guardian newspaper, to be anti-Sheron is not equatable to being anti-semitic. Latuff is right to use satire to add to the debate about opression which is wrong, whatever its perpetrators may have suffered in the past.

The attack against Latuff is a tranparent attempt to discredit growing international criticism of the Israel's state's brutal treatment of the Palestinians...pure and simple.

That supporters of Israel are outraged that Latuff would draw a comparison between the Jewish children of the Warsaw Ghetto and Palestinian kids who live under a brutal occupation in the West Bank and Gaza comes as no suprise. Leveling charges of anti-semitism against critics of Israel's absymal human rights abuses in the West Bank and Gaza has been a staple of Zionist propaganda effforts for decades.

Latuff's image resonates both truth and bitter irony, and that makes it immensely effective. Indeed, the Jewish resistance fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt had more in common with the Palestinian fighters battling Israeli tanks during this Intifada, than with war criminals like Ariel Sharon. And Sharon's defenders know this as well. But they'd rather the rest of us didn't. And it that fact that prompted the hysteric suit in Switzerland.