The Guardian was last night accused of “shocking” antisemitism after publishing an offensive cartoon of ex-BBC chairman Richard Sharp featuring Jewish stereotypes. The Mail on Sunday has more.
The controversial image by Martin Rowson showed a grinning caricature of Sharp, who is Jewish, with what experts described as a string of antisemitic tropes.
Sharp dramatically quit as BBC chairman on Friday after a report found that he broke the rules by failing to disclose his role in helping Boris Johnson secure an £800,000 loan.
The cartoon, published yesterday, depicted the former Goldman Sachs banker carrying a box from the bank stuffed with a squid and what appeared to be gold coins.
Stephen Pollard, former editor of the Jewish Chronicle, described the illustration as “unambiguously antisemitic”, adding: “It takes a lot to shock me. But I still find it genuinely shocking that not a single person looked at this and said, ‘No, we can’t run this.’”
Boris Johnson last night suggested those responsible at the Guardian for publishing the image should resign. “Frankly whoever commissioned and printed this has made a far worse mistake than Richard Sharp,” he said. “They should take his lead.”
Writing on Twitter, award-winning screenwriter Lee Kern said: “The Guardian is antisemitic. If a paper can be institutionally racist, it’s them.”
While the squid seemed to be a reference to Goldman Sachs – once described by Rolling Stone magazine as “a great vampire squid” – it is also a “common antisemitic motif” used to depict a supposed Jewish conspiracy, according to Dave Rich, an author who specialises in antisemitism.
He added: “You might argue that outsized facial features and tentacles are common to other topics too, so it’s just a cartoon thing. Except where something has a long and familiar antisemitic history, it takes on a different meaning when you apply it to Jews.”
Critics also highlighted that the cartoon appeared to feature a bloodied pig’s head and Rishi Sunak portrayed as a puppet. Alex Hearn, co-director of Labour Against Antisemitism, said: “It is extraordinary that so many classic anti-Jewish motifs were squeezed into one cartoon, without the Guardian editors objecting.” …
A spokesman for the Guardian yesterday said: “We understand the concerns that have been raised. This cartoon does not meet our editorial standards, and we have decided to remove it from our website.
“The Guardian apologises to Mr Sharp, to the Jewish community and to anyone offended.”
Worth reading in full.
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These figures may be slightly out of date, but last time I checked 27% of all Nobel prizes had gone to Jews despite them representing a vanishingly small proportion of the global population. Jews, in general, make a huge, positive contribution to society.
Down-ticking Grauniad readers in today, I see.
And we’re told race is a social construct…
That’s a non-sequitur: The by far overwhelming majority of Jews haven’t ever won and won’t ever win a Nobel prize. They might well make a huge, positive contribution to society but your statement doesn’t show that.
By the generally accepted measures of achievement (financial, scientific, academic, cultural) they overachieve relative to their numbers. You may regard this as unimportant, but nonetheless it’s true.
Or underachieve: A somewhat well-known antisemitic ‘argument’ in post-WW1-Germany was that Jews had been underepresented in frontline troops and overrepresented among army members in safe rear area jobs.
My opinion on that is that such statistics are generally worthless and usually employed for political pointscoring. They’re created based on the assumption that property X of some group of individuals is relevant for some phenomenon Y by sorting people into the X-group and the not-X-group. If the outcome is as desired, it’s supposed to prove that X is indeed relevant. But there was no reason for using this particular grouping criterion except the assumption that it must be relevant, ie, this is circular reasoning.
There are more arguments against this. Eg, the number of elite positions (supposed to refer to your measures of achievement) is much, much smaller than the population a statement is supposed to be made about. Considering the relevant sizes, the number members of the elite group are simply irrelevant. 27% of the number of Nobel prize winners were Jews means absolutely nothing for the millions of Jews who are/were just ordinary people and as such, didn’t win Nobel prizes.
I’m not saying it “means” anything, just that it’s a fact.
The correlation is a historical fact which solely exists because someone desired to create it. In absence of more information about this phenomenon, it has exactly all of the relevance of an answer to a Trivial Pursuit question.
Well, lots of people claim race is a social construct, while at the same time pointing to differences in outcomes sorted by race being evidence of racism. And people are convinced by this. So I think in the context of where we are, it’s highly relevant. Understanding how the world actually IS is always better than pretending it’s what you want it to be.
That this kind of circular reasoning is popular among people trying to deceive others (or – this could happen from time to time – fool themselves) doesn’t make it any less circular. Dito for the inappropriate generalization. Different outcomes sorted by race solely exist because someone who assumed that it must be race which makes the relevant difference did the sorting accordingly.
And then, this is different outcomes sorted by Himbeerlolli (raspberry lollipop) in the USA. An equally plausible and equally speculative explanation could be: The ancestors of the current black population of the USA were a negative selection from African people — those who ended up being sold into slavery were hardly the most intelligent, resourceful and determined ones. This shows in their descendants until today, albeit human mutation and crossbreeding ought to eradicate this phenomeon over time.
Many Jews fought for Germany in WWI
20% gone to Jews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates
https://www.startpage.com/do/search?q=jews+as+precentage+of+world+population&segment=startpage.brave
Probably more than 27% of all award-winning film and television comedy writers are Jewish too, strangely.
Would this be accused of a lack of diversity in another context? Or to re-task a Guardian statement of the Oscars to this situation: The Nobels may not be anti-Gentile; but they are definitely hideously Jewish.
“Hideously”? Explain. That’s a revolting thing to say and in my book, clearly Anti-Semitic.
It’s a statement made by the Guardian that has been adjusted to fit this discussion by changing the award and the ethnicities.
Is now not a good time to raise Jeffrey Epstein and the Nobel’s?
What on earth is that freaky cup with an eye..that looks as though it’s covered in fur?
Anyway…absolutely disgusting, and an apology isn’t enough…Bob Moran was sacked for much less, from the Telegraph..and Andrew Brigden was thrown out of the Conservative Party for a comment that wasn’t even anti-Semitic…I hope someone keeps the pressure on….heads should definitely roll….
“The Guardian was last night accused of “shocking” antisemitism after publishing an offensive cartoon of ex-BBC chairman Richard Sharp featuring Jewish stereotypes. “
Is the Pope Catholic? It’s a Left-wing rag. Why do you ask?
I don’t read the Guardian. I think it’s content is crap.
But I don’t really know what it means that the Guardian is anti-semetic. All the staff are? It’s content is anti-Israel?
Does being anti-Israel make you anti-semetic?
I’m quite anti-US these days, but I’m not anti-Americans. I like quite a lot of them.
Maybe I’m missing something but my guess is that the people at the Guardian don’t as a whole hate Jews.
Totally agree
I watched Melanie Philips on Unherd a while back, talking about why she left the Guardian and considers it anti-semitic. It was along the lines that her colleagues repeatedly held Israel to a different, tougher standard than other countries in the region. I think she said they considered other countries to be “brown people” and therefore not quite as responsible for their own actions as opposed to Israel which should be held to a higher account, ignoring the fact that according to her, Israelis are also “brown people” in large part. I think she found this exceptionalism to be rooted in anti-semitism.
I’ve not read what she wrote but based on your summary it seems like a plausible argument. However, criticism of Israel has become taboo and that’s unhelpful. Israel acts in what it believes are its own best interests and if I were Israeli I would probably support them. You could argue it’s a uniquely racist state, based on it being a homeland for Jews. I’ve got not problem with that, and given their history who can blame them. But that doesn’t mean that criticising it is anti-semitic.
It’s a homeland for Ashkenazi Jews stolen from other people.
Genetic archaeology tells us that the Ashkenazi Jews are descended from male Jews who moved to what is now Italy around 2,000 years ago (almost certainly for economic reasons) and then married local women because Jewish women weren’t available.
Which surely means that they’re technically not Jews.
“given their history who can blame them”
A history of seriously pissing-off everybody they lived amongst.
I’d possibly accept your argument if they’d carved their homeland out of part of the area that used to constitute the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but Palestine? No way.
(2,000 years ago some of my ancestors would have been living in what are now Germany and Denmark. Does that give me the right to ethnically cleanse those countries?)
I don’t know what the answer to the Palestine/Israel business is. But no-one asked to be born Jewish so even if their ancestors or relatives are “pissing people off” it seems wrong to punish them. Pretty much every other race on Planet Earth is either extinct or has a homeland of some kind that is relatively undisputed (though goodness knows we Europeans are busy disavowing ours…).
I’m not suggesting they should be “punished”, I’m pointing out the the murder of 2.25 to 2.5 million Jews in Europe in the first half of the 40s doesn’t entitle them to the “reward” of Palestine.
Maybe. It has not turned out to be trouble free. But if I were a Jew I would have been feeling uncomfortable in the 40s and more comfortable now. At the risk of stating the bleeding obvious, we are where we are.
They’d be much more comfortable if they’d moved to Noo Joysey rather than Palestine.
And the Mizrahi Jews wouldn’t have been expelled from their ancestral homelands if Israel hadn’t been created.
Well New Jersey isn’t on offer. I suppose there are areas of the USA and Russia that could be used. Complicated though.
Where did these Mizrahi Jews live and who expelled them?
Ashkenazi Jews: Eastern Europe.
Sephardic Jews: Western Med
Mizrahi Jews: the Middle East.
Falasha Jews: Ethiopia. Viciously discriminated against in Israel. Is it coz dey is black?
The Saatchis are Mizrahi Jews from Iraq.
Thanks. So which country did these Mizrahi’s live in, who evicted them and why?
I’ve been giving you the benefit of the doubt, but no longer.
Benefit of what doubt? Sorry, you’ve lost me.
A better question is what has happened to the thriving communities of Christians, Armenians and Jews who lived for generations in cities from Tehran to Casablanca.
But our blatantly antisemitic trolls care nothing about Jews or Christians, so long as they can wallow in their lies and their hate.
Victims of Anglo American ‘great game’?
This may help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizrahi_Jews
Thanks
Stalin created a Jewish homeland in Birobidzhen but it wasn’t to their liking.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=birobidzhan&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-gb&client=safari
Thanks; I didn’t know that.
From a little reading, I can’t say I blame them. It doesn’t sound very appealing.
Will you welcome with open arms the millions of African and Asian converts to Christianity who want to come to live in Christian Europe.?
Well I think we’ve had far too much immigration in recent decades so I prefer to see a more or less total moratorium at least for another few decades, and then take stock. So short answer, no. What makes you think I would/should?
The Mizrahi jew lived peaceably amongst the Mohammedans in Palestine and throughout the Middle East respecting each others faiths, cultures and mores until the mass exodus of the huge diaspora of European Ashkenazi jew (converts to Judaism 8th century) took place post WW2.
The (tens of millions?) African and Asian Christians may consider they too have a right to live in Christian Europe even though they too are only converts to Christianity and have no direct lineage to European ancestry.
https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/most-ashkenazi-jews-are-genetically-europeans-surprising-study-finds-8c11358210
Surprising how many shills for the Palestinian Arabs show up here.
They can’t all be the extreme left (aka “far right”) sad anti semites and Holocaust deniers of old, who one might presume would all have died in their mum’s basement by now.
Spot on.
Melanie Phillips tonight has published on her excellent blog the complete cartoon, rather than the extract published here on DS, (for some reason).
Just as disgusting as the extract and featuring Boris shouting encouragement to Sharpe.
Israel is an excellent place for a holiday and seems very largely open to honest free speech. Apparently not so much at the moment, as the left are very hot under the collar about the plan to rein in an out of control unelected left wing judiciary, trying to thwart government policies.
Where have we seen that before?
But make no mistake, Israel is the one bright spot between Athens and Delhi. Hoping our far left chums both here and in Israel don’t manage to destroy it.
I’ve honestly got no great axe to grind one way or another about Israel, but they were a big disappointment during covid. To be fair, so was most of the rest of the rich world.
If I want to retain the right to be able to cause offence with my views, I have to accept things that cause me offence.
I wish the Guardian hadn’t apologised and simply let people criticise their cartoon.
Totally agree
If you want to think of it as an apology, that’s fine.
The problem with celebrating this Guardian faux pas as a moral victory is that it means every time a bad guy organisation is portrayed with a be-tentacled logo, it will be seen as a de facto anti Semitic trope.
See James Bond Spectre, or Bob Moran’s Klaus Schwab cartoon, or Batman.
Indeed
Not a moral victory, just the woke left eating itself
“Anti Semitism” in a cartoon in the guardian.
Based on “tropes”
DS comments board starts to look like the DT on the Middle East.
Is there really any point to this one?
Let’s keep the boot on the Guardians neck, because make no mistake they never accept any apology. Especially about Birthday Cakes