A DESPICABLE
CARTOON IN THE TIMES
The paper of record needs to reflect deeply on how it came to
publish anti-Semitic propaganda.
By Bret Stephens
As prejudices go, anti-Semitism can sometimes be hard to pin
down, but on Thursday the opinion pages of The New York Times international
edition provided
a textbook illustration of it.
Except that The Times wasn’t
explaining anti-Semitism. It was purveying it.
It did so in the form of a cartoon,
provided to the newspaper by a wire service and published directly above an
unrelated column by Tom Friedman, in which a guide dog with a prideful
countenance and the face of Benjamin Netanyahu leads a blind, fat Donald Trump
wearing dark glasses and a black yarmulke. Lest there be any doubt as to the
identity of the dog-man, it wears a collar from which hangs a Star of David.
Here was an image that, in another
age, might have been published in the pages of Der Stürmer. The Jew in the form
of a dog. The small but wily Jew leading the dumb and trusting American. The
hated Trump being Judaized with a skullcap. The nominal servant acting as the
true master. The cartoon checked so many anti-Semitic boxes that the only thing
missing was a dollar sign.
The image also had an obvious political message: Namely, that in
the current administration, the United States follows wherever Israel wants to
go. This is false — consider Israel’s horrified reaction to Trump’s
announcement last year that he intended to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria —
but it’s beside the point. There are legitimate ways to criticize Trump’s
approach to Israel, in pictures as well as words. But there was nothing
legitimate about this cartoon.
For some Times readers — or, as
often, former readers — the answer is clear: The Times has a longstanding
Jewish problem, dating back to World War II, when it mostly buried news about
the Holocaust, and continuing into the present day in the form of intensely
adversarial coverage of Israel. The criticism goes double when it comes to the
editorial pages, whose overall approach toward the Jewish state tends to range,
with some notable exceptions, from tut-tutting disappointment to thunderous
condemnation.
For these readers, the cartoon would
have come like the slip of the tongue that reveals the deeper institutional
prejudice. What was long suspected is, at last, revealed.
The
real story is a bit different, though not in ways that acquit The Times. The
cartoon appeared in the print version of the international edition, which has a
limited overseas circulation, a much smaller staff, and far less oversight than
the regular edition. Incredibly, the cartoon itself was selected and seen by
just one midlevel editor right before the paper went to press.
An initial editor’s note acknowledged that the cartoon “included
anti-Semitic tropes,” “was offensive,” and that “it was an error of judgment to
publish it.” On Sunday, The Times issued an additional statement saying it was “deeply sorry”
for the cartoon and that “significant changes” would be made in terms of
internal processes and training.
In other words, the paper’s position is that it is guilty of a
serious screw-up but not a cardinal sin. Not quite.
The
problem with the cartoon isn’t that its publication was a willful act of
anti-Semitism. It wasn’t. The problem is that its publication was an
astonishing act of ignorance of anti-Semitism — and that, at a publication that
is otherwise hyper-alert to nearly every conceivable expression of prejudice,
from mansplaining to racial microaggressions to transphobia.
Imagine,
for instance, if the dog on a leash in the image hadn’t been the Israeli prime
minister but instead a prominent woman such as Nancy Pelosi, a person of color
such as John Lewis, or a Muslim such as Ilhan Omar. Would that have gone
unnoticed by either the wire service that provides the Times with images or the
editor who, even if he were working in haste, selected it?
The
question answers itself. And it raises a follow-on: How have even the most
blatant expressions of anti-Semitism become almost undetectable to editors who
think it’s part of their job to stand up to bigotry?
The reason is the almost torrential criticism of Israel and the
mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, including by this paper, which has become so common
that people have been desensitized to its inherent bigotry. So long as
anti-Semitic arguments or images are framed, however speciously, as commentary
about Israel, there will be a tendency to view them as a form of political
opinion, not ethnic prejudice. But as I noted in a Sunday Review essay in February, anti-Zionism is all
but indistinguishable from anti-Semitism in practice and often in intent,
however much progressives try to deny this.
Add to
the mix the media’s routine demonization of Netanyahu, and it is easy to see
how the cartoon came to be drawn and published: Already depicted as a
malevolent Jewish leader, it’s just a short step to depict him as a malevolent
Jew.
I’m
writing this column conscious of the fact that it is unusually critical of the
newspaper in which it appears, and it is a credit to the paper that it is
publishing it. I have now been with The Times for two years and I’m certain
that the charge that the institution is in any way anti-Semitic is a calumny.
But the
publication of the cartoon isn’t just an “error of judgment,” either. The paper
owes the Israeli prime minister an apology. It owes itself some serious
reflection as to how it came to publish that cartoon — and how its publication
came, to many longtime readers, as a shock but not a surprise.