Wednesday
Feb152006
Israeli anti-Semitic cartoon contest
Issandr El Amrani
This is pretty funny:
Amitai Sandy (29), graphic artist and publisher of Dimona Comix Publishing, from Tel-Aviv, Israel, has followed the unfolding of the “Muhammad cartoon-gate” events in amazement, until finally he came up with the right answer to all this insanity - and so he announced today the launch of a new anti-Semitic cartoons contest - this time drawn by Jews themselves!
“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Sandy “No Iranian will beat us on our home turf!”
The contest has been announced today on the www.boomka.org website, and the initiator accept submissions of cartoons, caricatures and short comic strips from people all over the world. The deadline is Sunday March 5, and the best works will be displayed in an Exhibition in Tel-Aviv, Israel.Incidentally, I liked the cover of this week's Tel Quel, the liberal French-language Moroccan news-magazine:
Sandy is now in the process of arranging sponsorships of large organizations, and promises lucrative prizes for the winners, including of course the famous Matzo-bread baked with the blood of Christian children.
The headline says "The (sensitive) image of the prophets" while the text in the blacked-out Mohammed says "Why Jesus and Moses but not Mohammed? And why violent demonstrations because of idiotic cartoons?"
Reader Comments (7)
the cairo international book fair is a fine piece of work. anti- jewish/christian publications readily available to the public at large and no one seems to care.
wake up arabs!
Don't know about the anti-Christian stuff, but I saw a fine new edition of Mein Kampf when I went there a few weeks ago.
As for no one seeming to care, it's regretably true in the Arab world, but a lot of others care: this issue regularly gets brought up in the States, even in Congress, such as when there was the whole fiasco over Fares Bela Gawad, the soap opera with a plotline involving the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
[...] This has got to be Issandr’s best find yet. Trevor ap Patnarthur on 2006/2/15 @ 14:13 in Splog, Les bourgeois ‹‹ Ban beards ‹‹ [...]
The French are fine ones to talk...sorry, but I never heard so much anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish bigotry in my life as when I lived in Paris, mainly from "centre-right" RPR types. And I say this as someone who is a big Francophile in every other way.
I agree about France, but this is all just an attempt at revisionist history. Check out this take on the http://www.online-information.org/education/holocaust/iran_holocaust_cartoons.html" rel="nofollow">Iran Holocaust Cartoons
Trashing other ethnic/racial/religious groups is a human failing. It gets exacerbated in times of stress. Americans - nice rich white Americans - can afford to be so tolerant because our lives are so comfortable.
A fellow North American resident recently pointed out that every white supremacist she met seems to be from a poor working class (white) background. This doesn't always follow -some people have emotional problems that fuel their bigotry - but I would say that Arab anti-Jewish sentiment is largely a product of the 20th century and its upheavals. As Karen Armstrong (I think) points out, the Arabs had to import the spurious "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" from Europe because they had no such document of their own vilifying Jews. It is very regrettable that folks are playing into this stuff.
A Jewish dialogue group member used a word in Yiddish for "trash-talking" - she said we Semites trash-talk each other, tear each other down. You ought to hear Lebanese sitting around, trashing other religions, nationalities and races. They are the worst. And I heard some pretty mean stuff about Copts when I lived in Egypt (whereas my American-born friend, an expat of longstanding, swore he heard Copts saying blasphemous, vindictive things about Muhammad, so perhaps it goes both ways)
All this nastiness arises from the mess the world is in.
I just stumbled upon this website from boomka.org. Leila, what you said is very interesting.
One thing in particular that makes it interesting is that Pew Reports had a survey about the attitudes toward Jews in different countries. It said that Lebanon and Jordan held the most negativity toward Jews (each with 100% I think). Now Lebanon is the newest democracy in the Middle East, and Jordan is a close ally of Israel and is among the most modern states in the area. Also, Beirut has always been a very Western city, so I would assume that maybe it is better off than some other cities. Does this mean that Arabs from Beirut are generally considered snobs?
There is a method to all this madness. Britain was the first European country to democratize and industrialize. Hell, the magna carta, one of the most important documents for subjecting rulers to the rule of law, came from England. And before WWII, the British evacuated thousands of Jewish children from areas around Germany.
Despite all of this, the British harbor some of the ugliest racism and anti-Semitism in Europe, but never act on it. This is because it is just consistent with their snobbery and feelings of superiority. This is why the Brownshirts didn't achieve much success, except for sympathy from that prince and his American wife. A bunch of those Jewish children were not treated so well once in Britain.
Could this be the same thing in Lebanon? I don't know much about Cairo, except for that Mubarrak is not very well liked. I mean, I want answers, dammit.