A leading Norwegian daily published a caricature depicting what some
construed to be Jews torturing a baby during a circumcision.
The caricature that
appeared Tuesday in the Dagbladet newspaper –- the country’s third
largest in terms of circulation — showed police officers looking on as a
bearded man wearing a black hat and black coat sticks a three-tooth
pitchfork into the head of a blood-soaked baby while holding a book.
Another unseen person cuts off the baby’s foot with a bolt cutter as a
woman in a long-sleeve shirt and a hat shows the officers another
blood-spattered book and tells them: “Abuse? No, this tradition is
central to our belief.” The police officers apologize “for
interrupting.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Copper,
said the cartoon was “so virulently anti-Semitic it would make Hitler
and Himmler weep tears of joy.”
Manfred Gerstenfeld, a scholar of anti-Semitism and former chairman
of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said the caricature “cannot
be viewed separately from centuries of libels in Christian circles that
try to establish a link between the ritual abuse of blood and the Jewish
faith.”
But in an email sent to MIFF, a Norwegian pro-Israel organization,
Dagbladet cartoon artist Tomas Drefvelin said he did not mean to draw
Jews in his caricature, which he meant “not as criticism of either a
specific religion or a nation [but] as a general criticism of
religions,” Drefvelin wrote.
He added: “I gave the people in the picture hats, and the man beard,
because this gives them a more religious character … Jew-hatred is
reprehensible. I would never draw to create hatred of a people, or
against individuals.”
Ervin Kohn, the president of Norway’s Jewish community, told JTA that
in Norway, “it is not uncommon to compare brit milah with cutting off
limbs and calling it mutilation. This is a form of lying, propaganda.”
The European Jewish Congress said in a statement Wednesday afternoon
that it is considering taking legal action over the cartoon.
“This cartoon has crossed all lines of decency and is dripping with
hate and anti-Semitism,” Dr. Moshe Kantor, president of the European
Jewish Congress, said. “We are now studying the possibility that this
legally constitutes incitement and even a hate-crime and will therefore
require legal action.”
“This is a violent cartoon which is meant to inspire hate and
contempt against one particular people. This type of hate, reminiscent
of Nazi propaganda, cannot be left unanswered, and it is exactly this
type of incitement which is contributing to a very troubling period for
minorities in Europe at this time, especially with the rise of the
far-Right,” Kantor said.
http://www.jta.org/2013/05/29/news-opinion/world/norwegian-daily-prints-cartoon-of-gory-circumcision-child-abuse
Wednesday 29 May 2013
Norwegian daily prints cartoon of gory circumcision, child abuse
Posted @ 17:33
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