Oliphant cartoon blasted as anti-Semitic

Oliphant cartoon

Pat Oliphant, one of the most widely syndicated political cartoonists in the world, is in a bit of hot water over this drawing. The cartoon, which ran in papers across the country yesterday, depicts a headless soldier goose-stepping behind a fanged Star of David, marching the tiny, defenseless Gaza off a cliff.

The ADL and Simon Wiesenthal Center are leading the opposition:

“Pat Oliphant’s outlandish and offensive use of the Star of David in combination with Nazi-like imagery is hideously anti-Semitic,” said Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director. “It employs Nazi imagery by portraying Israel as a jack-booted, goose-stepping headless apparition. The implication is of an Israeli policy without a head or a heart. “

“The imagery in this cartoon mimics the venomous anti-Semitic propaganda of the Nazi and Soviet eras,” the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in its statement. “It is cartoons like this that inspired millions of people to hate in the 1930s and help set the stage for the Nazi genocide.”

Indeed, the cartoon immediately evoked for me images of Nazi propaganda that portrayed duplicitous Jews shoving Germans into the ocean. (I looked but couldn’t find any previous posts about this; here, though, is an archival treasure trove.)