on 04-08-2014 01:58 PM
The Sydney Morning Herald has retracted and apologised for publishing a cartoon described by Jewish leaders as racist and admitted it was a serious error of judgment to publish it.
The cartoon, which accompanied a column by Mike Carlton last month, has been removed from the paper’s websites.
Jewish community leaders and many others had written to the Herald to complain about the cartoon and the Australian Jewish News had called for its readers to boycott Fairfax Media’s publications.
Israelis, mostly residents of the southern Israeli city of Sderot, stand on a hill overlooking the Gaza Strip, on July 20, to watch the fighting between the Israeli army and Palestinian militants. Cartoonist Glen Le Lievre says images like this were used as the source for the drawing. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty
on 04-08-2014 03:46 PM
I guess you cant blame people for wanting to have a look, it's curiosity getting the better of people. If something like that was happening near my home and I could see it I dont think I'd just close all the curtains and ignore what was going on, I'd be curious and probably have to check it out for myself...
on 04-08-2014 03:52 PM
@secondhand-wonderland wrote:I guess you cant blame people for wanting to have a look, it's curiosity getting the better of people. If something like that was happening near my home and I could see it I dont think I'd just close all the curtains and ignore what was going on, I'd be curious and probably have to check it out for myself...
That's ok, just make sure no cartoonist makes a sketch about you being a spectator.
on 04-08-2014 03:59 PM
Good point. I agree though that the cartoon was in bad taste, there is no room for satire in regards to war imo.
Another point to consider here also is those Israelis obviously feel safe and secure and have the freedom to be able sit upon the sidelines and watch.
on 04-08-2014 07:07 PM
Carlton is a disgraceful human being.
on 04-08-2014 07:30 PM
@lightningdance wrote:Carlton is a disgraceful human being.
I wouldn't have pegged him as an anti-Semite, that's for sure.
on 04-08-2014 07:39 PM
Is he an anti-semite or just writing an opinion piece, borrowing some opinion from a Jew?
It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory. But this is a new and brutal Israel dominated by the hardline, right-wing Likud Party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition. As one observer puts it: "All the seeds of the incitement of the past few years, all the nationalistic, racist legislation and the incendiary propaganda, the scare campaigns and the subversion of democracy by the right-wing camp – all these have borne fruit, and that fruit is rank and rotten. The nationalist right has now sunk to a new level, with almost the whole country following in its wake. The word 'fascism', which I try to use as little as possible, finally has its deserved place in the Israeli political discourse."
Fascism in Israel? At this point the Australian Likudniks, as Bob Carr calls them, will be lunging for their keyboards. There will be the customary torrent of abusive emails calling me a Nazi, an anti-Semite, a Holocaust denier, an ignoramus. As usual they will demand my resignation, my sacking. As it's been before, some of this will be pornographic or threatening violence.
In fact, that paragraph within the quotation marks was written by an Israeli. Gideon Levy is a columnist and editorial board member of the daily newspaper Ha’aretz. Born in Tel Aviv to parents who fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, he despairs of what his country has become and the catastrophe its armed forces are visiting upon Gaza. After a recent column calling on Israeli pilots to stop bombing and rocketing civilians, his life was threatened and he now has a bodyguard day and night. It has come to that. In the worst insult of all, Levy is branded "a self-hating Jew".
on 04-08-2014 07:50 PM
Well the Jews in Sydney took it personal enough to call his piece anti-semite.
on 04-08-2014 08:40 PM
I think some jews took affence and others agree with his point of view.
As the cartoonist said, he based on cartoon on photos of people treating the Israeli bombardment of Gaza as a spectator show.
on 04-08-2014 08:41 PM
offence not affence