Political cartoons, by their very nature, have to express ideas in an easy-to-understand way. Therefore they’re often more accessible and impactful than op-eds on the same subject. They’re also an efficient way to transmit hate and misinformation about Jews and Israel. Whereas, traditionally, the core motif of anti-Semitic cartoons is that Jews represent absolute evil, anti-Zionist cartoons – even those which don’t convey explicitly antisemitic tropes – evoke the idea that the actions of the Jewish state aren’t just wrong-headed, but represent a conscious decision to commit evil.
A cartoon in the Guardian on June 12, by the cartoonist Andrew Marlton (known as ‘First Dog on the Moon’), titled “Gaza: things we cannot unsee“, continues in the tradition of Israelophobic and Judeophobic cartoonists at the outlet such as Steve Bell and Martin Rowson, and serves as another illustration of how malicious lies about Israel get spread by Western media outlets.
Here’s the first frame:
The ‘mass grave’ lie relates to a story which originated in the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera, which published reports about claims made by “Palestinian civil defence crews” – i.e. Hamas – concerning the ‘discovery’ of mass graves, putatively dug by Israel in a rush to hide evidence of a ‘massacre’ they committed outside Nasser and Shifa hospitals in Gaza. The cable ties reference in the frame refers to claims that some of the dead bodies had their hands bound with such ties.
As we noted previously on these pages, this Hamas propaganda was quickly exposed as disinformation.
Here’s the second frame:
The frame refers to an IDF assault late last month on high-ranking Hamas commanders in Rafah, which, as we detailed in response to another outlet’s grossly misleading take on the operation, did NOT – as Hamas claimed – strike the tents where Palestinian refugees from the war were sheltering.
The fire, which tragically resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians, was most likely caused by a secondary explosion ignited by ammunition that Hamas stored in the tent area – which means that the terror group is responsible for the civilian deaths. Further, as was widely reported at the time, the bomb used by Israel’s military was 37 pounds (the smallest ordinance in the IAF’s arsenal for that type of attack), not, as the cartoon claims, “2000 pounds”.
As the Jewish Chronicle’s Stephen Pollard aptly observed about media coverage of Israel following the Oct. 7th massacre, “Psychological treatises will one day be written on the moral degeneracy which has taken hold of so many Western minds, which credulously take the word of Hamas, a terrorist organization, as true whilst regarding anything said by Israel, a democratic nation state, as by definition false”.
Surely the time is now for police action against the blatant support provided by The Grauniad for Hamas, the proscribed terrorist organisation – or are Muslim votes too
valuable at election time ?