In 2019, the New York Times News Service and Syndicate published a cartoon depicting a dog with a Jewish star around its neck and the face of a Jewish leader, leading a blind, yarmulke-wearing U.S. President – an image promoting the lethal narrative about ‘Jewish power’ that would be standard fare for Nazi and Soviet antisemitic propagandists, and their modern descendants. After a wave of criticism from across the political spectrum, the Times removed the cartoon and posted an apology on X, admitting that the imagery was antisemitic.
Such toxic calumnies about Jewish and/or Israeli control of non-Jewish foreign leaders take many visual and rhetorical forms, and are expressed with different levels of explicitness. A variation of the Times’ evocation of the ‘tail wagging the dog‘ trope, which refers to something powerful being controlled by something less so – and which, tellingly, has been peddled by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Iran’s PressTV – was published on the Sky News website on Oct. 2 by their international affairs editor Dominic Waghorn:
It’s sad that we evidently need to remind Mr. Waghorn that Israel is a sovereign state, and, as such, Jerusalem – and not Washington – rightfully decides which policies to pursue and which ones not to. The inability of the US president to convince Israeli leaders to stand down and not take military action to clear Hezbollah from its illegal presence in southern Lebanon, after a year of near daily rocket attacks forced 60,000 of its civilians to flee, may be reasonably seen as an American diplomatic failure. But, that’s all it is.
It certainly is not evidence that the American superpower is taking orders from their Israeli masters.
Though antisemitism has many factors, in its modern form, the persistence of racist tropes about Jews and Israel is often correlated with such breathtaking ignorance on the forces which influence political decisions in London, Washington and Jerusalem.
