The CST’s 2016 Antisemitic Discourse report included an example of antisemitism that year in an article by Telegraph assistant editor Jeremy Warner which was critical of Paul Singer, the well-known Jewish founder of Elliott Management Hedge Fund, for refusing to accept a deal on debt relief.
The original Telegraph article opened thusly:
“Latter day Shylocks at Elliott Management allowing, Argentina will soon have renewed access to international capital markets.”
Near the end of the article, Warner again evoked Shylock:
“Debt restructuring provides a fourth option, yet as both Argentina and Greece have discovered, the trouble with borrowed money is that adjusting its value takes difficult negotiation, frequently obstructed by aggressively litigious hedgies such as Mr Singer demanding their pound of flesh.”
The uses of “Shylocks” and “pound of flesh” were of course references to the antisemitic caricature from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.
Both Shylock references were eventually removed after complaints from CST. However, no apology, addendum or explanation of any kind was offered by Telegraph editors.
An opinion piece at the Telegraph six days ago, also by Warner, included an antizionist conspiratorial trope about Israel’s putative power over the United States. Warner’s piece (“Has Trump’s White House learnt nothing from the history of US interventionism?”, March 2) included the following:
What makes [US] intervention all the more surprising is that I imagine it’s opposed by a significant part of Trump’s Maga base. To see US foreign policy become the puppet of a tiny little country in the Middle East – Israel – is not what they voted for.
Let’s be clear: this is Guardian-level antisemitism.
It will, in fact, remind many readers of the notorious and widely condemned Guardian cartoon by Steve Bell in 2012, in response to (tepid) British support for Israel’s Operation Pillar of Defence, titled: “Tony Blair and William Hague’s role in Israel-Gaza clash”.
In addition to the CST criticising the cartoon as antisemitic, even the Guardian’s then Readers’ Editor, Chris Elliot, responded by noting that “during the 1930s and 1940s, Nazis and their supporters deployed propaganda devices about Jews”, including Jews “shown as a puppeteer”, as “in the cartoon portraying Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin as puppets of the Jews in a 1942 issue of the Nazi paper Fliegende Blätter”.
Elliot concluded by repudiating Bell for his depiction of Blair and Hague being controlled by the Israeli prime minister, writing that “While journalists and cartoonists…should not use the language – including the visual language – of antisemitic stereotypes.”
The Telegraph journalist’s language clearly mirror Bell’s antisemitic visual language.
Warner’s style of conspiracy theory was also published in cartoon form by the New York Times International edition in 2019, which depicted a dog with a Jewish star around its neck and the face of Netanyahu, leading a blind, yarmulke-wearing President Trump.
NY Times editors deleted the cartoon, and ran this apology, acknowledging that the cartoon was antisemitic.
It’s horribly dispiriting – particularly given the tsunami of antisemitism in Britain since the Oct. 7 massacre – that Telegraph editors not only allowed such a toxic trope to be published, but, we’ve learned, actually defended it following a complaint from one of our readers.
We’ll also be contacting editors, asking for a retraction of Warner’s ‘Israeli puppeteer’ language, and intend on appealing it to IPSO if they reject our complaint.
