Telegraph cartoon evokes antisemitic motif

Under the leadership of Zack Polanski, who’s Jewish, the Green Party has become the most antisemitic party in Britain. As Jake Wallis Simons aptly put it, “In the fertile ground of social media insanity and community balkanisation, the Greens have become a seedbed for the political ambitions of every jihadist, Islamist and progressive fanatic in Britain”.

For instance, two Greens candidates in London were arrested earlier in the month on suspicion of stirring up racial hatred online. One of them, Sabine Mairey, wrote in a post, “Ramming a synagogue isn’t antisemitism, it’s revenge.” The other, Saiqa Ali, shared an image of an armed man wearing a Hamas headband with the slogan, “Resistance is freedom.”

Greens candidate Raja Ateeq wrote the following on social media: “250k Jewish cockroaches who were relocated are refusing to go back to Gaza… 400k Jewish [sic] have flown out of Israel… couple more Islamic countries to join and in Sha Allah, Palestine will be free”.

Another Greens candidate, Tina Ion, posting under the social media handle “thereal.anne.frank”, wrote that “every single Zionist” should be killed, and, in another post, referred to “Jewish Nazis” as “money grubbing thieves” who “have built mountains of money over centuries.”

Further, Polanski himself has promoted conspiratorial antisemitic social media posts, including liking several posts on Bluesky claiming that the prime minister was receiving money from “Zionist philanthropists” and questioning how much Israel was allegedly paying him.

That being said, a Telegraph cartoon’s depiction of Polanski is, nonetheless, extremely troubling.

The following was published at the outlet on May 5 by their chief political cartoonist, Patrick Blower, two days before both the Greens, led by Polanski, and the Reform Party, led by Nigel Farage, made significant gains in the local elections.

The CST’s Dave Rich correctly observed that some of the people most vigorously pushing the allegation that this Telegraph cartoon is antisemitic “are also the people most keenly gaslighting the Jewish community over antisemitism in other ways, and especially in relation to the Green Party”.

It would be forgivable, he added, “to think that the alleged antisemitism…is being weaponised – as the saying goes – to defend Polanski after his awful recent comments about antisemitism and about the police response to the Golders Green attack”. This “might explain”, he continued, “why some in the Jewish community are reluctant to add their voices to this particular complaint.”

However, Rich concluded that though he doubts the cartoonist intended the image to look antisemitic, “that is not the end of the issue”. Cartoonists, he argued, “have a responsibility to be careful how they draw people, especially if those people are from minorities for whom there is a tradition of spiteful physical caricature”.

We agree, and believe that the Telegraph’s depiction of Polanski invariably evokes an antisemitic motif.  In addition to his gratuitously elongated nose and kippah-shaped hair, his facial expression conveys an ugly, sinister, scheming quality that evinces the “Happy Merchant” caricature, (aka, Jew Face), which, ADL notes, is “ubiquitous in modern online…antisemitic iconography”.

Like Rich, we don’t believe at all that Telegraph editors or Blower are antisemitic.

However, particularly amidst the enormous surge in antisemitism since Oct. 7, it seems reasonable to expect all British outlets to avoid publishing cartoons about Jewish public figures which convey the visual language of antisemitic stereotypes – regardless of the political views of the Jew being depicted.

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