Israeli Newspaper Prints Racist Obama Cartoon

Leon Hadar has pointed me to a racist cartoon of Barack Obama that appeared in Ma'ariv, an Israeli newspaper, showing Obama painting the White House black. Hadar writes that the cartoon is a further effort by Israelis to question whether "Obama is good for the Jews." I think it's worse. The black paint is a kind of "schwarzer" joke, to use the Yiddish word for blacks that I grew up hearing. It isn't funny. In its way it is reminiscent of the racist cartoon of Condoleezza Rice that appeared in the Palestinian press after she declared the Lebanon war to be the "birth pangs" of a democratic Middle East. The cartoon showed Rice pregnant and giving birth to a monkey. Ugly. Palestinians and Israelis are the Shi'ites and Sunnis of their particular sectarian corner of the Middle East. They hate each other and are diminished by the hatred, and think in racial terms. Not for us; Obama is helping the U.S. get way past that...

Comments

[Larry]

Look at this typical lying Arab and her family and the moron reporter that reports the story: http://www.yahoo.com/s/813876
This say it all about the Palestinians and the press.

[Montag]

What, no watermelon? It's sad because Obama is the best hope Israel has of stopping short of becoming another Belgium. Hillary called Palestinian eductation "child abuse." I'm sure many Israelis would agree, since a strong back is a terrible thing to waste.

[Ed.]

How quickly the US public perception of Israel is changing from that of a just refuge for a besieged and beleaguered people to that of a nearly fascist state seething with racism.

That Zionists were able to maintain the myth of Israel for as long as they did was certainly an incredible feat. But now the bad word on Israel is out, and many Zionists are no longer bothering to wear their masks. I predict they are going to have an increasingly difficult go of it in a globalized, multi-cultural world. Their entire belief system is an anachronism.

Phil wrote: "Palestinians and Israelis are the Shi'ites and Sunnis of their particular sectarian corner of the Middle East. They hate each other and are diminished by the hatred, and think in racial terms. Not for us; Obama is helping the U.S. get way past that..."

I detect a subtext of paleocon/libertarian non-interventionist thinking in that paragraph, which I am happy to see coming from Phil, who in the past I believe regarded himself more or less as a left-liberal.

Look, people with the tribal mentality have been beating the hell out of each other for millennium, and will continue to do so long after the American empire has gone bankrupt from trying to police the world. True, America is past its racialism (more or less) but could easily be dragged backward by the Zionists unless they are stripped of their power.

What was the Iraq war but a Zionist-engineered program to entangle America into the tribal battle taking place between Jews and Muslims in the Mideast, and foster an us-vs-the Islamofascists tribal mentality among Americans? And it almost worked. The Zionists tried it once, and they will most certainly try it again. In McCain, they may very well have found another willing partner to take the place of Bush.

[sim]

Aren't you exaggerating the cartoon a touch by comparing it with that absurd monkey one? OK, it's the White House, he's Black, so it's painted black. It's stupid alright, but you could find the same thing in Mexican or Argentinian papers. But then those aren't Jewish nations, so what's the point of criticizing them.

[Jim Haygood]

The clumsy cartoon is reminiscent of similar themes I've seen in Asia -- homogeneous societies whose lack of practice in dealing with racial differences sometimes proves embarrassing.

Why does this cartoon exist in the first place? Because as the recipient of $3 billion a year in U.S. aid (around 2% of its GDP, if I recall), Israel naturally obsesses over whether the next president will keep the unmerited cornucopia flowing.

Rather than lecturing Israel over its insensitive political cartoons, far better to nip the issue in the bid by CUTTING OFF THE MONEY. Then watch Israeli commentary on U.S. elections dwindle to the disinterested level found in NORMAL countries.

[Zaid Khalil]

Phil,

You are really off with the following statement: "Palestinians and Israelis are the Shi'ites and Sunnis of their particular sectarian corner of the Middle East. They hate each other and are diminished by the hatred, and think in racial terms."

This may be true of Ashklenazim, but its clearly not true of Ethiopian Jews and even Mizrahim. With regards to the Palestinians its even more complex, because perceptions of racial features vary practically from city to city. For instance, the 'whiter' Palestinian population in Jerusalem is fairly racist whereas population in the refugee camps in Nablus is not at all. But in no case is the racism towards people of darker skinned anything like what exists in the US. I also want to stress that there is a reason i say people of darker skin, rather than black. Its because that dichotomy of black vs white is a very European and more specifically American construct. Its not uncommon for people in the global South, specifically those in the elite to adopt this colonialist mindset and the prejudices that come along with it. But to a large degree the population in the global South does not identify with it. Unlike the population in colonial centers of power where racism towards people of color is a defining feature. For instance, when fair-skinned Palestinians and Israelis emigrate to the United States they inherit white skin privilege and all the racism that come with it. In the case of Palestinians they may be subjected to other forms of discrimination, but they are most certainly not experiencing the same type of racism as blacks in America.

I could go on, but in summary, your statement is just incorrect. It also points to the fact that by and large you have had extremely limited interaction with both Israeli and Palestinian society. In both cases the media is going to represent the voice of the elite, which in Israel would be the Ashkenazim and among Palestinians it would be the Ramallah/Jerusalem elite.

[Byrne]

Can you explain the joke? I understand the black guy + black paint connection, but it just looks like a dumb pun. If the Brits ever elect another cheery, grinning loon, I would expect some pun about Downing Street and Uppers; I think this is on the same level.

[Ed.]

Zaid Khalil wrote:

"Its not uncommon for people in the global South, specifically those in the elite to adopt this colonialist mindset and the prejudices that come along with it. But to a large degree the population in the global South does not identify with it."

Nonsense. This is left-wing propaganda designed to lay all of the world's problems at the feet of whites, which is racist in and of itself. Racism exists tenaciously all over the globe, and only the West has developed advanced civil rights guarantees to effectively deal with it. Colonialism was and is nothing more than tribal conquering and pillaging from Alexander the Great through the British Empire. Was Alexander a racist or a conqueror? Sure he thought his people were superior, because in relatively small numbers they were able to defeat much larger armies, as were the British, Spanish and other European empires. In today's left-wing vernacular, the ability to conquer people of a different skin pigmentation is akin to racism.

Today, the only way one can lay racism as a motive on the West is by associating it with Israel, which has institutionally racist Jim Crow and apartheid laws. Was venerating Judeo-racism and the Zionist model a motive for those who arranged the invasion of Iraq? No question, which is why they are now rightfully being put through the ringer by non-racist whites in the West.

America should not be sending money and military support to Israel or any other country with a poor human rights record until they write constitutions that guarantees civil rights and freedom of speech for all their citizens.

Americans need to take responsibility for keeping the US government Leviathan and its fascist hangers-on away from abusing and exploiting the developing world, but non-Western peoples need to take responsibility for bringing their own civil rights and human rights standards up to Western levels and stop using white people and “colonialism” as an all-purpose scapegoat for their own tribalism and civil rights sloth. Until they do, opportunists will use their primitive human rights standards as an excuse for invasion and occupation.

[Defenestrator]

You think it has to do with Israel being Jewish? You don't think it has anything to do with Israel holding itself out as a democracy and promoting freedom?

Would the ADL and AIPAC let a cartoon of a big-nosed, yamulke-wearing, star-of-david-on-the-lapel-suited skinny man with a boot on the head of Uncle Sam, with a caption saying "No, we have no power in the United States" not be considered anti-Semitic?

This cartoon is obviously racist and of all the people on the planet, Israelis who claim the Holocaust as reason for everything, should know better.

[Leon Hadar]

I can imagine MEMRI ciruclating a caricature from an Egyprian newspaer in which presidential candidate, say, Joe Lieberman is drawing stars of david on the white house -- and describing it as anti-Semitic. Or imagine this caricature appearing in a major newspaper in the south. I don't think that Israelis are racists by nature. But worries that Obama is "anti-Israeli" end-up reawakening old streotypes. My guess is that if the "suspect" was Huckabee, the caricature would show him drawing crosses on the White House.

[WayDownSouth]

As someone from Africa's southern tip, I find myself adopting an increasingly dim view of Israel yet not long ago was quite sympathetic.

It's sad, Israelis have learnt nothing but hatred and brutality from the Holocaust experience.

As for the Arabs, they frighten me!

[bbk]

As a Shia Muslim, I'd like to say that the divide between Shia and Sunnis have been exaggerated in the Western media. In Saudi Arabia, there is a Shia minority who live in relative peace. In Iran there is a Sunnis minority who live in relative peace with the Shia. In Iraq, there was a time after the US invasion when Shia and Sunnis banded together in Najaf to fight off the invasion. The gulf between Sunnis and Shia widened due to the prolonged US presence. Before the US invasion, Shia opposition was to Saddam, not to the Sunnis. For the majority of Iraq's history, Sunnis and Shia lived in peace. Indeed, Sunnis and Shia have had fewer historical problems than Catholics and Protestants.

[Zaid Khalil]

Ed,

There has been nothing in history of conquerors similar to the systematic genocide performed by the Spaniards, American Settlers or Nazi Germany. Furthermore there is nothing in history comparable both in terms of volume of slaves or the institutionalized brutality of the Triangular Trade. The closest ancient comparison to both is the destruction and enslavement of Carthage by the Romans.
As for your statement, "Racism exists tenaciously all over the globe, and only the West has developed advanced civil rights guarantees to effectively deal with it", i think you are smoking crack dude. First its not historically correct, the most advanced state with regards to civil rights in the 19th century was without question, Haiti. Haiti set the standard, until it was ravaged by the US a century later.
Second, there is a debate as to whether civil rights is in fact a capitulation from people of color movements to the white power structure in America. After all civil rights is just code for human rights, except that civil rights is subjected to the whims of Uncle Sam, whereas human rights is by definition global. Even the successes of the civil rights struggle in the US certainly owes more to the struggle of people of color with guns than it does to the 'enlightened nature of white folk'. By kicking the European states out of their respective homelands the national liberation movements in the Global South served a warning to the white man, that liberation was achievable perhaps even inside the colonial states themselves. That scared the white power structure into adopting these civil rights measures.

Finally, lets take a close look at the human rights standards of the West, particularly the US. In the past 15 years the US is responsible for the deaths of nearly 2 million people, has created 4 million refugees, and that is just in Iraq. The US did this with the direct or tacit support of several Western states. When you extend this to Afghanistan, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, Vietnam, it becomes clear that the US is the worlds worst human rights violator- nice standards.

[Ed.]

Zaid wrote:

"There has been nothing in history of conquerors similar to the systematic genocide performed by the Spaniards, American Settlers or Nazi Germany."

False. Communist conquerors murdered hundreds of millions. Stalin, the Jewish Bolsheviks, Mao and Pol Pot conquered huge swaths of territory in Asia and Eastern Europe and systematically exterminated any and all who opposed them, and millions more who never even lifted a finger in opposition: farmers, peasants, the over educated, the under educated...everyone. And they often killed for no reason whatsoever other than that they could.
http://mensnewsdaily.com/archive/m-n/m-n-misc/naegele080905.htm

"the most advanced state with regards to civil rights in the 19th century was without question, Haiti. Haiti set the standard, until it was ravaged by the US a century later."

Haiti had a long history of colonization by the Spanish and French and was filled with mixed-race people prior to any American involvement, and was plagued by civil wars. Along with former black slaves, those who contributed to the establishment of civil rights were the mixed raced descendents of Spanish and French colonizers. There was widespread discrimination against the remaining whites in the 19th century.

""Second, there is a debate as to whether civil rights is in fact a capitulation from people of color movements to the white power structure in America..."

This is insane racist-Marxist rhetoric.

Racism does exist all over the globe, and in fact black on black and brown on black slavery still exists in Africa and variations of brown on brown or brown on black indentured servitude exist in many areas throughout what you call the "Global South."

"it becomes clear that the US is the worlds worst human rights violator.

In the modern era, the Communists of all races easily have the most blood on their hands. I won't defend the record of the Clinton/Bush/Cheney regimes, (I tenaciously opposed Iraq sanctions and in particular the Iraq war far before it became fashionable to do so) but I will point out that the variation of Neoconservatism that they all practice is on a continuum from globalist-materialist Marxism. Like Marxists (such as yourself?) they simply want to use government to extract as many material resources as possible from the producing sector and redistribute it primarily to themselves and their fascist partners, and to punish and murder their enemies, which is why I reject the two-party system and am a libertarian populist.

Those with a globalist materialist/Marxist perspective or with a racialist “people of color vs. whites” world view are primitive and dangerous…and far too commonplace.

[Timothy Bledsoe]

Who cares? The fat and stupid Americans have spoken. They are too stupid to vote for Ron Paul and now they will choose among Coke and Pepsi. I hope they all lose their social security, pension funds, and houses.

[Zaid Khalil]

What frustrates me is that you are imposing an ideological construct on me that I dont really share. I am much closer to an anarchist than to a Marxist, but I dont want to deny it because its pretty clear that you are red-baiting and its despicable. I am not going to jump to the defense of either Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, whom were much closer to kings than they were leaders of social movements. But I will say this, if you take a close look at the horrors of capitalism on a place like India and apply the same standards to Western capitalist states that you do to psuedo-socialist states, the overall mortality is equivalent if not far worse.

To address each of your mind-numbing statements, like "there was widespread discrimination against the remaining whites [in Haiti] in the 19th century", is clearly an exercise in futility. But more importantly, my original comment was on a place (Israel/Palestine) that I know quite intimately. Its a place I have lived and directly experienced the aspects of the culture and society. I also happen to come from a village in the West Bank where a large percentage of the residents also live in the US. Its pretty evident the differences in perceptions of race between Palestinians who live in the US and for instance Palestinians that live in Askar refugee camp, where many of the residents are dark skinned Palestinians. Now if you have an explanation for this distinction I am really curious what it is. Because its real, its not subjective, its a fact. Palestinians in Askar refugee camp would NEVER when speaking amongst themselves refer to their neighbors as abeed, which literally means 'slaves'. It would never even cross their mind. But you will routinely hear Palestinians who come to the states when talking amongst themselves will refer to their African Americans neighbors as such. You explain that to me, Ed?

[Richard Silverstein]

Phil: You've helped me coin what may be a new term: Obamaphobia. It's sweeping the nation & I guess parts of the world. The cartoon is simply shocking in its baseness. I'm frankly appaled that such a thing could be published in a mass circulation Israeli daily. It tells you a lot about what you'll find in Maariv.

[Ed.]

Zaid wrote: "Palestinians in Askar refugee camp would NEVER when speaking amongst themselves refer to their neighbors as abeed, which literally means 'slaves'. It would never even cross their mind. But you will routinely hear Palestinians who come to the states when talking amongst themselves will refer to their African Americans neighbors as such. You explain that to me, Ed?"

When people are living in a situation of scarcity and attempting to scratch survival out of the dirt, they're all in the same boat, irregardless of race, and there is a common unity in that.

When people move into situations of prosperity, and prosper themselves, and start climbing the latter of success, they have the time and inclination to start comparing and contrasting themselves to their neighbors and other races and try to make a determination about why their way of life (cultural/racial/religious/political) is better than those around them.

It's normal, its human, and its as old as time.

The Palestinians who have come to America and adopted racist attitudes haven't caught some white disease of racism; they're merely engaging in the age old game of denigrating the neighbors to psychologically validate themselves.

Obama is currently having a difficult time attracting Hispanic-immigrant votes because many of them look down their noses at blacks, a tendency that came with them from their native lands.

Everyone wants to feel superior to someone, irregardless of their race. It's pathetic, but its human.

The answer isn't to reduce the world to poverty so everyone is too busy scratching out a living to be a bigot, as Leftists want to do. That’s the worst form of bigotry: misanthropy.

Is criticism of misanthropy "Red-baiting"? If so, so what? Don't hate-filled totalitarian bigots deserve to be verbally tormented?

[Charles Keating]

Coke and Pepsi--I like that, gonna steal it. I agree that Ron Paul
gives it too Americans straight and they can't handle it--or, rather they look only at what they think benefits their situation and not at all at the long term for the population as a whole.

[Zaid Khalil]

Ed you wrote, "When people are living in a situation of scarcity and attempting to scratch survival out of the dirt, they're all in the same boat, irregardless of race, and there is a common unity in that."

Then you go on to say, "Obama is currently having a difficult time attracting Hispanic-immigrant votes because many of them look down their noses at blacks, a tendency that came with them from their native lands."

Clearly many hispanic immigrants are coming from living in a situation of scarcity and attempting to scratch survival out of the dirt, yet you maintain that their racist attitudes came with them from their native lands. This is a contradiction to what you are saying. I'm not saying its not true, but what I am pointing to is a complexity that you for some reason reject.

[Ed.]

I maintain that racism/classism/casteism are innate characteristics of human civilization that come to the surface whenever people are prosperous enough to have the time to ponder their race/class/caste in relationship to others. When making such comparisons, the human mind will inevitably come up with reasons as to why its own race/class/caste is in some way superior to another.

Now institutionalizing those bias', as is still done in parts of the developing world (India for example) is another question altogether.

[ALLAIN JULES C@MMUNICATION]

What a pity !

Israël don't want peace !

[Steve]

Umm.. so.. Barack is a half-black guy whose campaign is all about "change" and what not.. so what's the problem with claiming that he wants to add some "change" to the White House, metaphorically through a good paint job?

The toon's only racist insofar as it notices that Barack's a self-identified black guy. I guess the secret's out now.

Damn those pesky Jews!

Let's all start calling them NAZIs and terrorists because they noticed that a black guy was black.

After all, anyone who mentions that black people are black must be a racist. Yeah. That's it.

But of course, noticing that Jews are Jewish and calling them fascist tribal hate-mongers -- every last one -- is in no way anti-semitic.

That's some grand logic, kids.