The power of the Jewish lobby is, as shown by the increasing number of mainstream journalists to write openly on the topic, not absolute in its control of the media—but it is still strong enough to force Britain’s “newspaper of record,” the Sunday Times, to retract a simple cartoon just because it dared to portray the truth about the suppression of Palestinians by Israel.
The cartoon, reproduced alongside, showed Israeli Prime Minister Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu building the “Separation Barrier” wall with Palestinian blood and bodies.
The cartoon, drawn by Gerald Scarfe, includes a caption stating: “Israeli elections – will cementing peace continue?”
The Sunday Times was forced to issue a statement in which it said it “abhors anti-Semitism and racism of any type and we would never set out to offend the Jewish people — or indeed any other ethnic or religious group. The publication of last week’s cartoon was a very serious mistake.”
The Sunday Times’ owner Rupert Murdoch apologized for the cartoon the day after it was published. “Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times,” he wrote on his Twitter account. “Nevertheless, we owe major apology for grotesque, offensive cartoon.”
The cartoon, however, depicts reality, not anti-Semitism, which is a meaningless word.
American news reports repeatedly describe Israeli military attacks against the Palestinian population as “retaliation.” However, when one looks into the chronology of death in this conflict, the reality turns out to be quite different.
According to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, at least 5,181 Palestinians were killed as a result of direct Israeli military action between October 2000 and October 2008.
The numbers also do not include the sizable number of Palestinians who died as a result of inability to reach medical care due to Israeli road closures, curfews, the Israeli closure of border crossing from Gaza.
According to the book “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine” by Itan Pappe, (Oxford,2003), approximately 1.5 million Palestinian civilians have died since 1948,including the victims of the ethnic cleansing campaigns in the west in 1948-50 and in the east since 1967.
So the Sunday Times cartoon was simply reflecting fact, not “anti-Semitism.” But it seems that simply telling the truth is too much for the Jewish Supremacists.
