As I’ve mentioned here repeatedly, anti-Semitic cartoons are a staple of the media, both state and private, in the Middle East, and especially Palestine, although Israel does not purvey such hatred in its media. This disparity is, of course, ignored by the Control-Left, who will excuse the Palestinians anything, including homophobia, misogyny, and anti-Semitism, because they’re perceived as people of color. But if these cartoons appeared in the Western press, they’d be universally decried and vilified. Such is the hypocrisy of much of the Left.
And sadly, the cartoons, often displaying Jewish stereotypes that would befit the Nazi’s Der Stürmer, are now spreading to the once-secular land of Turkey, turning, under Erdogan, into an Islamic state.
MEMRI (the Middle East Media Research Institute), whose work is scrupulous, has presented a selection of cartoons from a Turkish newspaper. Thankfully, the paper isn’t the nation’s most popular, but I predict this stuff will spread. Their explanation:
İbrahim Özdabak is a Turkish cartoonist whose personal website includes cartoons dating back to 2005 covering many subjects relevant to Turkish society and politics. Many of his cartoons have antisemitic themes, depicting Jews as blood-soaked butchers, vultures circling over Palestinian land, and vampires drinking Palestinian blood. These cartoons present the same images of Jews as those circulated in the antisemitic tabloid Der Stürmer and other Nazi-era publications. His cartoons are printed in the Turkish daily newspaper Yeni Asya (“New Asia”), which sold 11,245 copies during the week of April 9, 2018, making it the 29th most popular print newspaper in Turkey.
Here are a few of those cartoons’s with MEMRI’s explanations. Note the big-nosed depiction of the Jew that’s always used by anti-Semites. If you think that these cartoons are only anti-Israel rather than also being anti-Jewish (they are of course deeply intertwined), you’re just wrong.
A Jewish Nero plays the harp while the “Islamic world” burns. (Yeniasya.com.tr, August 1, 2016.)
The Jew plotting to take over the entire region “east of the Nile” and “west of the Euphrates” (Yeniasya.com.tr, June 26, 2016.)
A Jewish man praying at the Western Wall laughs at the message on his phone, which reads: “Turkey and Israel have come to an agreement.” (Yeniasya.com.tr, June 28, 2016.)
My emphasis in the explanation below. This cartoon is particularly invidious:
The cartoon below was a response to an open letter published April 22, 2018 in the French-language Le Parisien newspaper proposing that “the verses of the Quran calling for murder and punishment of Jews, Christians, and nonbelievers be struck to obsolescence by religious authorities,” so that “no believer can refer to a sacred text to commit a crime. The letter drew harsh criticism from French Muslims, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan responded harshly to it in a speech on May 8, saying: “In France, some group came out and published a communique calling for the removal of certain verses from the Quran. Even though it is very clear that the people who said this do not know anything about the Quran, I wonder, in their lives, have they ever read their own books, [such as] the Bible? Or have they ever read the Torah? Or have they ever read the Book of Psalms? If they had read it, they would probably also want the Bible to be banned… When we warn the Western countries about anti-Muslim sentiment, anti-Turkish sentiment, xenophobia, and racism, we get a bad reputation. Oh West, know that while you attack our holy book, we are not going to attack your sanctities, but we are going to take you down.”
Solving the puzzle of the Büyük Ortadoğu Projesi (“Greater Middle East Project”) reveals the Star of David. (Yeniasya.com.tr, July 20, 2017.)
“Here there is a bit of Palestinian land left!” (Yeniasya.com.tr, November 18, 2016.)
You have to be insane if you think that Jews control the United Nations, but of course the stereotype is that they control everything.
(Yeniasya.com.tr, April 28, 2018.)
This one’s pretty nasty, too:
“Gaza Chambers.” This cartoon plays on the similarity in Turkish between the words “gas” and “Gaza.” (Ibrahimozdabak.com, date unknown.)
h/t: Malgorzata
So sad…anti semitism is alive and well
Maybe our president can complain about this to his butt-buddy Erdoğan — whose thugs attacked US citizens for peacefully protesting on US soil, while Erdoğan enjoyed the show from the backseat of his air-conditioned limousine.
The tRUMPocratic Oath: “First, what is harm?” .
Is there any provision to kick nations out of NATO? I think Turkey and Hungary are both ripe for ousting.
I think the reaction to separate is a bad one. Better to keep working towards something, to keep negotiating, and to take a longer view on our relationships.
There is no provision to do so in the NATO mechanism, but there is in the usual diplomatic channels. Hungary, Poland & Turkey are all a worry & I’m sure that NATO no longer keeps Turkey informed of all NATO developments because of their backchannel leaks to Russia [& buying of Russian arms]
We need to counter the authoritarian rise in all three countries, but it’s best done while still in NATO. Particularly as Turkey is home to around sixty US B61 nuclear weapons [gravity bombs for mounting on military jets each with a yield of around 20 Hiroshimas]
When I was on a U.S. Navy ship, should anyone ask whether there were nuclear weapons aboard my ship, the standard response was (supposed to be), “I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons on this ship.”
I should think that such information would be classified at least secret, then or now.
Where are you going with that thought Filippo?
The Eastern European members of NATO do not have nuclear weapons on their soil, but they absolutely insist that they must be under the protection of the NATO nuclear umbrella. Part of that umbrella is the NATO ‘Nuclear Sharing’ agreement, where US manufactured B61 bombs are deployed in various NATO countries in the same shelters as house the aircraft that would deliver them.
It is known that there are exactly 215 USAF Weapons Storage & Security System vaults at 13 sites in seven countries. The location of the sites is not meant to be a secret – it is part of the deterrence factor. Any NATO member can go check any WS3 vault.
I think this arrangement breaks the NPA, but NATO chooses to believe it doesn’t
Just congenially curious, what is your source of this information?
So your answer to my question by implication is what I think I now is not likely true or is in some sense “Top Secret” – for the nuclear realm [civil & military] the category is “Restricted Data/Formerly Restricted Data” which is higher than “Top Secret” – the latter being accessible to over a million USians.
I’m 62 & my first career was in signals & military intelligence [at the low level front end]. My info is NRDC, FAS, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists & the UNODA mainly for the numbers & transparency information. The nuclear policy at the various levels & the rationale behind MAD & the way the NATO nations interoperate & the policy triggers [“invade him over there & you’ve effectively invaded us”] – all that from many years of reading & talking, plus of course the point of NATO is to march & react as one.
The first obvious point is absolute nuclear secrecy at the national level or higher is counterproductive & destabilizing
So we have a system of secrecy going from the Nuclear Sharing agreement at the loose end which deals with tactical gravity bombs – this is fairly open book [because it requires the cooperation of a bloc of nation states] to the tight end – the SSBN part of the triad where the location of the subs is a mystery to nearly all members of the crews on board.
But even the permitted armaments of the SSBNs is not a free-for-all – for stability reasons this is by international agreement & it is vetted.
Then there’s the dark end such as the weaponisation of space, what back ups are available when GPS etc is taken down, forbidden WMDs & other monsters we know nothing of. This is the area where the secrecy truly exists – nobody bothers to hide the B61s, the only secret is the numbers stocked in a particular vault, the yield settings & the planned uses. It is quite possible that the stocks aren’t quite as supposed with a few of them empty, but we can have some confidence from the Dual Use aircraft & where they are housed – that’s open knowledge.
Thank you. Good to know.
Thank you from me also. I have come to trust the accuracy and validity of what you share.
Your listing of your experiences and your sources on this issue reinforce my trust.
If the B61 interests you, then I recommend reading the chapter from page 23 onwards of THIS LINK TO PDF NTI report from January. It’s part of the Trump-approved plan [from before his time] to upgrade the US nuclear arsenal & systems & it’s a shocker. Upgrading weapons that should be scrapped [some types of nuclear weapon have no role today or act to reduce overall stability].
The message is that it is no longer possible to have a rational defence budget in the USA – because jobs & the power of Washington lobbying. The military are silent [more or less] on this because the top dogs have lucrative, no-work jobs promised upon retirement.
Not new news, but it’s a consolidating trend with no road back that I can see.
I do not find anything wrong with Hungary.
What is your understanding of the status of the independence of the judiciary in Hungary?
I do not know. What I know is that in Britain, some “Count Dancula” was tried and fined because of a video he posted on YouTube, and in France, opposition politician Marine Le Pen is being tried because of images she posted on Twitter. Because nobody says that Britain and France are a liability for NATO, so I see no reason to observe under a magnifying glass the judiciary of unliked Central European countries.
Are you not the least bit curious about the disliking of the compromising/degradation of the integrity of the judiciary of a given country, central European or not?
I am just curious why this disliking is so selective.
Keeping Turkey in NATO is the only thing stopping Erdoğan from going to a fully Islamic state. He still has hopes of joining the EU for the economic benefits, but he’s never been able to meet the humanitarian requirements, and things are getting worse.
Russia is desperately trying to get Turkey on their side, which would be a disaster. They are a buffer state between the Middle East and Europe. They also have a huge army. Within NATO, it’s second only to the US in size – about 600,000 iirc. And, as mentioned above, there are multiple US military bases in Turkey, which are very important strategically. For a start, they’re probably the only thing preventing war between Turkey and the Kurds. That enables the Kurds to keep extremist Sunnis (e.g. ISIS, Al Qaeda) in check.
The Jews have been very successful in any field that they enter. It has been my experience that less successful people don’t like those who are successful or smart. I guess this is a built-in mechanism to cope with their less-than-successful lives. You are seeing this today in America with the Trumpsters. You could say it is stupid but I think it is really envy. Unless we find ways of re-wiring the human brain, this problem will always be with us. Unfortunately, the Jews always seem to be the group that gets the brunt of this human defect.
Isn’t this view a smidge racist? “Jews are smart and everyone who hates jews are dumb and jealous,” and anyone else could say they’ve met a dumb jew and a smart Trumpet. It would be better for us to avoid broad generalities in all of these discussions.
Is it racist to identify the ethnic/cultural background of, and the ratio of the number of those with that background to the total number of, Nobel prize winners?
If it is racist, then apparently Sam Harris, Lawrence Krauss and not a few other such luminaries are culpable.
The United States surely was grateful for all the Jewish scientists who fled Nazi Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe prior to WW II, and who made the critical difference at Los Alamos, Hanford, WA and Oak Ridge, TN, while at the same time many USers continued in their bigoted ways.
(I remember a high school chum, putatively a good, pious Southern Baptist, saying his father “Jewed” down a car dealer on the price. I thought seriously about asking him whether he rather “Baptisted” him down on the price.)
One can find the same type of rubbish over here in Der Stürmer‘s extant epigonous doppelgänger, “The Daily Stormer.”
I read recently (I’m not going to check myself) about that site having to shut down because they couldn’t collect a mere $2,000 from their paltry base of readers to keep the site going. It seems there aren’t many people looking for the kind of material they produce, even on the internet.
You are half right – I don’t think they have a readership numbers problem & the site is operating, but
[1] SPLC is suing Andrew Anglin personally [as opposed to the holding company Moonbase Holdings] – Anglin needs more cash flow
[2] The Daily Stormer relies solely on reader contributions rather than ads [always has for obvious reasons]. But the processing is difficult since PayPal etc will not touch them now. Even some of the bitcoin processors have turned their backs. They are down to cash, cheques, BTC & XMR
Oh & the Alt-Right set up a Patreon crowd funding alternative called Hatreon used by fans of Anglin, Spencer etc. Anglin was getting $3.5k/mnth via that channel, but the banks & credit card companies stopped processing to/from Hatreon so that’s dead in the water.
SEE THE ANGLIN PAGE HERE It’s malware free – I’ve scanned it
I can’t remember where I read about this and a quick search isn’t turning up anything, so don’t believe my last comment unless I can come up with a link.
I can never figure out how Israel-haters continually damn the country as an expansionist, imperialist state hell-bent on stealing everyone else’s land. A brief look at some maps in a history book would show that the amount of territory controlled by Israel peaked around 1973, and has shrunk massively since then – the Sinai, southern Lebanon and Gaza have all been vacated or handed back to their previous sovereignty. If the Israelis are trying to be evil imperialists, they’re surely not very good at it.
Not to mention the fact that if Israel really did control all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates, the region would be a much more peaceful, humane and prosperous place than the violent, war-torn cesspit of Islamic hellholes that occupy it today.
More to the point – Sinai, southern Lebanon and Gaza were taken by Israel because the Arab states attacked them. They weren’t taken by expansion, they were taken in defense. With the exception of the Golan Heights and the West Bank, the lands they secured in their defense after being attacked were returned.
I think yuo’re wrong. One thing is Israel right to exists and progress, another is how the current top leadership treats the Arab population. Are you sayong that Bibi woul be good a world leader? He isn’t Ben Gurion, Golda Meir nor Rabin….. As you might know.
The current top leadership in Israel is investing in Arab sector’s development more (even proportionally to GDP) than any previous Israeli government. More Arabs achieve very high positions in Israeli socjety. Higher proportion of Arabs (inclusive women) are studying at the university level than ever before. Ben Gurion, Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin were maligned with the same words as Netanyahu is maligned today (short memory can be very useful sometimes!). The only difference was that in their times it was mostly Arab and Sovjet propaganda that spread diverse libels about them – today it’s more democratic – everybody does it.
>A brief look at some maps in a history book would show that the amount of territory controlled by Israel peaked around 1973, and has shrunk massively since then
There’s more to life than evidence!
It never fails to surprise me, the double standards that are brought into play when Israel and the Middle East are discussed.
sub.
Yeah, the sacred Holy books, written 2Kyrs ago. Revered by people who look down their noses at anyone driving a 5+y/o car.
“Revered by people who look down their noses at anyone driving a 5+y/o car.”
What does that even mean?
“Oh West, know that while you attack our holy book…”
It means they’ll hold 2Ky/o stuff above everything at the same time they enjoy all the comforts of modern technology, and want that to be absolutely up to date, all the while denouncing it.
Ah, OK. I honestly didn’t get it. Thanks.
Sorry if my initial question sounded accusatory, as I didn’t mean it to.
A minor advantage of the widespread belief in the conspiratorial organization “The Illuminati” is that they displace the Jews as the folk responsible for all evil in the world.
(The Illuminati really existed as an offshoot from the FreeMasons from 1776-1796 so President John Adams anxieties about their undue influence on world affairs is forgivable.)
That still alive, evil, loony televangelist Pat Robertson doesn’t agree with your thesis – the Illuminati were infiltrated & taken over by Jewish bankers according to him…
The New World Order, 1991:-
The ones currently controlling the US are the Evangelical Christians, and their motives (the Rapture, Armageddon, and the Return of Christ to rule the Earth) are delusional but scary. The war part could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know by pointing out that the Hamas Charter is not just anti-Israel but horrific in its level of anti-Semitism. It even refers to the long-debunked ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ as proof of the motives and plans of Jews.
The best solution is the Two State one, but the fact that extremist Muslims (like Hamas) believe the land is theirs because Muhammed said so makes that impossible.
My 2nd citation of Bill Maher today:
In his film “Religulous” he talks about how an apocalyptic focus could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. He spends between 5 to 15 minutes of the film on this, and I wish he had done more with it.
In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic church did not want the laity to read the Bible. However, the Greek Orthodox church was OK with the laity reading most of it, but heavily discouraged ordinary folk from reading the Apocalypse of John, also known as the Book of Revelation. Perhaps they were on to something.
So many conspiracy theories, so much fake news.
I am less concerned about the purported ethnicity of the wealthy rulers of the world than I am of their (e.g. Trump, Russia, China, the Middle East, etc.) banding together to hold on to and increase their power and wealth at the expense of the rest of us.
As for a conspiracy theory, what about “Skull and Bones”? I recently read that it was started by the Bush family and that members of this group are heavily enmeshed in U.S. politics. Conspiracy? Fake news?
Not started by the Bush/Walker people, but close to the start
The first Bush dynasty Bonesman was Prescott Sheldon Bush. His dad Samuel Prescott Bush – a fortune from arms & influence is worth a read
An interesting living Bonesman who compared an Obama tax plan to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. Also made a fortune with Seaworld [read story about his unfeeling & incorrect remarks regarding the killer whale killing a trainer incident]: Stephen A. Schwarzman the founder of Blackstone Group, a friend to Trump, a panoply of other vile Republicans [IMO] & to the Saudis & making inroads to China with educational scholarships. I’ve wondered in the past how it breaks down – his good works for influence versus good works to sooth a troubled conscience?
I did not find any of the cartoons offensive. None of them were funny. None of them seemed well thought out. Some were simply wrong as PCEE noted. And all of them were borne of insecurity.
The Jewish caricature straight out of Daily Stormer and The Elders of Zion didn’t offend you?
I wonder. If there were such cartoons against Blacks or any other minority which members would find them offensive, would you also state that you don’t see anything offensive in them?
And “borne of insecurity”? The atmosphere in Turkey is one of victory (look up “Afrin”) and triumph. The dream about a new Turkish empire is shared by a huge part of population. Antisemitism is rampant, with incitment going from above (see this article by a Turkish journalist who had to escape Turkey not so long tome ago). I would say that this is hatred and feeling of Turkish supremacy – not insecurity.
Technically there are no cartoons that would offend me. It’s just not who I am. And they are, by definition, cartoons.
I did spend an hour re-watching Hitchens’ Daniel Pearl Lecture (2010) after viewing the cartoons. It is something I do at least once a year since the talk came out.
Now that would be justice: if anyone thinks that the cartoons are worthwhile they should be forced to watch Hitchens’ Daniel Pearl lecture.
Not thought out? I think the last one, which is the nastiest, was very thoroughly thought out indeed. There is a trope beloved of modern anti-semites: to use images of the Holocaust, especially in a deprecating way, to mock or attack Jews. This cartoon embodies that trope in a very nasty way. That’s no accident.
Offensive may not be the right word. I find these cartoons troubling because of the twisted worldview they represent and the violence such a worldview has spawned. A cartoon is not a disease but it may be a symptom that we should not ignore.
They are not “offensive”, they are plain hate-mongering.
I hear Ken Livingstone is looking for a retirement cottage somewhere.
Erdogan and his cronies have really poisoned Turkey.
“Oh West,… we are going to take you down.”
I think it is high time for some precautions to prevent these words from coming true.
“İbrahim Özdabak . . . his cartoons have antisemitic themes, depicting Jews as blood-soaked butchers, vultures circling over Palestinian land, and vampires drinking Palestinian blood.”
I’d like to see his extensive portfolio of Armenian genocide cartoons.
Have you nothing to say about trained Israeli snipers deliberately shooting Palestinian children?