Yesterday we ran this post about a story about Virginia Senate candidate James Webb’s campaign having put out a cartoon that his Jewish opponent considered antisemitic.
Drawing pictures of Jewish people with accentuated hooked noses, and also using the phrase “anti-Christ” is not usually something that would qualify you for an Anti-Defamation League Citizen Of The Year award.
And yes, alas, since our post was done at a Starbucks in the middle of a multi-hundred-mile drive, the image wasn’t available online when we did our search. Some readers and bloggers did find it but hours after our post first ran (in fact we were in the car when they found that link and didn’t get on a computer until about 10:30 pm last night).
Now we’ve seen it and it does not change our opinion (OOPS: here come the emails and posts saying we are on the payroll of Miller’s campaign, have hated Webb all of our life, are trying to make one candidate win in Virginia, and secretly get money from Karl Rove because the whole idea of our post was to help George Allen win).
Captain Ed Morrissey (one of our favorite conservative bloggers) has a post with the image on his site (also read his post where he disagrees with TMV) so here it is:
He also has a comparison of what Miller looks like and the cartoon. The bottom line on offensive Jewish caricatures is that they usually accentuate the nose a bit more than it is and all have a certain “look” to the face. If you run the historical anti-semitic caricatures (we ran a few on the original post) you can see how there is a similar thread going through them.
Years ago on the San Diego Union I did a story mentioning a KKK type group in North San Diego County. I then received at my home address a big, fat envelope with anti-black and anti-semitic pamphlets containing cartoon caricatures. Again, they fit a certain pattern.
Quite a few websites disagreed with TMV on this one. So here are a few different views you should check out.
NOTE: It’s always enlightening to see the people who can disagree with a position and outline why (we think about those later and about their arguments) and those who go on the attack hurling adjectives or coming up with colorful and quaint motives for why you wrote something that even you don’t know existed (we read them, shrug and forget about them, although they do provide fleeting comedy relief). You’ve already read Captain Ed, here are a few more (and most disagree due to a differing perspectives and should be read so you can make up your own minds);
—Glenn Reynolds, aka Instapundit feels it’s a campaign blunder (yes, but Webb could offset it by visiting Jewish voters at Jewish restaurants — in other words, any restaurant that serves Chinese food. Now THAT’S a harmless stereotype…but a true one..)
—James Joyner thinks its a tempest in a teapot (or, rather, a storm in a pot of chicken soup…)
—The Agitator says we “smeared” Webb. He said we had a “goal” to portray Webb a certain way. (And we thought we were only giving you our reaction to the Forbes story. Hey, we learn something NEW every day!)
—Dean Esmay thinks the cartoon doesn’t warrant our reaction.
—Classical Values actually makes the best, most clinical, stand-back argument that the cartoon is not the way we perceive it, concluding with a classic line: “I don’t think James Webb is an antisemitic fascist, but he may be a little stupid.” READ IT IN FULL.
Also, be sure to read comments in the full original post, which mirror some of our hate emails. We especially love people who disagree then go on the attack accusing us of personal motives, a political agenda, and saying this proves yours truly was an awful journalist.
We love you, too. And if you send us an email with your address, we’ll be sure to send you an original Valentine.
But we won’t use James Webb’s artist.
And then there are the people who say this just PROVES we hate James Webb. Actually, as a reporter on the San Diego Union yours truly covered the failed attempt by the city of Oceanside to annex Marine base Camp Pendleton, and also the Reagan amnesty plan. Webb was one of the most dynamic members of the Reagan cabinet. So, sorry, yours truly could care less who wins or loses in Virginia; this is a totally separate issue.
FOOTNOTE: We also get a kick out of the folks in our emails who say “how dare you say it’s a classic antisemitic stereotype” and then say we’re antisemitic because we posted some cartoons showing some what the classic stereotype is.
Yes, there could be Jewish antisemites — probably those who’ve had to do catering for a family doing a bar mitzvah.
And then there are those who say when we ran the other images we didn’t explain that they were classic images (we did) and tried to pass them off as Webb’s artist. Nope. Even our cat understands what we wrote in our post. (A reminder: Webb HAS apologized for this cartoon and in our original post we had some comments about the apology.)
But since we ran the Webb campaign image above, here are a few more classic images and see if you can see a common thread. But this time we’ll spell it out:
T-h-e-s-e a-r-e c-l-a-s-s-i-c g-r-a-p-h-i-c i-m-a-g-e-s and some recent caricatures so you can see what ran over the years (and these are on Google and easily available if you do a search):
There are many others. An Israeli newspaper even had a contest “Kosher anti-semites” to create the best antisemitic cartoon. Here’s one that updated an American piece of art:
UPDATE: A writer on Daily Kos blasts a newspaper for leaving out parts of the flyer (the image we gave you above is that image apparently that ran in the newpspaper; a PDF image linked by Holly on the original post has the original). But the issue here really is not the political content of the ad, which is a different matter for a different debate (which we would not have posted on since we’re not covering the Virginia race). It’s whether this kind of caricature was appropriate.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.