On Cartoons, Propaganda and Foreskins

Sometimes even paranoids have enemies.

Being Jewish, a supporter of Israel and conservative, I tend to ask myself frequently whether sometimes I am not being overly zealous in seeing anti-Semitism in what perhaps is valid criticism. Then I read something like this entry in Daniel Hannan’s blog and end up confirming that my fears are not groundless. 
The entry in question deals with a cartoon published in Brussels by the European Union. Ah, leave it to bureaucrats to find ways of spending your money. 

The cartoons are designed to reach parents through their children. And so we have cartoons such as “The Raspberry Ice Cream War, which tells the tale of a group of intrepid youngsters who travel back in time to a barbarous age where there are still sovereign states, and teach the inhabitants to scrap their borders. Older ones prefer Troubled Waters, a Tintin-style cartoon strip, whose heroine is a foxy MEP. Among the lines of dialogue are: “You can laugh! Wait until you’ve seen my amendments to the Commission proposal!” and, “I seem to spend my whole life on the train between Brussels and Strasbourg, but I’d hate to have to choose between mussels and chips and Strasbourg onion tart!”

But the cartoon that caught Hannan’s eye was the one on the super villain D. Vider. Look at the picture above, which shows the baddie, Dr D Vider, surrounded by his henchmen. “What, I wonder, asks Hannan, prompted the creators to give him a hooked nose and a goatee beard, like some anti-Semitic caricature from the Völkischer Beobachter? Am I being over-sensitive? Well, read the way he is described by the authors”:

Ruthless speculator, curator and collector of ancient curiosities, DAVID VIDERIUS is a former financier. He is a multi-millionaire, used to making money no matter if it might involve the suffering of others. Banned and ostracized from the financial world for unprofessional conduct he managed to escape arrest despite his involvement in financial scandal. Having disappeared for many years, he reappeared as DR D VIDER. He manages a holding company, DIVIDEX, controlling hundreds of different businesses across Europe and beyond...

Imagine however if this cartoon had been created by some reactionaries rather than the politically correct bureaucrat in Brussels. A villain named David with a hooked nose who made his money as a speculator.

What is the EU’s agenda here? Well, a few years ago, Daniel Hannan stumbled across an internal Commission report that concluded as follows: “Children can perform a messenger function in conveying the message to the home environment. Young people will often in practice act as go-betweens with the older generations, helping them embrace the euro.”

The notion that the government should get at parents through their children is a characteristic of authoritarian states, not liberal democracies. One thinks of Orwell’s fictional youth organization, the Spies; or of the revolting Pavel Morozov, who became a hero of the Soviet Union when he was murdered after shopping his father for hoarding grain. (Having decreed a state funeral for the boy, Stalin privately remarked: “He was a rotten little shit, ratting on his parents like that.”)

Not that the EU’s kiddieprop seems to be having much effect: in every country, younger voters are more Eurosceptic than their elders. Perhaps no amount of publicity can convince people of a bad idea.

***

In the meantime, another cartoon has emerged, with a new hero: Foreskin Man. 

The San Diego-based group that is laboring to get circumcision banned in San Francisco has perpetrated a comic book. In it, a superhero named Foreskin Man saves a baby boy from being circumcised by the evil Monster Mohel, a vicious-looking Orthodox Jewish rabbi who could have been drawn by an acolyte of Joseph Goebbels.

Indeed, Foreskin Man has a distinctly Hitlerian “Aryan” look to him.

It’s crystal clear from the dialogue that the perpetrator of this literary opus intends to depict the Judaic religious view of circumcision as evil and repulsive. The “comic” hauls out every theme of Jew hatred in the arsenal.

Note that these circumcision-haters could have addressed the issue as one of science, medicine, personal autonomy, or even just a social issue on which reasonable people can disagree.

But they didn’t. The case they’re making is that circumcision is evil because Jews do it as a religious observance.

The Anti-Defamation League is right. The attempt to ban circumcision in San Francisco is driven by anti-Semitism. The case could have been made without depicting a scary rabbi named Monster Mohel slavering over a naked infant – but it wasn’t.

Actually, this group is not insane. It’s evil.


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