Just when you thought the New York Times couldn't sink any lower, their international print edition came out with the above cartoon Thursday showing a blind President Trump with yarmulke being led by a dog-like Bibi Netanyahu, wearing a Jewish Star of David on his dog collar. On Saturday, the Times issued an apology, but no apology can erase this or explain how it ever got published to begin with. What is the explanation? "We had an anti-Semitic editor who slipped this through, so we fired him"? "Somebody was asleep at the switch"?
This is the type of cartoon that we see in today's Arab cartoons, a region where Hitler is still considered by many to be a hero. Speaking of Hitler, the Times cartoon also takes us back to Der Stuermer, the Nazi weekly that trafficked in these images. Its editor, Julius Streicher, the so-called "Jew baiter of Nuremberg", was hanged after the war as one of the major Nazi war criminals. Streicher had been sacked by the Nazis before the Holocaust even began for his corruption, never physically ordered anyone's killing, but was condemned for crimes against humanity precisely because his hate, exemplified by cartoons like the one below, contributed in no small measure to the climate that led to the Holocaust.
Ring a bell?
More recently, we saw another example of this on one of our college campuses, UC Irvine in 2008 to be exact. I know because I saw it with my own eyes posted on the so-called "Apartheid Wall" assembled by the UCI Muslim Student Union as part of their annual week of events dedicated to the demonization of Israel.
And just this year, the Belgian town of Aalst rightfully came under fire for a Carnival float that featured this image of Jews:
No, the NY Times cannot plead ignorance about these images. This is blatant, and this is with full knowledge of these types of images, what they represent, and what they are intended to provoke. Just yesterday, we once again witnessed an attack on a synagogue (Poway, California) by a Jew hater who killed one person and wounded three others simply because he wanted to kill Jews.
The NY Times for so long has no longer deserved the title, "flagship of American newspapers". What the Times deserves is bankruptcy and extinction, not through a government shutdown, rather because decent people refuse to purchase this rag.
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