Racism imagined; antisemitism ignored

There’s a joke about a man who goes to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist starts with a Rorschach test. Each image the man is shown is described as a “naked woman.”

Finally, in exasperation the psychiatrist says, “Mr. Jones, you have a dirty mind.” To which Mr. Jones replied, “Doc, you’re the one showing me dirty pictures.”

Yesterday the New York Post published a rather tasteless cartoon depicting two policemen shooting a monkey. This is what Bob Owens saw in the cartoon:

I see an editorial cartoon combining the too real absurdity of two current events:

1. The signing of the “stimulus,” a nearly $800 billion dollar spending bill that Democrats forced through the House and Senate without reading.
2. The tabloidesque horror of a Connecticut chimpanzee that severely mauled a woman before being shot down by police officers it attempted to attack.

However, judging by the activity on memeorandum yesterday, a lot of liberals saw racism. As Owens puts it:

The editorial cartoonist was clearly intoning that a deranged chimp couldn’t have authored a bill any worse than the boondoggle created by Nancy Pelosi in her little fiefdom we call the House of Representatives.

Like clockwork, however, the angry spoiled children of the media left race-baiting industry cried “Wolf!” “Racist!”

Or as a voice of reason on the Left, Jonathan Chait put it:

But, look, obviously the point is that the stimulus bill could have been written by a monkey. The monkey doesn’t look like Obama and is in no way suposed to represent him. And it incorporated violence because the monkey in the news story was, in fact, shot — and the punchline depends on the monkey being dead and thus unavailable to write further legislation. Again, while it’s a mediocre joke at best, Obama supporters shouldn’t be looking for racial slights around every corner.

To see a portrayal of President Obama in the monkey requires a really warped mind – especially considering that the stimulus bill wasn’t even written by the President. Kind of like the guy being shown ink blots, the interpretation of the cartoon says more about the critics than about the cartoonist.

However the City Room blog at the New York Times took this rather seriously and titled a post, Chimp-Stimulus Cartoon Raises Racism Concerns. The Times’s bloggers gathered up the reactions of every single prominent critic of the cartoon they could find and even threw in an expert opinion for good measure:

Andrew Rojecki, associate professor of communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and co-author of “The Black Image in the White Mind” (University of Chicago Press, 2000), a study of racial attitudes and their relationship to mass media content, said he found the cartoon deeply troubling.

“Of course I would say it’s racist,” Professor Rojecki said in an interview. “There’s no question about it.”

He added, “The cartoonist, whether he did this consciously or not, was drawing upon a very historically deep source of images about African-Americans that African-Americans do not have a lot of control over.”

Such images are harmful on a number of levels, he said. “Even people who do not harbor deep-seated prejudices, because they have stereotypes deeply embedded in their consciousness, may react unconsciously when those associations are triggered,” he said.

The controversy over this cartoon is manufactured. But once someone cries “racist,” the New York Times made the case that indeed, the cartoon was racist.

How about antisemitism? Well then the Times (at a different blog) doesn’t find the charge so convincing. The title asks: Is a Play About Gaza Anti-Semitic? Read the Script. The play, “Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza” is being considered for a New York production.

Jeffrey Goldberg identified one aspect of the play’s antisemitism:

The mainstreaming of the worst anti-Jewish stereotypes — for instance, that Jews glory in the shedding of non-Jewish blood — is upon us.

Elder of Ziyon elaborates:

The play shows a truly despicable Jew-hatred. Its underlying theme is that Jews who feel an attachment to Israel are inveterate liars who consciously feed their children myths, and these children can grow up and lie to their own children, all the while knowing that they are the evil ones and Palestinian Arabs are righteous.

For most of the play, increasingly so as it goes on, nearly all the “Tell her…” lines are what the playwright considers lies and the “Don’t tell her….” lines are what she considers the truth. The climax of this sick thinking comes at the penultimate line, “Tell her we love her” – Churchill believes that Jews who live in Israel cannot possibly love their children.

Of course, no modern liberal anti-semitic play can be complete without comparing Gaza with the Holocaust, so it starts semi-sympathetically (but even then, Jews lie to their children) and goes on to the inevitable and grotesque ideas that Jews today revel in the deaths of innocents, just like the Nazis who they must have learned this from.

EoZ also commented on the NYT report about the possible New York production of the play and observed:

Notice that the article implies that the Rachel Corrie play was controversial because it is “sympathetic to Palestinians” rather than because it is slanderous towards Israelis. The implication is that critics of these sorts of “artistic” ventures simply hate Palestinian Arabs rather than have any legitimate problems with mindless and decontextualized Israel-bashing.

No doubt when the Times reports and comments on the upcoming Durban II conference it will be described as “critical of Israel” and “defending the Palestinians.” But as Howard Jacobson wrote the other day:

That being the case, it is hard to be certain what the playwright knows and what she doesn’t, what she, in her turn, means deliberately to twist or just unthinkingly helps herself to from the poor box of leftist propaganda. The overall impression, nonetheless, is of a narrative slavishly in line with the familiar rhetoric, making little or nothing of the Jews’ unbroken connection with the country going back to the Arab conquest more than a thousand years before, the piety felt for the land, the respect for its non-Jewish inhabitants (their rights must “be guarded and honoured punctiliously,” Ben Gurion wrote in 1918), the waves of idealistic immigration which long predated the post-Holocaust influx with its twisted psychology, and the hopes of peaceful co-existence, for the tragic dashing of which Arab countries in their own obduracy and intolerance bear no less responsibility.

Quite simply, in this wantonly inflammatory piece, the Jews drop in on somewhere they have no right to be, despise, conquer, and at last revel in the spilling of Palestinian blood. There is a one-line equivocal mention of a suicide bomber, and ditto of rockets, both compromised by the “Tell her” device, otherwise no Arab lifts a finger against a Jew. “Tell her about Jerusalem,” but no one tells her, for example, that the Jewish population of East Jersusalem was expelled at about the time our survivors turn up, that it was cleansed from the city and its sacred places desecrated or destroyed. Only in the crazed brains of Israelis can the motives for any of their subsequent actions be found.

Thus lie follows lie, omission follows omission, until, in the tenth and final minute, we have a stage populated by monsters who kill babies by design – “Tell her we killed the babies by mistake,” one says, meaning don’t tell her what we really did – who laugh when they see a dead Palestinian policeman (“Tell her they’re animals… Tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out”), who consider themselves the “chosen people”, and who admit to feeling happy when they see Palestinian “children covered in blood”.

Anti-Semitic? No, no. Just criticism of Israel.

It would appear that the hate-o-meter at the New York Times is set to such an extreme level of sensitivity that it can detect racism even where it isn’t, but when it comes to antisemitism, the hate-o-meter is switched off.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.