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Doonesbury attracts Abe Foxman's ire for 'anti-semitic' cartoon

Garry Trudeau Here is a recent cartoon (below) in the popular, long-standing and widely syndicated Doonesbury series by Garry Trudeau. Abe Foxman’s Anti Defamation League of B’nai Brith have somehow uncovered anti-Semitism in it, objecting on the grounds that it “misquotes the Bible, maligns Judaism, and promotes a Christian heresy, all within eight panels.” Quite a feat.

Also take a gander at another cartoon controversy we posted on recently by Trudeau’s fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

Trudeau

8 comments on “Doonesbury attracts Abe Foxman's ire for 'anti-semitic' cartoon

  1. Freeborn
    10 June, 2009

    Ancient Judeans had longed for a nationalist avenging Messiah.He who came clarified for them that they were captives of the Pharisees every bit as much,more even,than of the Roman occupiers.

    The Pharisees of yore are today’s Zionists.Jesus held them to be the foe of both God and man.The aspects of their creed Jesus singled out for attack were precisely those modern day characteristics Zionists insist are those that define Jews,Jewishness and Judaism.

    The mass of dietary proscriptions and observances on which Pharisees insisted counted for nothing to the man from Galilee.He swept these aside and reduced the Law to two life-guiding principles:Love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself.

    When he said “neighbour” he was not,as Pharisees taught,referring simply to Judeans.In this as in his insistence on the need to love one’s enemies Jesus was spelling out for his listeners how the Pharisees had corrupted the Law.

    No it was not for Judeans to massacre and murder non-Judean neighbours as injuctions invoked times out of number by the Pharisees taught.

    Nor had he come as nationalist liberator and conqueror of territory as the prophecies had it.In simple words Jesus quietly but directly challenged the most powerful men of his day.

    The martial injunctions in Deutronomy that offer loot,territory and slaughter as reward for strict adherence to the Law are turned upside down in the Sermon on the Mount.Jesus offered no material reward just the inner peace that derived from actions performed in humility and with moral purity.

    He had come to announce universal love the greater power than the hatred that came from self-segregation and affected ethnic superiority.

    For all these reasons Abe Foxman and the Zionists despise Jesus.

    Now when it came to the moneylenders,or banksters as we know them today,who have bankrolled the “religious” wars down the ages-well when it came them as Sam says in the cartoon that’s when Christ really did lose his temper!

    And who the Hell but Abe Foxman would blame him?

  2. 99
    10 June, 2009

    Pharisee |ˈfarəsē |
    noun

    a member of an ancient Jewish sect, distinguished by strict observance of the traditional and written law, and commonly held to have pretensions to superior sanctity.

    • a self-righteous person; a hypocrite.

    That pretty well sums up modern Zionism for me.

  3. peoplesgeography
    11 June, 2009

    Well-noted.

    I am a bit puzzled by the ADLoBB letter’s contentious claim that, in fictional character Shylock’s day, “Jews were forced by Christians to engage in usury.” ‘Forced’ — how so?

    But as a sometime student of theology, there is definitely a basic demarcation in the Old and New Testaments between a vengeful God and the gentle humility of Jesus.

    Amid the predictable huffing and puffing, I think Paul Hawkins of Ohio has the best response in Doonesbury’s feedback page:

    Wonder what the going exchange rate is regarding satire to dogma? It’s a comic strip for God’s sake!

  4. Freeborn
    12 June, 2009

    Whether the Jews of Tudor England were “forced” into usury is a vast question.

    Certainly being barred from full civil rights and public positions would serve as an incentive to go into usury as a career!

    However what is less speculated on is the Talmudic teaching that Jews who did business with Gentiles were thoroughly absolved of any wrong-doing.Cheating non-Jews by the Chosen People was legitimate according to the Law.

    Another incentive down the ages for Jews to enter banking has been the feeling among Jewish elites that finance is something of an Achilles heel for Gentiles.We’re not very good at it to wit!

    Looking around the heavily indebted governments of today one wonders how on earth they got that impression!

    Suffice it to say that by Cromwell’s time Jewish bankers,in Venice particularly (as in Shakespeare’s The Merchant),had become entrenched sponsors of warfare and revolution across Europe.It was Venetian Jews who offered advice to Cromwell on how best to remove Charles I during the course of the war that they would sponsor.

    By the time of the Jewish Enlightenment in Germany in the eighteenth century,Jewish cultural leaders who formed the vanguard of Reform Judaism,be they journalists like Ludwig Borne or poets like Heinrich Heine,were either members of leading Illuminati banking families or working on their behalf.

    Heine was close to James Rothschild of the Paris banking family while Moses Mendelssohn,David Friedlander,and Hartwig Wessely (aka.Napthali Herz) were high-ranking Illuminati.

    A strong current among these Jewish elites was the contempt in which they held the Ostjuden and the benighted Orthodox world from whence they had migrated.This current was to play a role that goes unacknowledged to this day in the official history of the Holocaust.

    For the usurers of the Sabbatean Jewish elite the oppression and persecution of the great unwashed mass of Jewry that took place in Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany and elsewhere were but stepping-stones on the road to the world domination they planned long ago and have achieved today.

  5. Freeborn
    13 June, 2009

    The aforesaid usurers:Itzig and Friedlander-were named in Lazare’s Antisemitisme(1894)as financing the French Revolution.While it was Moses Mendelssohn who introduced Illuminism to France and financed leading revolutionary actors including Mirabeau.

    In the situation of financial paralysis that always precedes revolution-a situation not dissimilar to the one wherein debt bondage is entrenched across the US and Europe today-the French government by 1780 had become wholly dependent on international finance (read Jewish usury) which controlled all the stocks of gold and silver on the basis of which the government had been given all its ruinous loans.

    Taking gold out of circulation at the optimum time ensured French finances were in total confusion.By the dawn of Revolution with the help of the King’s minister,Necker,the debt stood at £170m.

    Usury had become the instrument par excellence of international revolution that began in Cromwell’s time.

  6. peoplesgeography
    14 June, 2009

    Thanks for taking the time to comment, Freeborn. There’s a lot to chew on there. And also a reminder that delving into the history of political economy would be more than instructive to pursue.

  7. j87
    17 June, 2009

    Let’s call a Jew a Jew. 99 and Freeborn are clearly using Zionist to mean Jew. I guarantee that most of the pre-1848 moneylending Jews, such as my great-great-great-grandfather (who was one in Ukraine) were not Zionists, as Zionism is a largely secular movement that (in its early stages) denied the true Jewish yearning for a Messiah who would restore the Temple and its service.

    And Jews in various places were forced into finance because they were, at times, forbidden to own lands, or engage in trades, or join craft guilds. So what was left? Banking.

    Also, it was convenient, as Christians cannot lend to Christians at interest, and Jews cannot lend to Jews at interest, but one can lend to the other at interest. Without interest, there’s no incentive for a lender to make a substantial loan, assuming the risk of non-payment, or of expulsion or a pogrom before the loan is due.

    For Trudeau to make a bigoted statement like this is out of character, but that it is an antisemitic cartoon? Unavoidable. Esp. since the posters here and elsewhere are expressing the same sentiments in clearly racist terms. Perhaps Trudeau just wasn’t thinking that day, when he drew it.

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This entry was posted on 10 June, 2009 by in cartoon, Christianity, Judaism and tagged , , .

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