Another week, another antisemitic outrage
This continues because it is never properly dealt with
So here we go again. Less than a week after the last outrage over antisemitism in Britain, here’s yet another one.
Richard Sharp, a former Goldman Sachs banker and a Jew, was forced to resign last Friday as chairman of the BBC. He had been found to have broken official rules by failing to disclose his involvement in trying to facilitate a businessman’s offer of an £800,000 loan to the former prime minister, Boris Johnson, weeks before Johnson appointed Sharp to the BBC post.
The Guardian’s cartoonist, Martin Rowson, chose to comment on this development with a hideously antisemitic cartoon (below). This depicted Sharp as a monstrous grotesque with an enlarged nose, carrying a box revealing the partial wording of “Gold Sac”. The box contained a vampire squid with yellow objects underneath its tentacles, stuffed alongside a Rishi Sunak puppet and next to a pig’s head disgorging what looked like blood — all alongside a dung-heap presided over by a naked Boris Johnson clutching bags of dollars.
The images associated with Sharp are all classic antisemitic tropes depicting Jews as greedy, manipulative and corrupt. The vampire squid, an image used by Rolling Stone magazine to describe Goldman Sachs itself, is a common antisemitic motif (sometimes presented as an octopus) used to depict Jews as having their tentacles wrapped around society.
In response to instantaneous outrage, the Guardian pulled the cartoon.
People get away with expressing antisemitic views if they suffer no painful consequences. Protests by Jews against such views generally carry little or no weight, since they are assumed to be thus seeking to launder Jewish misdeeds by playing the victim card (itself an antisemitic trope, since there are demonstrably no such misdeeds in these circumstances and the Jews are indeed demonstrably victims of bigotry). But when those promoting such Jew-hatred prompt outrage on their own side, the danger to their own interests forces them to issue a prompt and grovelling apology.
Good-hearted people, who for various reasons may find it impossible to grasp the true and unique nature of antisemitism, are often disposed to take such an apology at its face value. Those of us who suffer from both Jew-hatred and the persistent failure by so many to understand what this is tend to be a trifle more jaded.
One clue to the insincerity of such an apology lies in the language. Another lies in the past history of the perpetrator. Such clues have been on distressing display in both the Rowson incident and also in two others that have occurred over the past two weeks — one of which provoked a furore, while the other appears to have taken place without any adverse comment at all.
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