No Laughing Matter

One newspaper publisher was tried, convicted, and executed during the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II. Julius Streicher, publisher of the virulently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer, was convicted of crimes against humanity. The publisher was led to the gallows on October 16, 1945. Maintaining a defiantly hateful air, Streicher called out “Heil Hitler!” before denigrating the proceedings as “Purimfest,” referring to the Jewish holiday of Purim. After the hanging, his corpse was cremated at Dachau, the same as many victims of Nazism.

Der Stürmer’s slogan “The Jews are our misfortune,” was carried on every issue. Stories within lived up to that slogan, accusing Jews of a host of crimes. They were rapacious capitalists. They were subversive communists. They molested German girls. They undermined Christianity. They served Satan and his minions. They schemed to conquer the world. They drank the blood of Gentiles. No stone was left unturned in Streicher’s quest to dehumanize Jews, all the better to prepare their extermination. The tribunal at Nuremberg found that Streicher’s words constituted “incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes…and constitutes a crime against humanity.”

The messages of these stories were supported by the cartoons of Phillip Rupprecht, alias “Fips.” Streicher biographer Randall Bytwerk described Rupprecht as “a cartoonist of outstanding crudity” who “became identified with the Stürmer almost as closely as Streicher.” In some ways, the cartoons were worse than the articles. Even a complete illiterate could see the drawings of fat, unshaven Jews leering at young girls or Jews drinking the blood of Christians and get the idea. The cartoons routinely compared Jews to animals, especially snakes—symbols of evil dating back to the story of Adam and Eve.  Rupprecht’s drawings also appeared in the book Der Giftpilz (the Toadstool) a piece of anti-Semitic propaganda aimed at children and occasionally used in German schools.

Rupprecht’s cartoons constituted, like the articles his boss ran, a clear incitement to genocide. Yet he escaped Streicher’s fate in the hangman’s noose. Instead, he was sentenced to the relatively mild sentence of ten years hard labor, of which he served only five. He worked as a painter and decorator after his prison term, fathered four children, and passed away at 74.

Could a newspaper run cartoons that serve as incitement to genocide today? Is such a thing possible? Not only is it possible, but the printing of such propaganda has been happening for over a year. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 186,000 per a Lancet study, all while Israeli politicians continue to spout genocidal rhetoric aimed at Palestinians. Israel’s conduct during the war has been enabled at every step by the United States, via weapons sales and billions of dollars in military aid. Nevertheless, cartoonists in English language media have continued to dehumanize and attack Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, and those in the Palestine solidarity movement.

One of the ways cartoonists have done this is by comparing Palestinians and their allies to Nazis. Last October, Kirk Walters (King Features) showed campus protesters as tiki torch-carrying white nationalists straight out of the 2017 Charlottesville protests. One protester even physically resembles Adolf Hitler.  Gary Varvel (Creators Syndicate) took a similar tack last November: A protester with a Hitler mustache proudly wears an “I Heart Hamas” sweater. Comparing the victims of a genocide to perpetrators of a genocide is a shameful emulation of the pickpocket who yells “Stop thief!” to direct attention away from himself. This is readily apparent in Varvel’s case given that his cartoons stopped running in Toronto Sun over an anti-Semitic caricature of Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelenskyy. Now he poses as the staunchest defender of Jewish people.

Another avenue of attack from these cartoonists is to identify symbols of Arabs or Muslims as synonymous with evil. In April, Bob Gorell (Creators Syndicate) had the “C” in Columbia University replaced with the Muslim crescent and star, an Islamophobic reaction to the university’s pro-Palestine encampment. Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review Journal) has been no stranger to anti-Muslim sentiment in his art. In 2007, he drew Iran as a sewer with cockroaches swarming outwards to nearby countries. So it was no surprise when he placed the Palestinian flag side-by-side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil” in May. That month, Dana Summers (Tribune Syndicate) showed college professors as Eastern snake charmers calling forth a cobra labeled “antisemitism,” in a neat bit of Orientalism that manages to collapse Middle Easterners into South Asians. What would Edward Said say?

By far the most common symbol used in this way is the keffiyeh headdress. Chop Bock (Creators Syndicate) showed a frightening Arab on a college campus, face covered with a keffiyeh, hoisting a “Death to America” sign. Ramirez gave a keffiyeh-wearing protester a button reading “Hate.” Hate who? Why? The answers are unimportant. It’s enough to say that Palestinians and their sympathizers are motivated by unreasoning hatred and nothing more. Ramirez pulled off a similar trick when one of his cartoons depicted a college professor carrying a sign reading “From the River to the Sea: Support Hamas” and wearing an “I Love Terrorists Button.” You guessed it, the professor is wearing a keffiyeh. Absurdly enough, even Joe Biden, who has given everything Israel has wanted, has been slandered in this way. Varvel drew Genocide Joe as the second coming of Yasser Arafat, with the President ridiculously proclaiming “No more military aid to Israel.”

After Israel’s pager attack on Hezbollah, anti-Palestinian cartoonists were quick to incorporate it into their work. The right-wing National Review ran a cartoon in which Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s pager exploded. Apparently, joking about assassinating a congressperson is great fun in conservative media. UK satire magazine Private Eye published a cartoon that had a post-attack Hezbollah looking to socialist politician Jeremy Corbyn for leadership. After reader uproar, the cartoon was deleted. Everyone offended presumably belonged to Canadian cartoonist Graeme McKay’s “Student Union of Volatile and Underdeveloped Cerebral Cortices.”

The cartoonists listed have suffered remarkably few consequences for illustrating what the Nuremberg trials ruled is incitement to genocide. One of Ramirez’s cartoons that showed Palestinians with exaggerated racial features was pulled from the Washington Post after readers criticized it as racist, but that’s it.  Contrast with the treatment of Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Sabaaneh, detained and harassed numerous times by the Israeli military for resisting genocide through his art. In 1945, Rupprecht also received far harsher treatment, thus illustrating what journalists and scholars have referred to as the Palestine exception.

If words like Streicher’s and drawings like Rupprecht’s are an incitement to genocide, that principle remains true today. Cartoonists who use their talents to further dehumanize a population facing expulsion, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, are following in the shameful footsteps of Der Stürmer. They ought to be treated as such.

Featured Image credit: pzk net; modified by Tempest.
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