Darren Davidson
Business Media Writer
Sydney
The Australian
August 4,2014
In an extraordinary attack, Senator Brandis said coverage in Fairfax papers of the Gaza conflict was “overtly anti-Semitic”.
“I thought the cartoon was deplorable,” Senator Brandis said. “I think that critics of Israel’s foreign policy of course have every right to express their views. But I would have thought that a responsible media organisation would have a very good look at itself when it publishes cartoons (of) the kind we haven’t seen since Germany in the 1930s.”
In response to criticism from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Herald editor-in-chief Darren Goodsir said the cartoon was not intended to incite racial hatred. He said it was modelled on a number of photographs published, including one with an old man sitting observing the conflict in Gaza from a hill near Sderot.
Today’s edition of the Herald carries an apology in its editorial. Senator Brandis’s intervention will ratchet up pressure on Fairfax, which is facing a reader and advertiser backlash over the cartoon.
The Australian Jewish News has called on readers to cancel subscriptions to Fairfax. The cartoon illustrated a column by Mike Carlton, which ran in the paper’s July 26 edition. Created by illustrator Glen Le Lievre, the cartoon also ran on the website of Victorian masthead The Age, which is also published by Fairfax. The cartoon features an old man with a hook nose sitting in a chair emblazoned with the Star of David on the back,
pressing a remote to blow up a Palestinian area.
Asked if the cartoon amounted to racial vilification and could encourage or incite others to hate Jews, Senator Brandis said: “It certainly constitutes a racial form of stereotyping. I think The Sydney Morning Herald and Fairfax Media in general ought to be very careful about the almost overtly anti-Semitic tone some of their commentary, including their editorial cartoon, have adopted.”
It is understood Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull rang Goodsir to lambast him for running the cartoon, which he deemed anti-Semitic and offensive to many of his constituents in his eastern Sydney electorate.
Carlton’s column quoted Israeli journalist Gideon Levy accusing the Jewish state of fascism. “It is a breathtaking irony that these atrocities can be committed by a people with a proud liberal tradition of scholarship and culture, who hold the Warsaw Ghetto and the six million dead of the Holocaust at the centre of their race memory,” Carlton wrote. “But this is a new and brutal Israel.”
Goodsir declined to comment yesterday.
