Two Religions and Two Responses to Bigoted Cartoons

On Monday, protestors gathered in front of the offices of the New York Times after the paper’s international edition published a cartoon depicting the Israeli prime minister as a dog leading a blind and kippah-clad President Trump by his leash. Ruthie Blum comments:

[I]n the following weekend edition, the international edition of the New York Times published a second cartoon—this one of Netanyahu dressed as Moses holding the Ten Commandments in one hand and a selfie-stick in the other. . . .

Nobody at the paper, [however], is bracing for an armed Jewish onslaught. You know, like the slaughter in 2015 of twelve cartoonists and editors at the left-wing satirical French weekly, Charlie Hebdo, when it went after Islam. That the Paris-based paper regularly mocked Judaism and Christianity did not factor into the Islamist terrorists’ rampage, which continued on to the district’s Hyper Cacher kosher market, where shoppers were taken hostage and four Jews were murdered.

The Charlie Hebdo office was also fire-bombed in 2011, after publishing a cartoon of Muhammad in an issue whose cover was titled “Sharia Weekly.” This was five years after the paper was sued for running a series of controversial Muhammad-based cartoons that had appeared months earlier in the Danish daily, Jyllands-Posten, and caused a global Islamic assault. . . .

At least 200 people were killed during or as a result of those demonstrations, which were also used as an excuse for radical Muslim groups to vent their rage against Christians. Churches and Western embassies were attacked and Jyllands-Posten cartoonists, who were receiving credible death threats, went into hiding. . . .

[N]o cartoonist, editor, or anyone else ridiculing Jews or Judaism need fear for his life. The same cannot be said of those making fun of Muslims or Islam. Just ask the staff of Jyllands-Posten and Charlie Hebdo. If the New York Times editors are concerned today about the current uproar that their anti-Semitic cartoon has unleashed, it is not due to fear of death and destruction. It’s because the Jews complaining noisily outside their office . . . made it difficult for them to concentrate while coming up with their next batch of Israel-bashing pieces.

Read more at JNS

More about: Anti-Semitism, Charlie Hebdo, Jihadism, New York Times

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society