Anti-Semitic Cartoonists Don’t Belong at the White House

Among those invited to a White House media summit tomorrow is the cartoonist Ben Garrison, much of whose work portrays President Trump in a heroic light, and the president’s enemies, or “globalists” more generally, in a grotesque light. A few of his illustrations traffic in anti-Semitism, sometimes subtly and sometimes unmistakably. Daniella Greenbaum Davis writes:

Consider [one] egregious specimen of Garrison’s work: General H.R. McMaster, the former national security adviser, and General David Petraeus, the ex-director of the CIA, are manipulated by their puppet master George Soros, who is himself guided by a greenish hand and arm labeled “Rothschilds,” the name of a Jewish family of financiers whose name has become a byword for Internet conspiracists.

This is classic anti-Semitic imagery, familiar from tsarist, Soviet, Nazi, and Arab-nationalist propaganda: government ministers as puppets of a shadowy Jewish conspiracy. Compare Garrison’s cartoon with the [anti-Semitic] cartoon from the New York Times [international edition] of Netanyahu and Trump, and we see how similar they are. Major political figures with tremendous power and influence are supposedly manipulated by Jewish hands. The takeaway—“Jews control the world”—is identical.

Garrison claimed that the cartoon had been commissioned by the “alt-right” blogger Mike Cernovich; the reason, allegedly, being that Cernovich feared McMaster and other recent appointees wanted to purge the administration of figures sympathetic to the alt-right. If this is true, it suggests a deployment of anti-Semitism not from conviction, but as a kind of cynical strategy.

As for the Jewish perspective, it may be tempting to refrain from criticizing an administration that has been exceptionally friendly to Israel. . . . Likewise, the White House may believe that in exchange for its support for the Jewish state, American Jews will give the administration a pass for signaling to a small but vocal segment of its base—through acts of a sort of wink-and-nod anti-Semitism—that it still shares some of their key worldviews.

UPDATE: As of this morning, July 10, the White House has told reporters that Garrison has been disinvited.

Read more at Spectator

More about: Alt-Right, Anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, Rothschilds

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF