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.

Yasir Arafat was often quoted as saying that his “strongest weapon is the womb of an Arab woman.” That is, he believed the high birthrates of both Palestinians and Arab Israelis ensured that Jews would eventually be a minority in the Land of Israel, at which point Arabs could call for a binational state and get an Arab one. Using similar logic, both Israelis and their self-styled sympathizers have made the case for territorial concessions to prevent such an eventuality. Yet, Yoram Ettinger argues, the statistics have year after year told a different story:

Contrary to the projections of the demographic establishment at the end of the 19th century and during the 1940s, Israel’s Jewish fertility rate is higher than those of all Muslim countries other than Iraq and the sub-Saharan Muslim countries. Based on the latest data, the Jewish fertility rate of 3.13 births per woman is higher than the 2.85 Arab rate (since 2016) and the 3.01 Arab-Muslim fertility rate (since 2020).

The Westernization of Arab demography is a product of ongoing urbanization and modernization, with an increase in the number of women enrolling in higher education and increased use of contraceptives. Far from facing a “demographic time bomb” in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish state enjoys a robust demographic tailwind, aided by immigration.

However, the demographic and policy-making establishment persists in echoing official Palestinian figures without auditing them, ignoring a 100-percent artificial inflation of those population numbers. This inflation is accomplished via the inclusion of overseas residents, double-counting Jerusalem Arabs and Israeli Arabs married to Arabs living in Judea and Samaria, an inflated birth rate, and deflated death rate.

The U.S. should derive much satisfaction from Israel’s demographic viability and therefore, Israel’s enhanced posture of deterrence, which is America’s top force- and dollar-multiplier in the Middle East and beyond.