Dave Rich Profile picture
Apr 29 10 tweets 6 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
The depiction of Richard Sharp in today's @guardian cartoon falls squarely into an antisemitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power. It's appalling. Here's why 🧵 ImageImage
First, the face. Here's how the Nazis did it. And how the Soviet Union did it. And modern-day Jew-haters. Antisemites have often imagined Jews as ugly and physically repulsive, focusing specifically on these features. ImageImageImage
Then the squid. Yes, Sharp worked for Goldman Sachs, which was famously described in @RollingStone as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money" rollingstone.com/politics/polit…
This description stuck. ImageImageImageImage
The problem is that a squid or octopus is also a common antisemitic motif, used to depict a supposed Jewish conspiracy with its tentacles wrapped around whatever parts of society the Jews supposedly control. Especially money. Are those gold coins in the box with Sharp's squid? ImageImageImageImage
You might argue that outsized facial features and tentacles are common to other topics too, so it's just a cartoon thing. Except where something has a long and familiar antisemitic history, it takes on a different meaning when you apply it to Jews.
Or to put it another way: you might draw Boris Johnson as a gorilla and nobody would mind. But if you drew a black politician that way, it would be racist. Same principle applies here.
Is it possible that a cartoonist as experienced as @MartinRowson is unaware of these common antisemitic traditions (plus whoever else the Guardian saw it)? Or perhaps this just another case of assumptions about Jews, money and power that are so familiar, people don't notice them.
These assumptions have been built into our world for centuries. They are so familiar that they pass many people by (although Jews and antisemites always notice). It's the central theme of my book Everyday Hate - but the Guardian really should know better amazon.co.uk/Everyday-Hate-…
Incidentally, several of the images in this thread are taken from this excellent @antisempolicy briefing on antisemitic imagery. Perhaps Martin Rowson should read it. antisemitism.org.uk/wp-content/upl…

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More from @daverich1

Oct 31, 2022
How online Jew-hate works: a short tale involving the @tiktok_uk 'For You' column, a bunch of nazi videos, and my 16 y.o. son (spoiler: he's fine, and he gave me permission to do this) 🧵
My son spends most of his life scrolling through funny football videos on TikTok. A couple of weeks ago he got a shock: in amongst the videos of Messi & Ronaldo was this antisemitic meme.
It was part of a slide show with a host of antisemitic, far right images - 18 in total - in his 'For You' recommendations tab on TikTok. The video even has the hashtags 'jew' and 'evil' but got recommended by the algorithm anyway🤷‍♂️
Read 12 tweets
May 18, 2022
Anatomy of a troll: Who would send me a reply like this?🧵
It's a familiar meme in far left anti-Israel circles - I've been sent it dozens of times - and the stuff about "Zionist supremacy" using antisemitism to silence "justified criticism" suggests that direction. But let's dig deeper and see what we find...
This troll replies to me quite often, usually with this kind of thing: mild conspiracy theories and hinting at antisemitism but no direct abuse. What else can we learn about them?
Read 14 tweets
Apr 5, 2022
Time to update this thread, because some of the people who spent years ignoring, denying and equivocating over the overwhelming evidence of antisemitism in the Labour Party, are doing the same with the evidence of atrocities in Ukraine, and it's disgusting.
It comes from a political mindset, not an objective search for truth. Cherry-pick your evidence, 'other side' everything, we're only asking questions, etc etc. Some of them practiced their lines in Syria when most people weren't paying attention.
The perversity over antisemitism in this part of the Left was only ever a fragment of a wider politics that is utterly repulsive, and now we are seeing it in its full, unadulterated glory.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 27, 2022
First they came for the Jews? Well we've been complaining about the contemptible politics of the so-called anti-imperialist (but actually just oppose America on everything) Left for *decades* and now here we are 🧵
You know, the part of the left that said America brought 9/11 on themselves. That published Osama bin Laden on the opinion pages of the Guardian. That made excuses for the Taliban.
The "We are all Hizbollah" crowd. The part that thinks Hamas is a progressive left wing movement fighting for social justice. The ones who take swastika placards to protests against the world's only Jewish state, and all the others who stand by and say nothing.
Read 11 tweets
Jan 4, 2022
Emma Watson's post isn't, in and of itself, antisemitic. It may be simplistic, ignorant, one-sided, and many other things, but it isn't antisemitic and expressing solidarity with Palestinians doesn't, in and of itself, make Emma Watson an antisemite.
Here's a different way of responding from a different Israeli diplomat (but with a similar line in Harry Potter-themed puns) that tries to engage with some of the arguments. It's a much better way, whether you agree with Gilad Erdan's points or not
Of course, the relationship between anti-Israel politics and antisemitism is complicated. Some anti-Israel speech is antisemitic, some isn't, and some of it is sometimes depending on context. Use the IHRA definition to help work it out holocaustremembrance.com/working-defini…
Read 7 tweets
Nov 29, 2021
The second @BristolUni QC’s report into David Miller has been leaked. It exonerates Miller just like the first one did: nothing he said was antisemitic. How did they reach this conclusion? They used the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-wins… 🧵👇
The QC was “asked to take into account” the IHRA definition of antisemitism, but devotes several pages of the report to criticism of IHRA by Tomlinson, Sedley, Feldman & Stern. Only one opinion supporting IHRA is given, even though it is backed by most Jewish orgs in this country
Instead they clearly preferred the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism's definition of antisemitism as “hatred, discrimination, prejudice or hostility against Jews *as Jews*, or Jewish institutions *as Jewish institutions*” (their emphasis) - and this is the problem.
Read 17 tweets

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