UK Police Urged to Take Action Against Cartoonist Over Antisemitic ‘Blood Libel’ Depiction of Netanyahu
British cartoonist Bob Moran’s antisemitic depiction of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu. Image: X/Twitter
A British cartoonist has been reported to the police and the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) over a viscerally antisemitic depiction of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he shared on X/Twitter over the weekend.
The cartoon by artist Bob Moran shows Netanyahu wearing a deadened expression as he consumes the flesh of Palestinian children at a table covered with blood. Alongside him, dressed in butler’s uniforms and serving him the meal, are US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who studiously ignore the children’s corpses against a background of devastated buildings in Gaza. One word — “Kosher” — is positioned at the top of the image.
Several respondents pointed to Moran’s invocation of classic antisemitic tropes, such as the medieval blood libel, which falsely held that Jews use the blood of Christian children for their religious rituals, and unaccountable power and influence over foreign governments, as demonstrated by the servile postures in the representations of Biden and Sunak.
“This cartoon…combines three antisemitic tropes of Christian origin,” commented Saul Zadka, a Bible scholar based in Tel Aviv. “Control the world, enslaving non-Jews to do their bidding. They try to supplant the true lord, Jesus…Kill and eat babies and innocents, as they once did to Jesus…Are paragons of hypocrisy, focusing on ‘pharisaic’ ritual purity while rejecting morality, rejecting Jesus.”
Zadka then added: “Moran knew what he was doing, he wants to be martyred, crucified. He wants to be a victim. Christians have almost completely left all this behind, but it’s kept alive by the far left.”
Other social media users merely expressed disgust. “I am truly shocked Bob. This is an antisemitic hate trope. Awful,” one post read.
Among those pledging to report Moran to the police and the CPS was Laura Dodsworth, an author and journalist who contributes to several British media outlets.
“This cartoon is indistinguishable in character and style from the Nazis vile antisemitic propaganda,” Dodsworth wrote. “One specific Nazi counterpart showed a Jew eating children. Nazi-style slurs against Jews have no place in modern Britain.”
However, Moran doubled down on his cartoon, angrily denying that it trafficked in antisemitic tropes and even denying that Netanyahu belongs to the Jewish people.
“By the way, as far as I’m concerned, there are no Jews in that cartoon,” he posted. “If you think the man in the middle is a Jew, you have no understanding of the Jewish faith. Or any faith. Or basic morality.”
A former contributor to The Guardian and Telegraph news outlets, Moran is currently unemployed. He was fired from the Telegraph in 2021 after he used his Twitter feed to attack a doctor who recommended wearing protective masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, telling his followers that she “deserves to be verbally abused.”
The current spat around Moran is the latest in a series of controversies concerning antisemitic images in the British press.
In April 2023, The Guardian was forced to apologize after it published a cartoon of Richard Sharp, the outgoing Jewish chairman of the BBC, showing him with a hooked nose and a sinister grin while holding a box labeled with the name of the Goldman Sachs investment bank, where he previously worked.
In October that year, the same paper announced that it was firing veteran contributor Steve Bell over a cartoon that showed Netanyahu preparing to cut his abdomen in the shape of the Gaza Strip with a scalpel. Editors at The Guardian feared that Bell’s cartoon evoked the “pound of flesh” demanded by the Jewish character Shylock in William Shakespeare’s play “The Merchant of Venice.”
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