Itongadol.- The Spanish Jewish community is threatening legal action for a “Nazi” style cartoon published by a local satirical magazine which portrayed hook nosed Israeli soldiers urinating on Palestinians and physically abusing Jesus.
In the most recent issue of the popular left wing El Jueves, a publication similar in many respects to the irreverent French weekly Charlie Hebdo, illustrator Julio Serrano harshly criticized the Jewish state, including allegations that Jerusalem’s Israel Museum keeps a Torah scroll wrapped in “the skin of my holy testicles” and that any Jew who marries an Arab is stripped of his citizenship and expelled.
“This is absolutely outrageous and obviously we are going to be seeking legal remedies,” David Hatchwell, the president of the Jewish community of Madrid and vice president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, told the Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
While magazines lambasting religion and politics in an irreverent style are fine, he contended, it is “absolutely unacceptable” to engage in “every single original anti-Semitic attack and slanders against the Jewish people.”
“This [cartoon] could be taken from the Nazis’ Der Sturmer and nobody would notice the difference,” he continued, referring, among other things, to the magazine’s portrayal of Jews as having long hooked noses and seeking to dominate their gentile neighbors.
In one panel an Israeli soldier, wearing what appears to be a German style helmet, can be seen holding his genitals in his hands as he urinates on a cowering Arab and cries that “you don’t understand, Palestinian, my grandparents were in a concentration camp”
“Ok, the Holocaust was horrible and resulted in the creation of the State of Israel so that the Jews could live in peace, but that doesn’t give you the right to hassle the non-Jewish people who live there,” he writes. “Israel is like the child who watched in horror as his father beat his mother and now, as an adult, he beats his wife. Under Israeli law, Jews have preferential treatment as regards education, health, homes and work, and if you are not Jewish in the State of Israel, you are f**ked.”
Regarding politics, Serrano wrote that “:the Jews have it all tied up” and that non-Zionist parties are banned “so let’s forget about the cannabis party.”
Another illustration showed a soldier kicking an Arab woman and a hasidic man. Explaining that Israel constitutes “apartheid 2.0,” the illustrator averred that “no Israeli can marry a Palestinian [and that] such a union take place, the Israeli loses his citizenship and is obliged to emigrate.”
“The Palestinians are made to use secondary roads, which are studded with checkpoints at which Israeli soldiers exercise an iron control over the movements of those who are not Jews,” he continued, using a picture a long nosed Jew pushing a beaten Jesus next to a checkpoint.
“There is no real protocol of behavior and the soldiers do whatever they want with the Palestinians, they can forbid them from passing, detain them, take their things away and worse. It has been calculated that every Palestinian spends some 4 hours a day stopped at these controls.”
“These are lies, totally non factual, and it’s done in a sophisticated enough way that people who know nothing about the conflict will think that Israelis are Nazi-like oppressors and it affirms every myth [about Jews] in Europe [held] for thousands of years,” Hatchwell complained.
He said that the community plans on approaching the courts with a complaint of hate speech against this “pure anti-Semitism” which is “anathema to the values of modern Spain.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center agreed, issuing a statement to the Post calling the cartoons “classic anti-Semitism camouflaged as ostensibly legitimate criticism of Israeli policies.”
El Jueves, which had previously made waves in 2007 for printing a cover illustration of prince Felipe VI and his wife having sex, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.