Ma nishtanah?

Here's a piece from the Washington Post (hat tip: Matthew Kramer - registration required) reviewing the issue raised by the Dave Brown cartoon which shows Ariel Sharon devouring a baby. What it reports is that the cartoonist is unmoved and unrepentant:

Brown and the Independent have stood their ground, insisting that the drawing represented fair criticism of a head of government. They claimed vindication after the state-run Press Complaints Commission dismissed a formal complaint from Sharon and the embassy, and again, more recently, when the illustration won the annual award for best drawing from the Political Cartoon Society.
.....
British editorial cartoons can be savage and graphic: They often depict political leaders such as Blair and Bush committing lewd acts or roaming the world stage with blood dripping from their hands. In that context, Brown said he believes that his Sharon cartoon, which appeared the day before Israel's elections last year, fell well within acceptable bounds.
.....
"I was very careful," he said. "I was very aware not to use the Israeli flag because of the Star of David, or other Jewish symbols. I made it specifically Sharon and Likud."

It's always a sign that someone's on weak ground when they steer entirely clear of the one thing they need to address. As Roger Simon has written lately in a different connection, 'not to acknowledge a serious argument is... frankly, stupid'. The one thing that Brown and his supporters need to address is passed over here in silence: and this is that, because Sharon is a Jewish leader and the leader of the Jewish state, and because there is an old anti-Semitic theme of Jews devouring the blood of non-Jewish children, what might have been otherwise acceptable as a cartoon wasn't in the given case. (See my post, A new anti-Semitism?, on the old normblog site, November 27.) For similar reasons, while it is acceptable to draw George Bush as a monkey, it would not be to draw Robert Mugabe so, dreadful though the latter has become. Can anyone doubt that a monkey-cartoon of Mugabe by a white cartoonist would be condemned as racist? So what's the difference?