More on Everybody Draw Holocaust Day

Here’s another followup to Everybody Draw Holocaust Day (itself a followup to Everybody Draw Mohammed Day). Of course the Holocaust cartoons were a supposed counter to the drawings of Mohammed that were circulated. However in 2006, there was a similar counter done that actually didn’t miss the point.

The event was a contest of Jewish anti-Semitic self-deprecation cartoons and it was a reaction to the Iranian contest of anti-Semitic and Holocaust denial cartoons. From their Flickr page, the contest was announced on Feb 13th 2006, the winner on April 6th 2006.

“We’ll show the world we can do the best, sharpest, most offensive Jew hating cartoons ever published!” said Zusman, and Sandy added: “We’ll show the Iranians no one can do better Jew hating cartoons than the Jews!”

Often when people write a bigoted article or draw a racist cartoon they will respond to the media storm by saying “I was only satirising the racism/bigotry! [By exaggerating it]“. So it’s understandable that people would be suspicious of an event that sets out to satirise racism at the outset by exaggerating it. And supposedly they’re hiding behind their Jewish priviledge like it confers on them a right to make these cartoons?!

And yet this argument can be dissolved by looking at the actual cartoons. If ever there is room for satirising bigotry by exaggerating it this would be it. In fact it has a text counterpart that’s already acceptable. Let’s say someone makes a comment in some online forum to the effect of: “Jews control the world’s money”. I might be inclined to respond to it by saying something like: “Other than the cheques I get from Rothschild, the billions I save in tax thanks to my cousin’s brother accountant Moishe and my Passover butchering knife made of solid gold, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

Now, you might think my imagery isn’t very good — but that would only reflect on my shortcomings as a writer. But most people wouldn’t think I was doing anything wrong. The cartoon contest merely puts the same kind of exaggeration in a visual form. This certainly makes it more visceral but still the same in format.

And so I invite you to take a look at them. I’ve used my Jewish privilege to reproduce my favourite — it’s the only one that I found pretty funny over and above the satiric exaggeration — the angst in his face created with but a few lines is priceless. Another priceless bit is that almost every cartoon in the collection has some ridiculous aggressive comment from a tokyhotel314 who has missed the point by parsecs and has taken it on him/herself to damn each cartoon individually.

I imagine there might be some timidity commenting on this post so I’ll prompt some: what do you think of the general idea? Is there a stereotype of your own culture/background/whatever that you think would go well in a cartoon, just to show the world that you can produce more quality hatred than the bigots?