UK’s Guardian Draws Outrage with ‘Blatantly Antisemitic’ Cartoon

i24 News

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Illustrative. The Guardian’s web page after it removed a letter defending an MP accused of antisemitism that falsely claimed to be from “prominent members of the Jewish community.” Photo: screenshot.

i24 News – British daily The Guardian on Saturday apologized for a caricature of an outgoing BBC boss that was accused of trafficking in antisemitic stereotypes.

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Richard Sharp announced his resignation as BBC chairman on Friday after his involvement in a loan for then British prime minister Boris Johnson raised questions about the broadcaster’s impartiality.

Martin Rowson’s drawing pictured a grinning caricature of Sharp, who is Jewish, with an enlarged hooked nose; Sharp is seen carrying a Goldman Sachs office box, stuffed with gold and squid tentacles.

Banking and investment giant Goldman Sachs is Sharp’s former employer. The multinational figures prominently in antisemitically-tinged rhetoric on world domination by financial capital. Notably, Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi described it as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

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Following widespread outrage, The Guardian issued an apology and removed Rowson’s drawing from its website as it “did not meet our editorial standards.” Rowson too issued an apology, saying he “screwed up pretty badly.”

The Guardian, Britain’s left-wing broadsheet, is embroiled in Britain’s latest antisemitism scandal days after its sister newspaper published a letter by far-left Labour parliamentarian Dianne Abbott claiming that Jews have not experienced racism, but mere “prejudice.”

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Abbott, the first black woman to become an MP in the UK, said in a letter to the Observer newspaper that Irish, Jewish and Traveler people all “experience prejudice” similar to that suffered by “white people with points of difference, such as redheads. But they are not all their lives subject to racism.”

An Equality and Human Rights Commission investigation into antisemitism in Corbyn’s Labor party found in 2020 that the party’s hard-left faction in particular was “responsible for unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination.”

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