This week, the New York Times got itself into hot water for printing a blatantly Jew-hating cartoon in its international edition. The cartoon depicted Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an elongated dachshund, a Star of David hanging around his neck, leading a fat, blind, yarmulke-wearing Donald Trump through the streets. The implication: The nefarious, animalistic Jew is in control of the Jew-perverted president of the United States.
The image is nothing new. In 1940, the Lustige Blatter, a weekly German humor magazine, printed an image of a tall, ugly, bearded Hasidic Jew taking a tiny Winston Churchill by the hand and leading him across the surface of the globe.
So, what would tempt the New York Times to print an illustration directly from the mind of Julius Streicher? The fact is that the Times, like many of today’s mainstream media outlets, has been completely and utterly willing to cover for and, indeed, engage in anti-Semitism, so long as it is disguised as anti-Zionism. Undoubtedly, the editors at the Times believed that the cartoon was merely a criticism of Israel, not a criticism of Jews. That excuse found its logical apotheosis in a 2014 German regional-court ruling that characterized a firebombing of a synagogue as merely a protest against Israel, rather than act of anti-Semitism.