Israeli Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer said on Monday that The New York Times has become a “cesspool of hostility” amid the publication’s international edition featuring anti-Semitic cartoons on April 25 and over the same weekend that a Chabad-Lubavitch synagogue in Southern California was attacked by a gunman who killed one woman and injured three others, including a child.
Dermer, attributing Saturday’s tragedy at the Chabad of Poway to white supremacists, said at the annual Holocaust Days of Remembrance organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that “we have also seen anti-Semitism increasingly poison minds in the political classes of what once proudly called itself the West.”
“We have also seen one of the world’s most prestigious newspapers become a cesspool of hostility towards Israel that goes well beyond any legitimate criticism of a fellow, imperfect democracy,” he said.
“The same New York Times that a century ago mostly hid from their readers the Holocaust of the Jewish people has today made its pages a safe space for those who hate the Jewish state. Through biased coverage, slanderous columns and anti-Semitic cartoons, its editors shamefully choose week after week to cast the Jewish state as a force for evil.”
The Times apologized for the April 25 cartoon and, according to The Daily Beast, on Monday cut ties with the syndication service behind the image.
Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon said the apology was insufficient.
“Those who engage in anti-Semitism must be punished, whether it’s here at the U.N., political leaders, editors, policy pundits or college professors,” he said. “I am not in a position of accepting or not accepting the apology, but if somebody makes a mistake, I think somebody should be accountable.”
Thursday’s cartoon featured U.S. President Donald Trump wearing a yarmulke, sporting dark-tinted glasses and being led by a dog with the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a large blue Star of David hanging from its collar.
The weekend image by Norwegian cartoonist Roar Hagen depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with sinister eyes taking a picture of himself with a selfie-stick, carrying in what appears to be an empty desert a tablet featuring the Israeli flag painted on it.
It also resembles a different one from the same cartoonist featuring Netanyahu carrying a tablet that resembles the Ten Commandments, which the Israelites received in the desert after fleeing their enslaved lives in Egypt, in what appears to be a desert being followed by a sinister-looking U.S. President Donald Trump, both walking in the opposite parallel of a directional sign marked “Golan,” a reference to the Golan Heights.
Trump officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan last month.
