Palestine: Big event planned Saturday
A “grande mobilisation” is planned for Saturday in support of Palestine. Two hundred organizations are said to be involved, but the time and location are not mentioned.
In tangentially related news, La Presse withdrew an editorial cartoon by Serge Chapleau initially posted on Wednesday morning, showing Benjamin Netanyahu as a vampire, captioned Nosfenyahou. The paper has apologized.
Daisy 06:32 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
It’s at 2 p.m. at Dorchester Square.
steph 08:23 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Is it even possible to criticize Israel without having the anti-Semitism card pulled? Maybe if Netanyahu wasn’t such a gross disgusting monster.
Doesn’t this action (removal of editorial cartoon) play into the trope of Jews controlling the media? I’m glad CBC is sharing the screengrab.
MarcG 08:56 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
It’s amazing to me that the comic made it all the way to print. Nobody said “Hey, uh, that’s kind of a very well-known historical racist image you’ve got there?” The reason Legault can claim that racism isn’t systemic in Quebec and not get laughed off the stage is because of ignorance.
qatzelok 09:13 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Related to that Chapleau cartoon:
“Your vampire ball is over” – Putin to Western elites
https://www.rt.com/russia/594197-putin-vampire-ball-west/
jeather 09:20 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
I absolutely believe that — even if Chapleau didn’t consciously remember this trope, which seems probable, because IME it’s not in common current use — the history influenced the drawing.
There’s lots of ways to criticize Israel in general and Netanyahu in particular, and calling it the “anti-semitism card” implies that it’s always fake or false or just pulled unfairly, and that’s not true. Yes, some people will call everything antisemitism, just like other people will argue that even the most obvious things are not at all based in it. But that’s true for everything, not just criticism of Israel.
walkerp 09:56 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Agreed. It’s unconscious racial bias. There are so many ways you could portray Netanyahu as a monster without an image that emphasizes stereotypical Jewish features that have been used for millennia in hate propaganda. That it didn’t get flagged by the french media is further evidence that that kind of antisemitism is still quite deep and unexamined here. I do believe Chapleau when he said that he didn’t intend it to be a racist caricature. He probably was all happy about the clever wordplay with Nosferatu that he thought he had discovered.
Although counterpoint just Google Nosferatu and anti-semitism and you will discover many scholarly arguments that the movie itself was channeling anti-semitism in its themes and imagery.
The Israeli government does exploit the shit out of the anti-semitism argument to defend its own horrific practices, indeed, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there and you don’t have to lay it out on a platter like this.
Kate 10:05 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
I wonder. Chapleau’s clearly got social-aesthetic chops, going by the references he’s made in the past. I doubt he could’ve created that image without some sense of its historical referents.
Joey 10:21 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Montreal has a strong Jewish community that is active and engaged in civic life beyond its own institutions – it’s also a community that is generally beloved throughout the city (bagels! Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen! Phyllis Lambert! Et cetera.). So it’s easy to forget that, outside the city (but also somewhat within it), the sort of default/latent xenophobia that is deeply integrated into the social order here applies to us Jews as well. I suppose that’s another way of saying that it’s likely that Chapleau + his editors simply didn’t think playing footsie with anti-semitic imagery was such a big deal – certainly more likely than the notion that they had no idea that the cartoon had anti-semitic connotations.
Blork 11:59 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Let’s maybe step back a bit. Netanyahu can clearly be seen as a bad guy at the moment, and from some points of view could be seen as evil or some kind of angel of death or whatever. The cartoon is really just playing up on the similarity in the names “Netanyahu” and “Nosferatu,” in the context of Netanyahu’s aggression in Gaza.
As for the trope, let’s remember that the film wasn’t (or likely wasn’t) intended to be specifically antisemitic, although it was somewhat xenophobic (it was playing on the “fear of the other”). The screenplay was written by Henrik Galeen, himself a Jew, and the claims of antisemitism are based almost entirely on the shape of Count Orlok’s nose, which is pretty scant evidence if you ask me.
When the film came out in 1922 the Nazi party barely existed. It was picked up by them a decade later and used as propaganda. The idea that Count Orlok was necessarily supposed to be Jewish (or at least represented Jews) was played up then by the Nazi propagandists and later reinforced by the anti-Nazis as some kind of “proof” that the film was antisemitic.
And as tropes tend to go, the issue evolved from “here is a bit of evidence that there might have been some antisemetic sentiments in the portrayal of Count Orlok” to “it is undoubtedly true that Count Orkok was meant to be antisemitic!” the same way it goes when you play that game where you whisper something to the person next to you, then they whisper it to the person next to them, etc. By the time it comes around to you again all nuance is gone from the story, and in fact it can be a completely different story.
All that said, it was a mistake to publish the cartoon. Not because Nosferatu was intended to be antisemitic, but because we have come to believe that Nosferatu was intended to be antisemitic.
walkerp 12:04 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
I appreciate the detailed background on the movie, Blork. That is good stuff. But you added the “intended to be anti-semitic” to your argument which nobody here said. These tropes go back to Roman times and whether or not it was intended, the connection is there today.
walkerp 12:05 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Also, LOL @ “Count Orkok” typo.
Sorry! 🙂
Blork 14:03 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
@walkerp, fair enough. But surely intention counts for something. What irks me is that in our social-media-reductionism-driven society, the conversation about Nosferatu has gone from “there is some imagery there that could be considered antisemitic” to the received truth that “Nosferatu is antisemitic,” which is a trope in itself.
Scary movies often play up on the public’s fears; whatever the fear-of-the-month is, so to speak. These days it tends to be environmental apocalypse. In 1921 Germany, with the country having just been defeated in a world war and with the German Empire collapsed, one of the fears was of outsiders, or “the others” who would come and conquer. That was a normal fear at the time. (Bear in mind that WWII had not yet happened, the Holocaust had not yet happened, there were no refugee crises the way we have them today aside from European refugees from places torn up in the first world war, so “fear of other” had different connotations then.)
So they set out to make a scary movie, and they want to play up that “fear of others” because it will make the scariness more effective and therefore help the movie be successful. Bring in the costume department, which was lead by Albin Grau, an occultist who was later persecuted by the Nazis and who escaped to Switzerland before the war to avoid being sent to a camp. Grau was also the production designer for the film, so he determined the entire aesthetic.
I don’t know what conversations took place during the set and costume design meetings for the film, but the people who fall into the trope of accusing everything “Nosferatu” of being antisemitic will probably think every conversation started with “let’s make a movie to drive out the Jews!” I highly doubt it was anything like that. Rather, they wanted Count Orlok to look creepy and weird and foreign, and the nose was just part of that, along with the bald head, the creepy hands, the fanged teeth, and the weird clothing.
If the whole thing hinged on the nose that would be one thing. But the nose was just part of a overall creepy aesthetic, and I find it curious that 100 years later we are still placing so much emphasis on that one thing, and making noises as if that one thing defines the entire character/movie.
Kate 17:14 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
Daisy, I forgot to thank you for posting place and time.
Joey 20:53 on 2024-03-21 Permalink
No Blork – the problem isn’t that *Nosferatu* has been retconned into being some anti-semitic trope, it’s that portraying a prominent Jewish politician as a *vampire* is anti-semitic propaganda. Drawing Jews as big, powerful, frightening vampires is dealing in anti-semitic imagery regardless of what the intention behind the Nosferatu character is. And, yes, you could argue that OK this cartoon doesn’t cross the line per se (or maybe not too much), but tolerating this kind of thing just enables something worse to follow it.
Blork 09:14 on 2024-03-22 Permalink
OK, fair comment. There are two tropes at work here though; the trope of representing Jews as vampires, and the trope of pointing at Nosferatu as an example of antisemitism. My concern in this tangent is really about the second one.
Ian 09:18 on 2024-03-22 Permalink
To add to Joey’s comment, portraying Jews as “bloodsuckers” is often a not particularly subtle dogwhistle for blood libel.
Kevin 13:27 on 2024-03-22 Permalink
The David Frum thread on the entwined history of Nosferatu and anti-semitism is worth reading
https://x.com/davidfrum/status/1770434389299605686?s=20