I immediately saw that this would pose a huge problem. Chapleau’s caricature in The Press last Wednesday featured an illustration from the film Nosferatu from 1922 to show the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as a vampire preparing to sink his long claws into the town of Rafah, in Gaza. Wow, I thought, they let that slide!
The undertow did not take long. In the United States, Toronto-born journalist David Frum denounced the thing on with its million subscribers. THE Jerusalem Post, among others, reported this. Here, the Israeli ambassador, Jewish personalities and organizations demanded and obtained the removal of the cursed drawing, recalling in particular that the Nazis had used the same imagery in their anti-Semitic campaigns. The Press apologized flatly.
Ordinarily, all prudent actors in media and political life know that, while criticism of the Israeli government is necessary and permitted, there exists a lexical and iconographic field, surrounding the Shoah, which is radioactive. You only venture there at your own risk. Yves Michaud paid dearly, over 24 years, for his foray into this field. It’s the turn of The Press. So why do we have a new candidate for opprobrium this week: Yves-François Blanchet?
Here is what Thursday wrote on X the leader of the Bloc Québécois: “I indeed understand that the caricature could shock the defenders of the Israeli Prime Minister. Another might describe Hamas as a monstrous organization. » He continues: “I don’t have that much against caricature. I’m definitely against censorship. This is not hate propaganda or incitement to violence. »
The facts are undeniable. Netanyahu is preparing an offensive against Rafah to flush out Hamas terrorists who are using civilians as human shields. The international community, including American President Joe Biden, is asking him to abandon it, believing that it is impossible to carry out this military operation without causing a large number of civilian deaths and injuries. Israel is asking 1.3 million Gazans, many of whom came to take refuge there to escape the bombings in the north, to leave before the bombs rain. The famine, caused by Netanyahu’s refusal to allow food convoys to enter, has already begun. The International Court of Justice did not decide, on the merits, that Israel was committing genocide, but ordered it to take measures to prevent its military action from taking that step.
So, how can the caricaturist draw (exaggerating, as is his job) the man who presides over this human catastrophe? We understand that he could give him the features of any real or imagined villain – Palpatine, Chucky, Darth Vader, the Terminator, the Joker would be permitted, like Stalin, Pol Pot or Pinochet. But it was agreed to prohibit any association with the Hitler regime or with images used by the Nazis, including vampires, to demonize Jews.
Blanchet is therefore right to say that this is censorship, but he is told that it is justified by the incomparable history of the Nazi attempt to eradicate the Jews. The same argument was used to declare it intolerable that a people who were victims of attempted genocide could be accused of wanting to commit one, regardless of the arguments and evidence that could be presented — including statements by current Israeli ministers wishing openly the disappearance of the Palestinians.
Can the argument of ignorance be invoked? Could a Quebec cartoonist plead that he did not have in his memory or at his disposal the complete list of prohibited images? That he didn’t know that Nosferatu had been hijacked by the Third Reich?
Montreal author Mordecai Richler once offered the answer to this question. In the great American magazine The AtlanticRichler had claimed that the Parti Québécois knowingly used a Nazi song in its campaign, Tomorrow belongs to us. To Stéphane Venne, the song’s author, who wrote in the magazine’s next edition that it was completely false, Richler admitted that the song “was not a deliberate provocation, only a lack of tact.” The author of Duddy Kravitz thus suggested that any new song title be first compared to the complete register of real or fictitious Nazi songs (the incriminated song taken from Cabaret having only been invented in 1972). Richler, obviously, has never apologized for having thus defamed the PQ and its leaders.
There is therefore an impassable barrier. But only in one sense.
Since the murderous and barbaric Hamas attack of October 7, the Israeli government has often compared the Palestinian organization and its methods to Hitler, as reported by the Israeli press. They are worse, we heard, because at least the Nazis hid their executions and torture from the world, while Hamas happily broadcasts them on social networks. An excellent argument, if you ask me.
Basically, we are told that the survivors of the camps (there are still many in Montreal) and the trauma caused by these events for subsequent generations are such that even targeted use — against a political leader, but not against the community — of one image among the thousand once used by the Nazis is too hard to bear. I believe him. As I also believe that devout Muslims are physically repulsed by the sight of caricatures of Mohammed. However, we defend the right to publish them and show them in class.
Proponents of freedom of expression have thus agreed that this freedom must not come up against a non-existent right not to be offended. Legally, only calls to hatred and violence form its surrounding walls. Among sensible people — and in major daily newspapers — anti-Semitism, like any expression of racism, crosses the line.
Within this perimeter, The Press nevertheless indicated that Chapleau’s drawing “was intended to be a criticism of Mr. Netanyahu’s policies. It targeted the Israeli government, not the Jewish people.” So she was not anti-Semitic. The prime minister was ridiculed not for his ethnicity or religion, but for his policies. There is no doubt about it. The Press removed it and apologized anyway, deeming the use of the image of Nosferatu. Yves-François Blanchet thinks that these excuses are unwelcome.
I understand that the very existence of this debate (and of the column you are reading at the moment) brings us dangerously close to the radioactive zone. I accept the argument that, even if the Jewish people do not have a monopoly on suffering, as Yves Michaud said, the Shoah occupies a special place in the historical scale of barbarism.