A Norwegian bank has issued a credit card featuring an anti-Semitic cartoon. The bank allows customers to design their own card and suggested that in this case their system failed to detect and reject the insulting image. But the customer insists that the image was not what he had ordered.
The card issued by DNB Bank, Norway’s largest financial institution featured an anti-Semitic caricature of a Jewish man with a hooked nose wearing a tallit – a Jewish prayer shawl – in front of a mass of gold coins, ynetnews.com has reported.
The bank has a facility whereby customers can order personalised cards with pictures or portraits printed on them. However, a spokesman for the bank has said that there are strict guidelines in place as to what can be uploaded and printed, and that the system is manually supervised. Unfortunately in this case, it appears that the image got past the supervision.
The recipient of the card is an Australian citizen currently living in Norway, who was shocked to find that the image on his newly minted card did not match that which he had ordered.
The issue was brought to the attention of the Israeli embassy in Oslo, which promptly contacted the bank’s management. The bank quickly apologised to the ambassador, explaining that the card should never have been printed. It said that the bank issues a few million cards each year, and assured the ambassador that the image would be deleted from its system.
The vice president of the bank has apologised to anyone who took offence at the image, stating that the card in question would be cancelled and a new one issued immediately.
Norway has a long history of anti-Semitism, which is again on the rise there. Its small population of Jews is rapidly dwindling still further as Jews emigrate to escape the growing Islamisation of the country.
In 2012 author Julie Bindel travelled to Norway to research the problem personally, and found that “Anti-Semitism in Norway has become such a serious threat that many Jews are emigrating to Israel and elsewhere to escape it. Human rights activists, police and leaders of the rapidly shrinking Jewish community fear that soon, for the first time in centuries, Jews will have no visible presence in Norway at all.”