TEL AVIV – The University of California Berkeley’s student newspaper has drawn ire for publishing a cartoon featuring an anti-Semitic caricature of former Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz using Nazi-era imagery.
Days before his scheduled talk earlier this month in which the lawyer defended Israel from a liberal perspective, The Daily Californian published a cartoon featuring Dershowitz hiding behind a wall of “liberalism” with a globe-shaped body ostensibly representing perceived Jewish control of the world. In his hand is an IDF soldier who has just shot a man and underneath his foot a flattened body lies next to a Palestinian flag.
Dershowitz took to Twitter to slam the university. “Silence from Berkeley officials re Nazi cartoon of me. Imagine the outcry if it were anti Muslim/Black/Gay/Feminist,” he posted.
Dershowitz also posted a picture of a flier promoting the speech with his face defaced by a swastika.
The same student paper published an oped the day before the talk describing Dershowitz’ liberalism as “odd and unpleasant.” The author adds that the speech, which had not yet taken place, would be a “biased, moralistic and probably boring monologue from a publicity hound.”
Responding to the caricature, Dershowitz told the Daily Wire that “there is very little difference between the Nazis of the hard Right and the anti-Semites of the hard Left. This obviously was a hard Left neo-Nazi cartoon.”
He added, “I’m surprised that it was treated with as little response. Imagine if a comparably anti-black or anti-woman or anti-gay cartoon was ever published in the Berkeley student newspaper. Again, it reflects for me the incredible double standard in tolerance that people have toward anti-Semitism.”
Speaking to Breitbart Jerusalem, journalist and anti-Semitism expert Ben Dror Yemini said the fact that the cartoon was published was “unbelievable but not surprising.”
“There is a huge industry of lies being pushed by progressives,” Yemini said, drawing from the title of his newly released book that exposes the media and academia’s ongoing fraud in pushing its delegitmization campaign against Israel.
Yemini says that it doesn’t matter if Dershowitz describes himself as a liberal, since Israel’s opponents believe that “anyone who supports Israel should automatically be condemned.”
“They really believe that Israel is an apartheid state, that it is born in sin,” he said.
And there is almost no outcry, said Yemini, “because it’s against Jews. That makes it okay, legitimate.”
“The tragedy is that in history’s most progressive, most liberal times, lies prevail,” he said.
“Lies are part of the freedom of speech,” he added.
Breitbart Jerusalem’s requests for comment from both the editor of The Daily Californian and the cartoonist himself went unanswered.
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