To the reader who sent me a drawing of the Statue of Liberty, with devil’s horns and tail, brandishing the Star of David, and a caption about Zionists running the show, a belated thanks. When life seems tough, I seek comfort in the idea my people nefariously control the free world. With tribal connections like these my bank balance is bound to improve, right?
Alas, black humour cannot override the reality that such anti-Semitic tropes continue to exert power. Even in places where there’s next to no Jews, Jew-hatred is again a convenient shorthand for illiberal politics. Sowing fear, building walls, trashing democratic institutions.
In my family’s native Hungary, the Fidesz party of Viktor Orban swept parliamentary elections last weekend after campaigning against Muslim immigration — with a well-publicised catch.
Orban fingered one man as puppet-master behind a plot to overrun white, Christian Hungary with refugees: the Hungarian-born billionaire, philanthropist and Holocaust survivor George Soros. Campaign posters depicted Soros embracing opposition figures and brandishing cutters for slashing through Hungary’s border fence. A spokeswoman for Soros’ Open Society Foundations told Roger Cohen from The New York Times the images were doctored to elongate the financier’s nose, “right out of the Goebbels playbook”.
Read the article by Julie Szego in The Sydney Morning Herald.