Genocide is not an event; you don’t just wake up one morning and start exterminating an entire people out of the blue. Genocide is a process; you have to achieve it.
And like any process, genocide has its stages – 10 stages in all if you go by the list prepared by Dr. Gregory Stanton, founding president and president of Genocide Watch, an organization that does exactly what its name suggests. noted.
One of these stages is dehumanization. This is an important question because committing genocide is not easy; murdering men, women and children by the thousands tends to take its toll on the psyche, perhaps leading the person to ask all sorts of uncomfortable questions, to counter all sorts of unwanted thoughts that intrude even in the most closed minds, like single spies sneaking into a well-guarded fortress.
Those who pull the trigger on children, those who drop bombs on schools and hospitals, are after all presumably as human as those they murder. How then, one wonders, do they sleep at night? How can we not see the blood on their hands every waking moment, like Lady Macbeth wandering the halls of Dunsinane Castle?
The answer is simple; you live with it by convincing yourself that those who are killed are not in fact human, or at least not as human as you. If you do this correctly and repeatedly, you will convince yourself that murder is not murder; This is pest control.
Dehumanization must be a continuous process, alongside the actual extermination, because, you see, it is not only your own public that you have to convince, it is also the governments and publics of the countries that are arming, helping , encourage and, in some cases, cheer you on as you go about your bloody but necessary business. This is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve as eviscerated babies pile up in the courtyards of besieged hospitals, body bags clutter the streets and the world broadcasts the apocalypse live on smartphones.
It is in this context that we must consider last week’s infamous Washington Post cartoon.
On November 6, as Israel continued its deliberate and direct attacks on Gaza civilians in bakeries, hospitals and homes, while clearly announcing its intention to eradicate the Palestinians, the Washington Post published a cartoon titled ” Human shields.”
The caricature depicts a man with bestial features in a dark pinstriped suit, on which Hamas is written in bold white letters. His comically large nose protrudes from beneath deep-set eyes crowned with bushy eyebrows. He has several children and a typically helpless-looking abaya-clad Arab woman attached to his body. To its left is a Palestinian flag and to its right is a partial image of Al-Aqsa and, of course, an oil lamp. Just in case the symbolism wasn’t clear enough. The cartoon ticks a lot of boxes. In his landmark study of dehumanization, academic Nick Haslam writes that among the categories of dehumanization through imagery are depictions of the enemy as a barbarian, a criminal, and a harasser of women and children.
The indignation was immediate and effective; After removing the cartoon, editorial page editor David Shipley wrote in a note to readers that while he considered the cartoon a mere “caricature” of a “specific Hamas spokesperson ”, indignation convinced him that he had “missed something profound and divisive”.
It’s not really David’s fault. Like so many people around the world, he grew up with media and cinematic depictions of hook-nosed Arabs, either as bumbling sheikhs, bumbling bandits, or brutal (and bumbling) fanatics. This is a phenomenon that author Jack Shaheen wrote about extensively in his book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People, which was later made into a documentary.
Coming back to the caricatures, Arabs are not the only ones to suffer this treatment, far from it. Nazi Germany was full of images (just a Google search) that depicted Jews in much the same way: Their eyes are piercing and their noses are hooked or bulbous, sometimes both. All of this is precisely calculated to produce repulsion in the viewer, to separate the righteous “us” from the bestial “them.”
Take a quick look at anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons from World War II, some drawn by none other than the famous children’s author Dr. Seuss, and you’ll see the same techniques being applied. Anti-Irish caricatures published in the United Kingdom and the United States in the late 19th century also depicted Irish immigrants as beasts, and black Americans – or black people in general – always found themselves depicted as apes or monkeys. monkeys. The goal is as simple as it is insidious and effective: link character to appearance, then make that appearance hideous.
The Nazis of course went further and regularly portrayed Jews as rats with (barely) human faces rushing before the cleansing Aryan broom. Proving that classics never really go out of style, in 2015 the Daily Mail took a page from Goebbels’ playbook. depicting rats rushing towards Europe alongside turbaned Muslim migrants carrying AK-47s. The only woman visible was of course duly veiled and wearing an abaya. But at least the Daily Mail didn’t portray the real migrants as rats, thus completely dehumanizing them.
That honor goes to none other than Michael Ramirez, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who drew the Washington Post cartoon “Human Shields.” In 2018, the same year as the Palestinian Great March of Return – in which Israeli snipers killed 266 unarmed protesters and paralyzed tens of thousands more – Mr. Ramirez saw fit to draw a drawing showing a sea of rats, carrying Palestinian flags and under fire, rushing off a cliff while blaming Israel for their plight. Clearly, this is also a “deep and divisive” topic that the Washington Post seems to have somehow missed.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
