The Maariv ridiculed him justifiably. The color black maybe a characteristics for his intellectual darkness.

Many reviewers, here, are ready to blame all Israel for a cartoon.

Blame Obama, first. His projected incompetence is scary.

I am not concerned with the silly and narrow, what is good for Israel?

Obama is flatly bad for decency.

If Joe Liberman were elected president, would he put a Mezuzah on all the doors?

I’d love to see a Jewish president put mezuzas on the White House doors, though I’m happy to say it will never be a President Lieberman doing so. Maybe a President Feingold??

First off, I have found that people who modestly mouth such self-deprecating words as your “Being the uneducate(d) boor that I am“ ordinarily mean quite the opposite and think of themselves as ranging from above-average to brilliant. Only knowing you through your predictable reactions to liberal ideas, I don’t feel qualified to pass on the degree, or lack of same, of your uneducated boorishness and so hereby grant you the benefit of my doubt and shall hereafter consider you a person, say, of almost average intelligence and education, give or take. Both in the context of the article and the attempt in Jewish circles here and in Israel to suggest for various reasons (his birth, his background, his education, his name, his color, his words) that Jews supporting Israel had better beware of one Barack Hussein Obama, Jr., then displaying in a rather primitive cartoon that same black man, Obama, painting black a white fundamental American icon is, except perhaps for those who must be led by the hand, a statement of race, of blackness and whiteness, and in this case of blackness doing something to whiteness. May I now, please, release your hand?

Suffice it to say that the “Zigeunerweisen” stuff merely refers to a fairly well known tear-jerker, a pretty piece of musical cliché that, on being heard via haunting violin, might cause its listener to thump his chest with one hand while grabbing for a tissue with the other.

I cannot speak for Obama’s statement, which I assume you are quoting accurately, even though he is my candidate of choice. Was he reacting to Bill Clinton’s at best politically stupid reference to Jesse Jackson’s having won South Carolina two decades previously and it meant nothing? That is, was Obama riposting to what might easily be seen as Clinton’s possible racial slur, thus challenging the former President’s “first black President’s” credentials? I really don’t know, and I suspect you don’t either.

As seems to be your wont in many of your commentaries, you select out only part of a quotation in order to make your point, or, as in this case, you ignore part of the selected quotation. I said, “‘If indeed this paper of “secular centrists and moderate left-wingers‘ can freely without a huge reaction of disgust offer this Nazi type of racial garbage, then there’s bloody little hope that Israeli society can claim to be an ethical one.” Please, sir, reference my “can freely WITHOUT A HUGE REACTION OF DISGUST offer this Nazi type of racial garbage”. You’ve no doubt heard the term, “good German“, and it can just as easily be applied by changing that “good German” to a “good American” or a “good Israeli”, with the same fundamental meaning. However you may interpret that Maariv cartoon, I see it as a bigoted, racial slur, and I am apparently hardly alone in this. I gather there were those in Israel who saw it, too, as an ugly visual in support of an article referencing a paranoid reaction to Obama’s candidacy. In your previous posting, you speak of “the worry that he will carry out a Jimmy Carter-like foreign policy.” I assume that such a policy is one you dislike (hate?, fear?, distrust?), and so, for me, anyone professing a deep devotion to Israel and at the same time looks on Carter as either an anti-Semite or an enemy, major or minor, of Israel, or both, is not a person whose interpretation of the Maariv cartoon I would consider very reliable. In any case, racism, from whatever source, is both disgusting and, as Jews damn well know, dangerous.

Your sensitivity toward me I found touching when you so delicately said, “I am sorry to be the one to break this to you, but you have not been elected by anybody to define for the rest of humanity what is ‘politically correct‘.” My God, for at least seventy of my eighty years, I have labored under the delusion that it was I and I alone, chosen from an already select few, to lay out for the unwashed of the universe the whole truth and nothing but the truth, both politically correct and otherwise, depending on what I, omniscient creature that I am, determined the world needed more than anything else. Well, that’s what straw-grasping does for one, and I shall continue, woe betide me, to look for creatures that quack and waddle in order to identify them. ‘Tis a sickness.

Norman, you yourself said :
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If indeed this paper((Ma’ariv) of “secular centrists and moderate left-wingers“ can freely without a huge reaction of disgust offer this Nazi type of racial garbage, then there’s bloody little hope that Israeli society can claim to be an ethical one.
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You are tarring all of Israeli society because of one cartoon printed by one newspaper?! Seems like that is a preconception that you have and you are grasping at straws in order to confirm your prejudices. What are you doing that is any different than what you are accusing others of doing? I am sorry to be the one to break this to you, but you have not been elected by anybody to define for the rest of humanity what is “politcally correct”. Racism is negatively stereotyping whole groups of people even though a few individuals of that group may indeed have these bad characteristics. I fail to see how this cartoon has ANYTHING to do with this.

What is racist about it?

Ah, so nice to see Bar Kochba temporizing on behalf of Israeli racism. If you don’t see the racism of the cartoon then I won’t bother trying to educate you. Suffice to say that Yoav Karni, a respected Israeli journalist, first pointed out the inherent racism of the cartoon & every Israeli I e-mailed about this story yesterday who replied to me agreed that it is.

There would be many ways for a cartoonist to note the fact that the White House would be inhabited for the first time by a Black man that wouldn’t be racist. Showing him painting the building with black paint wouldn’t be one of them esp. in the context of the inflammatory anti-Obama rhetoric of the accompanying article & headline.

Carter’s policy led, not only to the hostage crisis, but also the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Your analysis of U.S. foreign policy is totally off the mark. Afghanistan is a state that borders on the former Soviet Union. Its leaders at the time thought it was an important national interest to have a friendly state on their borders. Nothing Carter did or didn’t do had anything to do with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. You would prob. have had Carter invade the country & start a war with the Soviet forces just to make the point that no Soviet army would ever push the U.S. around. Thank God there were cooler more pragmatic heads than yrs. running our country. Besides, the Soviets got their comeuppance & paid for their disastrous intervention & then we in turn paid for our own with the triumph of the Taliban after the Soviets withdrew. We too we are paying for our intervention in Iraq just as Israel paid for its in Lebanon.