On Feb. 1, the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news outlet, published an expose about Dwayne Booth, a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. The article stated that Booth had published “several antisemitic cartoons since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack.”
Among them were “Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses,” “Jews in a Nazi concentration camp holding signs bearing slogans such as ‘Free Palestine’” and “Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a bloodied, red-eyed butcher holding a long knife and a crumpled Palestinian flag.”
Booth teaches two classes at Penn. He never used the cartoons in those courses, according to interim Penn President J. Larry Jameson. The cartoonist often publishes under the pseudonym Mr. Fish on his own website and the progressive outlet ScheerPost.com, which is frequently critical of Israel..
Jameson said of the cartoons, “I find them reprehensible, with antisemitic symbols, and incongruent with our efforts to fight hate.” Jameson has his position because his predecessor, M. Elizabeth Magill, stepped down after failing to condemn antisemitism before a congressional committee. Penn saw a series of antisemitic incidents on its campus in the fall after hosting the Palestine Writes Festival.
Booth said the Free Beacon and Jameson were misrepresenting his work. He explained that they were focusing on the images without discussing the context behind their original publication.
“Being accused of anti-Semitism by a reporter (Jessica Costescu) who presents no corroborating sources beyond her own misreading of my work is neither journalism nor responsible reporting, particularly when many of the images cited had been amputated and presented separate from the columns for which they were rendered,” Booth said in an email.
The images in question often accompany the writings of Chris Hedges — a frequently controversial weekly columnist at ScheerPost.com who is an author, commentator and Presbyterian minister.
Here are some of the images:
“Never Again and Again and Again”
This image accompanies a Dec. 31 article by Hedges on ScheerPost.com called “Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust.”
“Israel’s lebensraum master plan for Gaza, borrowed from the Nazi’s depopulation of Jewish ghettos, is clear. Destroy infrastructure, medical facilities and sanitation, including access to clean water. Block shipments of food and fuel. Unleash indiscriminate industrial violence to kill and wound hundreds a day. Let starvation — the U.N. estimates that more than half a million people are already starving — and epidemics of infectious diseases, along with the daily massacres and the displacement of Palestinians from their homes, turn Gaza into a mortuary,” he wrote. “The Palestinians are being forced to choose between death from bombs, disease, exposure or starvation or being driven from their homeland. There will soon reach a point where death will be so ubiquitous that deportation — for those who want to live — will be the only option.”
Hedges goes on to quote Netanyahu telling Likud Knesset members that Israel is looking for “countries that are willing to absorb them,” meaning the refugees.
“Slaughterhouse”
This cartoon is from a Dec. 1 article from Hedges on ScheerPost.com titled “Israel Reopens the Gaza Slaughterhouse.”
Hedges was writing about the reopening of hostilities between Israel and Hamas after a seven-day cease-fire.
“No one, least of all President Joe Biden, plans to intervene to stop the genocide. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel this week, and while calling for Israel to protect civilians, refused to set conditions that would disrupt the $3.8 billion Israel receives in annual military assistance or the $14.3 billion supplemental aid package. The world will watch passively, muttering useless bromides about more surgical strikes, while Israel spins its roulette wheel of death. By the time Israel is done, the 1948 Nakba, where Palestinians were massacred in dozens of villages and 750,000 were ethnically cleansed by Zionist militias, will look like a quaint relic of a more civilized era,” he wrote.
Hedges also included a statistic about how 184 Palestinians had been killed since the resumption of hostilities.
“Bad Moon Rising”
This image was published above a Nov. 5 post from Hedges on ScheerPost.com called “Israel’s Final Solution for the Palestinians.”
In that one, Hedges wrote, “(Benjamin) Netanyahu, who first became prime minister in 1996, has spent his political career nurturing Jewish extremists, including Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked. His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, who Benito Mussolini referred to as ‘a good fascist’ — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.”
“There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state,” he added.
There are many other Booth, or Mr. Fish, cartoons on ScheerPost.com/category/chrishedges.
