This is a Geoff Olson cartoon titled “MARY AND JOSEPH, UPDATED” published in the Vancouver Courier on Dec. 23, 2011.
Geof Olson is a writer and artist who provides copy every week to the Courier for more than two decades. The Vancouver Courier is a Canadian semiweekly local newspaper published in Vancouver, British Columbia with a weekly distribution of 265,000.
One can simply say that the cartoon is wrong since Christians are not prevented from reaching Bethlehem on Christmas – or at any other time. They go through a gate in the security fence.
But is this cartoon anti-Semitic? Howard Rotberg of Vancouver sent a comment to the editor on its anti-Semitic aspect with the following words:
In an era when Middle Eastern Muslims are attacking Christians throughout the Middle East, including in the once majority-Christian town of Bethlehem, your cartoon showing Joseph and Mary stopped by an Israeli anti-terrorism wall is not just in bad taste -it is anti-Semitic.
Your paper does not cover world events; so why would you choose this cartoon for Christmas? The answer is that like anti-Semites everywhere you seem to care not about the ethnic cleansing of Coptic Christians by Muslims in the supposed Arab "spring" in Egypt, the driving out of more than half of Iraqi Christians and the bombing of 54 churches there or the persecution of Christians in every majority Muslim country in the world.
Instead, your Christmas commentary deals inappropriately with Israel's attempts to protect its citizens from suicide bombing by a wall. The fixation on Israel (a country explicitly under the threat of genocide by its neighbors) and the portrayal of Israel blocking Joseph and Mary at Christmas when Israel is the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, and the only one that allows religious freedom, can only be explained by anti-Semitism.
