Antonio Antunes denies his NY Times caricature of Netanyahu as a dog leading blind Trump is anti-Semitic, says it critiques Israel’s ‘criminal conduct in Palestine’
The Portuguese cartoonist behind the New York Times cartoon that depicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog has rejected charges of anti-Semitism, calling critics part of the “Jewish propaganda machine.”
Antonio Moreira Antunes, who draws for the Expresso newspaper published in Lisbon, told CNN Wednesday that Jews were not “above criticism.”
The calls of anti-Semitism were “made through the Jewish propaganda machine, which is, anytime there’s criticism it’s because there’s someone anti-Semitic on the other side, and that’s not the case,” Antunes told CNN.
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On Monday, Antunes said the cartoon was “a critique of Israeli policy, which has a criminal conduct in Palestine at the expense of the UN, and not the Jews,” Expresso reported.
“The Star of David is an aid to identify a figure [Netanyahu] that is not very well known in Portugal,” the cartoonist explained to Expresso.
He blamed right-wing figures saying: “The Jewish right doesn’t want to be criticized, and therefore, when criticized they say ‘We are a persecuted people, we suffered a lot… this is anti-Semitism.'”
Antunes claimed he was personally hurt by the Times’ statements of apology since publishing the caricature, saying the paper should have seen his work as “a political issue and not religious.”
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