Germany: Newspaper apologizes for anti-Semitic cartoon by Frenchman Joe Le Corbeau

“1 million rebate out of six, for Palestine.” 

Berliner Zeitung has apologized for publishing an anti-Semitic cartoon on its front page last week. The Berlin-based paper published an admission on its website that “there was a manufactured picture... from the title pages of magazine Charlie Hebdo. We regrettably showed... an anti-Semitic cartoon from Joe Le Corbeau [a friend of Dieudonné]. We offer this as an apology.”

Israel’s embassy in Berlin first noticed the phony cartoon on the front page of the Berliner Zeitung and contacted the paper about the provenance of the drawings. It is unclear how the editorial staff at the paper was hoodwinked by the fabricated Charlie Hebdo cover, however. Le Corbeau’s illustration shows an ultra-Orthodox Jew with an enlarged nose. The headline read “Shoah Hebdo” and the speech balloon next to the haredi image reads “1 million rebate out of six, for Palestine.” The conflation of rebate and rabbis is an anti-Jewish play on words.

Embassy staff noticed that the fake cover wrote “Charlo” instead of the correct “Charlie.” It was noticed that the magazine identification bar code was also bogus. It said 6,000,000 – a reference to the number of Jews murdered during the Holocaust. The Berliner Zeitung sells 114,417 copies a day and has a total readership of 400,000 each day.

In 2013 and 2014, several southern German papers published anti-Semitic cartoons. The Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung – Germany’s largest broadsheet – has been engulfed in a series of alleged anti-Semitic cartoon scandals over nearly the last 18 months. The paper published a caricature of Israel as a demonic monster and depicted Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a hooknosed Octopus gobbling up the world.

Jerusalem Post