Montreal-based French language newspaper LaPresse published a cartoon depicting Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a blood-sucking vampire on Wednesday morning and then promptly removed it. .LaPresse issued a statement some hours later apologizing for the caricature depicting the Israeli prime minister, which is entitled Nosfenyahou, en route to Rafah.Rafah is a Palestinian city in the southern Gaza Strip largely untouched so far by Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas. "The drawing focused on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is considering an offensive in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, where many Palestinians have taken refuge," wrote the publication. ."The drawing was intended to be a criticism of Mr. Netanyahu's policies. It targetted the Israeli government, not the Jewish people. It was unfortunate to depict the Prime Minister as Nosferatu the vampire, since this movie character was used in Nazi propaganda during the Second World War, as readers pointed out to us after publication.""We never intended to convey anti-Semitic remarks or harmful stereotypes.".Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St. Onge refused to condemn the disturbing, black-and-white image caricaturing the Jewish leader as a vampire while answering media questions. St. Onge was asked repeatedly to denounce the publication’s decision to run the antisemitic cartoon, but all she would say is that the “timing was bad,” according to Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner. “You just normalized antisemitism,” wrote Garner on Twitter. .The image depicts Netanyahu as the vampire from the 1922 silent horror film, Nosferatu, a movie that also inspired Nazi cartoonists in Hitler’s Germany, according to the Museum of the Jewish People. Likening Jews to vampires is a sordid myth dating back to the Middle Ages, one that made its first cinematic impression more than a hundred years ago. .Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula inspired the movie Nosferatu two decades later. The protagonist Count Orlok is described as having a mouse-like face, a large, crooked nose, and beady eyes. .Julius Streicher, the editor of a Hitler-era newspaper called Der Stürmer “was immediately infatuated with Nosferatu,” the Museum of the Jewish People says on its website. “He was inspired by the film’s vampire image and soon dozens of caricatures began to appear of vampire-like Jews. For Streicher, the vampire represented the ‘Other’ — the deformed, ugly, un-German, disease-ridden well-poisoner. In other words, the Jew.".La Presse, Canada’s second-largest French language newspaper, took the image down soon after it was published, but not before people took screenshots to circulate on social media. .The cartoon substitutes Netanyahu's face of the vampire in Nosferatu. “That film was riddled with antisemitic images and themes and directly inspired antisemitic cartoons in the Nazi press of the 1920s and 1930s,” wrote journalist David Frum who has a background in Jewish history. .“Did the cartoonist at La Presse know any of this history? Perhaps not. He wanted to draw a nasty caricature of Netanyahu. He might have invented a device of his own. Instead, he recycled the powerful image already present in his mind, waiting for him: the Jew as bloodsucker.”.“That's how antisemitism often works. A rich inventory of anti-Jewish images and themes pre-exists: the Jew as bloodsucker, the Jew as child-killer, the Jew as alien enemy. When a user wants to vent rage or dislike ... the resource accumulated over centuries is waiting for him.”
