Swastika (illustration)
Swastika (illustration)Thinkstock

The Spanish Jewish community is seeking legal action against the satirical left-wing magazine El Jueves over a comic strip published in its latest issue featuring anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic images.

The cartoon depicted various images with an anti-Semitic stereotype, including one of Israeli soldiers with grossly protruding noses urinating on Palestinians and pushing a beaten Jesus. A caption reads, "You don't understand, my parents were in a concentration camp," thus slandering the children of Holocaust survivors as “murderers."

Along with these images, the illustrator alleges that Israel is “apartheid 2.0” by captioning: "Israel, the promised land a science fiction book says was given to a group of people by a made-up God. Israel, the paradise of the Jews and no one else, because they refuse to share it with anyone who does not embrace their religion."

Cartoonist Julio Serrano, who created the comic strip, said, "This isn't an attack against Jews, but against Israel's unjust laws."

“Okay, the Holocaust was horrible and resulted in the creation of the State of Israel so that the Jews could live in peace, but that doesn’t give you the right to hassle the non-Jewish people who live there,” wrote Serrano in the magazine.

While this is not the first time El Jueves has criticized Jews, the Madrid community felt that this time it crossed the line.

“This is absolutely outrageous and obviously we are going to be seeking legal remedies,” said David Hatchwell, the president of the Jewish community of Madrid and vice president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain.

“This (cartoon) could be taken from the Nazis’ Der Sturmer and nobody would notice the difference….These are lies, totally non-factual, and it’s done in a sophisticated enough way that people who know nothing about the conflict will think that Israelis are Nazi-like oppressors and it affirms every myth (about Jews) in Europe (held) for thousands of years,” he said, calling the cartoon “pure anti-Semitism.”

While comparing El Jueves to the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, Hatchwell said, "The difference is that Charlie Hebdo uses satire to criticize racism, but what El Jueves has published is pure anti-Semitism. It's easy to level such criticism at Jews, because we don't set magazines on fire for insulting us."

The full offensive cartoon can be viewed in Spanish here