Is it anti-semitism?

Over at The Comics Journal Dirk Deppey has a post about the cartoon The Independent has bestowed with Cartoon of the Year. From the Independent article:

In the cartoon, published on 27 January, Sharon says 'What's wrong? You never seen a politician kissing babies before?' as a loudspeaker from a helicopter gunship chants 'Vote Sharon, Vote Sharon' overhead. The cartoon was based on Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children and was penned after a pre-election raid by Israeli missiles on Gaza City. The prize was presented after a vote by the members of the Political Cartoon Society and national newspaper cartoonists. It was presented by the former cabinet minister Clare Short on Tuesday night at the headquarters of The Economist in London.

Of course the cartoon has been decried as anti-semitic. I won't get into the specifics of these allegations, Dirk does a good job of outlining it. But what he doesn't do is offer a comparison between the cartoon and the original Goya that it's based on. So I think I'll go ahead and do that.

Here's the cartoon in question:



And here's the Goya painting:



Notice the comparison. Sharon's stance is almost exactly that of Saturn's, and the baby is in the same exact shape as Saturn's child. The main difference (besides the background) is that Saturn is replaced with a caricature of Sharon. But caricatures are always embellished, so if the caricature happens to have some stereotypically Jewish features, I don't see where that's anti-semitic. So I'm not buying the whole cries of anti-semitism here. It's not even anti-Israel, it's anti-Sharon and anti-Likud.

And besides which, I'll go a step further and say it deserved the reward. It's a very chilling image, showing the brutality of Sharon's government. And you can't really say he hasn't been brutal, Sharon has increased military activity in the occupied territories since taking charge, and this cartoon specifically criticizes that. And it does so with an image that is both simple and haunting. In other words, it's everything that a great editorial cartoon should be.

If there's any criticism it's that Dave Brown is assuming too high and specific a level of education of his readers. I'm not sure I would have thought of it as anti-semitism if I didn't know about the Goya painting, but if I hadn't I may be obliged to give in to the argument that a picture of a Jewish man eating a baby is nothing but an old anti-semitic stereotype. But borrowing from great pieces of art is a common technique in cartooning. Usually it's a piece of art or photography that's more in the public conscious than Goya, but hey, Goya's good too.

Update: The original picture I linked to the image changed to this making it not useful in the overall post. Instead I used The Indepent's archived picture, which is not as high quality a printing as I originally had, which is too bad, since that makes arguing for the quality a bit harder.