I had hoped Norway's self-proclaimed cultural elite had reached rock bottom with Jostein Gaarder's vicious anti-Semitic article, as well as Finn Graff's caricature of Ehud Olmert as a Nazi KZ-camp guard. Unfortunately, that has not been the case. The culture-elitist (and far left) newspaper Morgenbladet printed a caricature by cartoonist Mette Hellenes, who has a column called Kebbelife, showing a Hasidic Jew in traditional clothing shooting everybody in his way (you see a detail above, and a fuller version in Dagbladet). The victims appear to be Palestinian Arabs, men, women and children.
The childishly crude dialogue, in Norwegian, has the Hasidic man saying (in order): "What in hell are you doing? Stealing gasoline?!!", "Take that! - for stealing!", "This is for the gasoline!", "This is for the gasoline tank!", "And this is for destroying a bit of my hat!" and finally "And this is for throwing sand on my curly hair!" In the background, you can see a bystander saying "Stop, what are you doing?" before himself getting shot. The cartoons are interspersed with "bang!" (as I guess you can make out) every time the man shoots at everyone in sight.
A shocked Odd Einar Dørum, Norway's former Justice Minister (Venstre, Liberal Party), brought the cartoon along to the publishing house Aschehoug's traditional garden party for the country's cultural elite (yes, it is portrayed as such), and showed it around. I am pleased to inform that at least this time, the condemnations were pretty unanimous. Dørum said:
- I recognised something I know from my childhood. I was born in 1943, and this reminds me of Jew-caricatures from the 30s.
Jahn Otto Johansen was even more explicit:
This is classic anti-Semitism, exactly as it was in Der Stürmer.
However, the editor of Morgenbladet Alf van der Hagen defended cartoonist Mette Hellenes, by arguing she portrays everybody negatively, even herself.
She portrays people who are totally disgusting. This is her expression, and one must see the drawing in that context.
It is deeply disturbing that an editor of a newspaper can make such an excuse. There is a huge difference between drawing a non-flattering caricature of an individual person, and even there artists should be careful about racial stereotypes, and drawing a crude racial stereotype of an abstract person serving as a representative for an entire ethnic group.
It is certainly true that this is a caricature Julius Streicher's Der Stürmer would have been proud to print, and that any modern newspaper should be deeply ashamed to even consider for publication.
6:48:03 PM 
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