November 29, 2010: Adbusters crossed the line – and it was hardly the first time

By Michael Regenstreif

Adbusters, a Vancouver-based anti-globalization, anti-capitalist and anti-consumerism bimonthly magazine caused somewhat of a media storm when a photo essay in the November-December 2010 issue – published just as Holocaust Education Week was about to be marked in many communities, including ours – directly compared contemporary Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto of the early-1940s and the Gaza Palestinians with the Warsaw Ghetto Jews, and, by overt implication, Israel with Nazi Germany.

The comparison, to be sure, is not only wholly inaccurate, there is little doubt that it crosses way over the line, dividing legitimate criticism of Israel from blatant antisemitism.

The Warsaw Ghetto images that Adbusters used came from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Apparently, the magazine received permission from the museum to use the images on the pretence that they were being used for a 2009 article about war crimes in the Warsaw Ghetto.

When the museum was advised on how the images were actually being used, they took legal action, forcing Adbusters to remove the images from its website, and issued a statement that emphatically said, “Any comparison between the Warsaw Ghetto (or the Holocaust as a whole) and the situation in Gaza is wildly inaccurate, a gross misrepresentation of the facts and offensive to victims of the Holocaust.”

This recent photo essay was not the first time Adbusters had compared Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto. That supposed article about war crimes in the Warsaw Ghetto for which the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum granted permission to use its images was actually an article in the May-June 2009 issue directly comparing Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto.

And that 2009 issue was not the only other Adbusters article that has crossed the line vis-à-vis Israel and or Jews. A perusal of its online archive reveals a pattern of typical fringe-left anti-Zionism, including the all-too-predictable references to “Israeli apartheid” and a fawning tribute to Hamas as a revolutionary movement.

Perhaps the most infamous example of antisemitism in Adbusters is “Why won’t anyone say they are Jewish?”, a March-April 2004 exposé by publisher Kalle Lasn about how Jewish neo-conservatives controlled the Middle East policies of the administration of then-U.S. president George W. Bush, manipulating Bush on everything from Israel to Iraq. Adbusters published what it called “a carefully researched list of who appear to be the 50 most influential neocons in the U.S.,” pointing out, with a black dot next to their names, that more than half on the list were Jews.

These examples from Adbusters are consistent with what has been termed the “new antisemitism,” which was addressed this month in Ottawa at the conference of the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating antisemitism. The unequivocal conference speech by Prime Minister Stephen Harper left absolutely no doubt as to the position of the Canadian government on this type of antisemitism.

The speech by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, while not as strong a statement as Harper’s, indicated that there is little tolerance within mainstream Canadian politics for any variety of antisemitism.