B’nai B’rith International submitted the following Letter to the Editor to The Jordan Times:

To the editor:

Emad Hajjaj has responded to a most serious and fully substantiated "accusation" by resorting to evasion and dishonesty ("Cartoonist Hajjaj rejects ‘anti-Semitic’ label," Jan. 31).

Mr. Hajjaj calls "baseless,” since he is a Semite himself, the charge that his work has often featured vile anti-Jewish themes and imagery. He engages here in a tired semantic game; the textbook definition of the English term "anti-Semitism" is animus to Jews, bigotry to which anyone is susceptible when fed on ignorance and incitement.

More substantively, Mr. Hajjaj's exhaustive mimicry of anti-Jewish canards and stereotypes could not be on more open display. Though he claims to have adopted this subject matter after Palestinian-Israeli hostilities in 2008, we have found his record of hate-mongering to be consistent for many years prior.

Apologists for Mr. Hajjaj may aver that his cartoons merely violate Israeli state symbols, not religious icons and practitioners. How, then, to explain not just the abuse of Stars of David and menorahs but also the displaying of (secular) Israeli officials with a Torah scroll, skullcaps or a black hat? Would it be acceptable to critique Muslim states and leaders by misusing the Islamic star and crescent or other symbols sacred in Muslim societies? Definitely not.

It goes without saying that Mr. Hajjaj fails to see complexity in, and two sides to, the Arab-Israeli conflict – let alone the violent actions and rhetoric that precede and prompt Israeli policies.

Enlightened people of faith are challenged to be thoughtful and to empathize with other human beings, seeing all as God’s children. This, not simplistic and offensive propaganda, is the way toward the peace that Muslims, Christians and Jews deserve. It is irrelevant that Mr. Hajjaj supposedly did not "intend" his cartoons to hurt Jews. Now that he well knows that they do, will he chart a new course? Will intolerance like his be tolerated in the Arab world and beyond?

It is time for figures like Mr. Hajjaj to be held accountable for the dangerous ubiquity of anti-Jewish hatred in the Arab world.

David J. Michaels
Director of United Nations and Intercommunal Affairs
B'nai B'rith International
www.bnaibrith.org