(JTA) — A Brazilian cartoonist hit back at the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his inclusion on its top 10 slur list.
Carlos Latuff recently published a cartoon of the center’s founder, Rabbi Marvin Hier, awarding Latuff a medal in response to the center’s publication in December of a list of the top 10 anti-Israel and anti-Semitic slurs of 2012. Third on the list was Latuff’s caricature of Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu squeezing votes out of the body of a dead Arab child.
In the cartoon, an aggravated Hier presents a beaming Latuff with a medal that says “3rd” as Latuff sits on a chair drawing an airplane indiscriminately bombing Gaza. Hanging above Hier’s right ear are two lightning bolts.
Petra Marquardt-Bigman, a historian and blogger for The Jerusalem Post, noted that the bolts are the symbol of the SS – an elite Nazi unit.
Latuff said the two flat S letters are a “cartoon representation of headache.”
The Simon Wiesenthal Center is a human rights organization that seeks to combat anti-Semitism and teach about the Holocaust.
Latuff in 2006 took second prize in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition hosted in Iran under the auspices of the Iranian regime to retaliate against the publication of cartoons mocking the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish daily. Submissions mocked, inverted or denied the Holocaust.
Latuff’s award-winning cartoon shows a man against the backdrop of a Nazi concentration camp wearing a crescent-shaped red patch.
