I’m indebted to our Cartoon Correspondent, Ian McAnulla, for educating me on this.
In 1996, US cartoonist David Levine drew the above cartoon replacing the scar from US President Lyndon B Johnson’s recent gall bladder operation with an outline of Vietnam and thus cleverly pointing to the scarring effects of the Vietnam War on his career.
A few days ago, the Guardian’s Steve Bell explicitly repeated the idea with an outline of Gaza on Israel’s President Benjamin Netanyahu’s stomach, cleverly suggesting it would be his Vietnam. Bell is clear about his reference to Levine on the drawing, bottom left.
Several commentators quickly claimed that the cartoon was a reference to Shakespeare’s explicitly anti-semitic imagining of the money lender, Shylock, a money-lender in the Merchant of Venice, demanding his pound of flesh from a debtor who could not pay.
I was taken in by that interpretation but it’s clearly wrong.
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
I don’t feel sorry for him , it’s injustice he is experiencing much like the injustice he has been happy to issue with his scribbles to so many people over the years
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I think he is a victim of the ‘if you say, write or draw anything which is critical of the government of Israel or aspects of Zionism’ and some member of the Jewish media in the U.K., declares it to be ‘antisemitic’ then it is ipso facto ‘antisemitic’.
It is not only sections of the Jewish media which has this ‘ex cathedra’ authority, there are pundits, demagogues, campaigners for a whole range of themes who award themselves such authority and when the rest of the media and politicians pile in then, it is very unlikely the the writer will escape. The Guardian editor and board were shit scared that the Guardian with its self appointed moral rightness would be criticised for being labelled ‘antisemitic’.
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I’m afraid I consider it rather ‘Karma bites’. He has trashed Scotland using vile terms, and now he knows what it feels like. I am still playing the world’s tiniest violin.
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