On Saturday 29th April 2023 The Guardian published a cartoon of mine about Richard Sharp’s resignation as Chairman of the BBC, the top news item the previous day.
The main focus of the cartoon was Boris Johnson sitting naked on top of a dungheap holding bags full of dollars, with various wheeliebins around its base, labelled “Patrons”, “Friends”, “Families” and so on. Johnson was saying to Sharp, as the latter was leaving the dilapidated and clearly fire damaged room they were in, “Cheer up, matey! I put you down for a peerage in my Resignation Honours List!” I think the purpose of the cartoon was fairly obvious – Johnson’s blithe toxicity by association, and how Sharp was the latest bit of blowback from the former Prime Minister’s casual if all consuming sleaziness and selfishness.
None of that, however, seems to have fuelled the furious response to the cartoon. That was all down to how I depicted Richard Sharp. In the internal narrative of the cartoon, I’d wanted Sharp to play the stooge, the fall guy Johnson had brought low. I also wanted to hint at other parts of the story, and how the networks of croneyism cut every which way among our rulers. It is common knowledge, for instance, that Rishi Sunak used to work for Sharp at Goldman Sachs, the multinational bank infamously described by Matt Taimmi in Rolling Stone in 2008 as “a vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity”.
To signify this not insignificant connection between Sharp and the current Prime Minister, I had him holding a cardboard box, the standard accessory of the just sacked, with the Goldman Sachs logo on it, albeit partially covered by his CV, also held in one of the hands holding the box. The logo’s been crossed out and “BBC” scribbled beneath it, also now crossed out. In the box are Sunak and the aforementioned vampire squid, in a rather cutesy cartoon form, and with the typical yellow polyped skin that stretches between the tentacles of vampire squid.
And this is where things started going wrong.
The portrayal of Sharp takes up 3% of the overall image. I was trying to draw him looking silently furious, by implication with Johnson, in the standard caricatural way common to all political cartoons of exaggerating various of his features (most prominently, I thought, his large forehead and rather hooded, baggy eyes). I thought, at the time, it was a fairly mild caricature compared with how I’d draw Johnson. But I’d also never drawn Sharp before, so maybe overworked it to satisfy myself I’d “caught him”; in David Low’s famous phrase, made him look more like him than he does. Oh, and then I added, just for a laugh as a tiny detail, an empty packet of “Dignity Shreds” at the base of Johnson’s dunghill, with a pig behind an attendant fur cup snarfing a clump of them up. I like to produce complex cartoons, crammed with incidental detail, partly it allows layers of nuance to be added to the overall umage, partly because it’s the English Cartooning Great Tradition, from Hogarth and Gillray, via Giles and Pont. Also, I know, a lot of the readers enjoy it. But sometimes, like in this case, in the mad rush to cram as much in as possible in the 5 or so hours available to me to produce the artwork by deadline, things go horribly wrong.
Satirists, even though largely licenced to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to fucking things up than anyone else, which is what I did here.
I know Richard Sharp is Jewish; actually, while we’re collecting networks of croneyism, I was at school with him, though I doubt he remembers me. His Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook. Likewise, the cute squid and the little Rishi were no more than that, a cartoon squid and a short Prime Minister, it never occurring to me that some might see them as puppets of Sharp, this being another notorious antisemitic trope. As for the pig and the “Dignity Shreds”, I think I painted them red as like scraps of licorice, again not appreciating they could also be interpreted as blood, repeating yet again antisemitic blood libels that have recurred poisonously for millennia.
Finally, fatally, many people assumed the yellow polyps on the squid were gold coins and the truncated Goldman Sachs logo simply read “Gold Sacs”. For this I apologise, though I’m not going to repeat the current formulation by saying I’m sorry if people were upset, which is always code for “I’ve done nothing wrong, you’re just oversensitive”. This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly. It’s a personal mantra of mine that satirical cartoons are like journalism, all about Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted. In other words, I should never attack people less powerful than me (which narrows the field more than you might imagine) and I should only attack people for what they think, not who they are.
So by any definition, most of all my own, the cartoon was a failure and on many levels: I offended the wrong people, Sharp wasn’t the main target of the satire, I rushed at something without allowing enough time to consider things with the depth and care they require, and thereby letting slip in stupid ambiguities that have ended up appearing to be something I never intended. But as I’ve always said, once my work is in the public domain, it no longer belongs to me but to the beholder, in whose eye offence dwells just as surely as beauty. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. To work effectively, cartoons almost more than any other part of journalism require eternal vigilance, against unconscious bias as well as things that should be obvious and in this case, unforgivably, I didnt even think about.
There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes. Despite the tyranny of the deadline, in future I’ll make sure I’ve drawn what I really mean, and mean what I draw.
Ridiculous. It’s just a standard cartoon caricature. I had no idea he was Jewish and nothing in the cartoon made me think he was. It’s just a well-aimed dig at Tory cronyism.
I know saying this makes me the worst antisemite since Corbyn, who was the worst antisemite since Hitler, but is noone else fed up with seeing nonsense claims about antisemitism?
It feels very much like claims of it are used to silence people and stifle debate, rather than actually tackle and reduce hate crimes. There is also a noticeable connection between accusations of antisemitism and anti-capitalist sentiment.
[removed]
To those who doubt this context, take a look at this piece of
[propaganda](https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/derjude_f58a23291d.png) and compare it to Sharp’s face. I really think the Guardian could have done a better job of checking appearances here.
Genuinely struggling to see what the backlash is about. Can someone please explain?
Compared to the entirely realistic depiction of Johnson in the same drawing…
The problem is a lot of anti-semetic imagery has been filtered down into popular culture so people have a hard time recognizing it, but the combination of multiples here is pretty hard to explain away. The squid is typically an [octopus](https://neverwasmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Octopus-Churchill-cartoon-by-Josef-Plank.jpg) and is pretty hard to deny when you put it literally inside the jewish banker canard with the goldman sachs box full of gold coins (if you wanted to be uncharitable you could go as far as to say shekels). The exaggerated proportions could be chalked up to general cartoon style, but he draws Sharp too grounded for that to make sense imo – compare to the way he draws Boris or trump for example. If you removed any one of those aspects I’d be a lot more charitable, but all three seems a little too intentional.
I could see it being accidental, but you’d think at least that a political cartoonist ought to be aware enough of this stuff to spot it before shipping it out
The Guardian has apologised and removed Martin Rowson’s drawing posted on its website as it “did not meet our editorial standards”.
Surely it’s more offensive to Johnson or fat people than Jewish people? The picture of sharpe looks like him and the little we know about him. It would be like saying a drawing of Rishi sunak is racist because the person is Indian….
If I can quote a former Israeli Cabinet Minister, Shulamit Aloni.
In the 2002 interview, the former government minister was asked by Amy Goodman: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”
Aloni replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticising Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When [in this country (the US)] people are criticising Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
Do her comments in that interview mean that anti-semitism itself is a trope?
How ironic, the Guardian a victim of the monster they helped create.
[removed]
I don’t get what the fuss is about, but this reeks of:
“just call it racist and you’ll get away from any criticism”
Well, well, well, looks like the Guardian is reaping what it sowed with the whole “Antisemitic Mural” and Corbyn. They should’ve known the moment they let that genie out of the bottle it’d be used as a giant beating stick.
Honestly though? I had no idea the guy was Jewish and *even if he is* so fucking what? He’s a corrupt as fuck Tory stooge with a paper trail to prove it. Nothing at all to do with whatever religion he practices.
Usual vile racism from far left media BBC Guardian etc etc. They just can’t help themselves when there’s a jewish person or wrong type of Asian ie our foreign and commonwealth minister to target. Scum
…what’s anti-Semitic about it??? If the guardian wants to pull it then that’s up to them, but as a random just looking at these caricatures, I can’t immediately spot anything anti-Semitic. I didn’t even know he was Jewish.
Edit: downvote me all you want, doesn’t change the fact that my Jewish boyfriend finds nothing anti-Semitic about this image.
Well at least we can all agree Richard Sharp is a massive bellend, regardless of the religion he believes in.
And of course this sub is blind to it…
If it not a problem why pull it? Why would anyone randomly draw a squid holding gold coins unless they understood the symbolism? Whether accidental or not, many found it antisemitic. Other cartoons are available.
I think it says quite a lot about The Guardian’s vision of the world.
Why do they ever draw a big nose? Like surely any satirical cartoonist knows that’s the instant accusation if they do, I’d have thought they’d be sensible enough that everyone gets a freaking button nose by now
26 comments
The person who drew that should be sacked. It couldn’t cram many more anti-semitic tropes into it if it tried.
Martin Rowson’s apology – explanation raises the question of cancel culture
https://www.martinrowson.com/
On Saturday 29th April 2023 The Guardian published a cartoon of mine about Richard Sharp’s resignation as Chairman of the BBC, the top news item the previous day.
The main focus of the cartoon was Boris Johnson sitting naked on top of a dungheap holding bags full of dollars, with various wheeliebins around its base, labelled “Patrons”, “Friends”, “Families” and so on. Johnson was saying to Sharp, as the latter was leaving the dilapidated and clearly fire damaged room they were in, “Cheer up, matey! I put you down for a peerage in my Resignation Honours List!” I think the purpose of the cartoon was fairly obvious – Johnson’s blithe toxicity by association, and how Sharp was the latest bit of blowback from the former Prime Minister’s casual if all consuming sleaziness and selfishness.
None of that, however, seems to have fuelled the furious response to the cartoon. That was all down to how I depicted Richard Sharp. In the internal narrative of the cartoon, I’d wanted Sharp to play the stooge, the fall guy Johnson had brought low. I also wanted to hint at other parts of the story, and how the networks of croneyism cut every which way among our rulers. It is common knowledge, for instance, that Rishi Sunak used to work for Sharp at Goldman Sachs, the multinational bank infamously described by Matt Taimmi in Rolling Stone in 2008 as “a vampire squid wrapped round the face of humanity”.
To signify this not insignificant connection between Sharp and the current Prime Minister, I had him holding a cardboard box, the standard accessory of the just sacked, with the Goldman Sachs logo on it, albeit partially covered by his CV, also held in one of the hands holding the box. The logo’s been crossed out and “BBC” scribbled beneath it, also now crossed out. In the box are Sunak and the aforementioned vampire squid, in a rather cutesy cartoon form, and with the typical yellow polyped skin that stretches between the tentacles of vampire squid.
And this is where things started going wrong.
The portrayal of Sharp takes up 3% of the overall image. I was trying to draw him looking silently furious, by implication with Johnson, in the standard caricatural way common to all political cartoons of exaggerating various of his features (most prominently, I thought, his large forehead and rather hooded, baggy eyes). I thought, at the time, it was a fairly mild caricature compared with how I’d draw Johnson. But I’d also never drawn Sharp before, so maybe overworked it to satisfy myself I’d “caught him”; in David Low’s famous phrase, made him look more like him than he does. Oh, and then I added, just for a laugh as a tiny detail, an empty packet of “Dignity Shreds” at the base of Johnson’s dunghill, with a pig behind an attendant fur cup snarfing a clump of them up. I like to produce complex cartoons, crammed with incidental detail, partly it allows layers of nuance to be added to the overall umage, partly because it’s the English Cartooning Great Tradition, from Hogarth and Gillray, via Giles and Pont. Also, I know, a lot of the readers enjoy it. But sometimes, like in this case, in the mad rush to cram as much in as possible in the 5 or so hours available to me to produce the artwork by deadline, things go horribly wrong.
Satirists, even though largely licenced to speak the unspeakable in liberal democracies, are no more immune to fucking things up than anyone else, which is what I did here.
I know Richard Sharp is Jewish; actually, while we’re collecting networks of croneyism, I was at school with him, though I doubt he remembers me. His Jewishness never crossed my mind as I drew him as it’s wholly irrelevant to the story or his actions, and it played no conscious role in how I twisted his features according to the standard cartooning playbook. Likewise, the cute squid and the little Rishi were no more than that, a cartoon squid and a short Prime Minister, it never occurring to me that some might see them as puppets of Sharp, this being another notorious antisemitic trope. As for the pig and the “Dignity Shreds”, I think I painted them red as like scraps of licorice, again not appreciating they could also be interpreted as blood, repeating yet again antisemitic blood libels that have recurred poisonously for millennia.
Finally, fatally, many people assumed the yellow polyps on the squid were gold coins and the truncated Goldman Sachs logo simply read “Gold Sacs”. For this I apologise, though I’m not going to repeat the current formulation by saying I’m sorry if people were upset, which is always code for “I’ve done nothing wrong, you’re just oversensitive”. This is on me, even if accidentally or, more precisely, thoughtlessly. It’s a personal mantra of mine that satirical cartoons are like journalism, all about Afflicting the Comfortable and Comforting the Afflicted. In other words, I should never attack people less powerful than me (which narrows the field more than you might imagine) and I should only attack people for what they think, not who they are.
So by any definition, most of all my own, the cartoon was a failure and on many levels: I offended the wrong people, Sharp wasn’t the main target of the satire, I rushed at something without allowing enough time to consider things with the depth and care they require, and thereby letting slip in stupid ambiguities that have ended up appearing to be something I never intended. But as I’ve always said, once my work is in the public domain, it no longer belongs to me but to the beholder, in whose eye offence dwells just as surely as beauty. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. To work effectively, cartoons almost more than any other part of journalism require eternal vigilance, against unconscious bias as well as things that should be obvious and in this case, unforgivably, I didnt even think about.
There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes. Despite the tyranny of the deadline, in future I’ll make sure I’ve drawn what I really mean, and mean what I draw.
Ridiculous. It’s just a standard cartoon caricature. I had no idea he was Jewish and nothing in the cartoon made me think he was. It’s just a well-aimed dig at Tory cronyism.
I know saying this makes me the worst antisemite since Corbyn, who was the worst antisemite since Hitler, but is noone else fed up with seeing nonsense claims about antisemitism?
It feels very much like claims of it are used to silence people and stifle debate, rather than actually tackle and reduce hate crimes. There is also a noticeable connection between accusations of antisemitism and anti-capitalist sentiment.
[removed]
To those who doubt this context, take a look at this piece of
[propaganda](https://shec.ashp.cuny.edu/files/original/derjude_f58a23291d.png) and compare it to Sharp’s face. I really think the Guardian could have done a better job of checking appearances here.
Genuinely struggling to see what the backlash is about. Can someone please explain?
Compared to the entirely realistic depiction of Johnson in the same drawing…
The problem is a lot of anti-semetic imagery has been filtered down into popular culture so people have a hard time recognizing it, but the combination of multiples here is pretty hard to explain away. The squid is typically an [octopus](https://neverwasmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Octopus-Churchill-cartoon-by-Josef-Plank.jpg) and is pretty hard to deny when you put it literally inside the jewish banker canard with the goldman sachs box full of gold coins (if you wanted to be uncharitable you could go as far as to say shekels). The exaggerated proportions could be chalked up to general cartoon style, but he draws Sharp too grounded for that to make sense imo – compare to the way he draws Boris or trump for example. If you removed any one of those aspects I’d be a lot more charitable, but all three seems a little too intentional.
I could see it being accidental, but you’d think at least that a political cartoonist ought to be aware enough of this stuff to spot it before shipping it out
The Guardian has apologised and removed Martin Rowson’s drawing posted on its website as it “did not meet our editorial standards”.
They should sack their editor then.
To be fair, [it does look like him](https://www.google.com/search?q=richard+sharp+goldman+sachs&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwi58dLd3c_-AhWwmicCHR0TDzsQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=richard+sharp+gold&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQARgAMgUIABCABDIHCAAQGBCABDoNCAAQigUQsQMQgwEQQzoECAAQAzoHCAAQigUQQzoLCAAQgAQQsQMQgwE6BwgAEMcDEANQgQNYjBlg_DpoAHAAeACAAUCIAegCkgEBNpgBAKABAaoBC2d3cy13aXotaW1nwAEB&sclient=img&ei=g2NNZPmjHLC1nsEPnaa82AM&bih=635&biw=1366) It’s a good caricature.
TIL Richard sharpe was Jewish.
Surely it’s more offensive to Johnson or fat people than Jewish people? The picture of sharpe looks like him and the little we know about him. It would be like saying a drawing of Rishi sunak is racist because the person is Indian….
If I can quote a former Israeli Cabinet Minister, Shulamit Aloni.
In the 2002 interview, the former government minister was asked by Amy Goodman: “Often when there is dissent expressed in the United States against policies of the Israeli government, people here are called antisemitic. What is your response to that as an Israeli Jew?”
Aloni replied “Well, it’s a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticising Israel, then we bring up the Holocaust. When [in this country (the US)] people are criticising Israel, then they are antisemitic.”
Do her comments in that interview mean that anti-semitism itself is a trope?
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x141n2s](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x141n2s)
I’m prepared to accept that this wasn’t deliberate given Rowson’s usual grotesque visual style and dark tone, but surely someone must have looked at this and thought the depiction was a bit… [uncomfortable](https://www.nybooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/The-Eternal-Jew.jpg)?
How ironic, the Guardian a victim of the monster they helped create.
[removed]
I don’t get what the fuss is about, but this reeks of:
“just call it racist and you’ll get away from any criticism”
Well, well, well, looks like the Guardian is reaping what it sowed with the whole “Antisemitic Mural” and Corbyn. They should’ve known the moment they let that genie out of the bottle it’d be used as a giant beating stick.
Honestly though? I had no idea the guy was Jewish and *even if he is* so fucking what? He’s a corrupt as fuck Tory stooge with a paper trail to prove it. Nothing at all to do with whatever religion he practices.
Usual vile racism from far left media BBC Guardian etc etc. They just can’t help themselves when there’s a jewish person or wrong type of Asian ie our foreign and commonwealth minister to target. Scum
…what’s anti-Semitic about it??? If the guardian wants to pull it then that’s up to them, but as a random just looking at these caricatures, I can’t immediately spot anything anti-Semitic. I didn’t even know he was Jewish.
Edit: downvote me all you want, doesn’t change the fact that my Jewish boyfriend finds nothing anti-Semitic about this image.
Well at least we can all agree Richard Sharp is a massive bellend, regardless of the religion he believes in.
And of course this sub is blind to it…
If it not a problem why pull it? Why would anyone randomly draw a squid holding gold coins unless they understood the symbolism? Whether accidental or not, many found it antisemitic. Other cartoons are available.
https://www.thedailymash.co.uk/uncategorized/richard-sharp-receives-invitation-to-the-fked-by-boris-club-20230428234572
I think it says quite a lot about The Guardian’s vision of the world.
Why do they ever draw a big nose? Like surely any satirical cartoonist knows that’s the instant accusation if they do, I’d have thought they’d be sensible enough that everyone gets a freaking button nose by now