Eleftherotypia, one of the most widely circulated newspapers in Greece, ran this cartoon following Israel's assassination of the leader of the Islamist terror organization Hamas, Sheikh Yassin, in 2004.
The woman asks: “Why did the Jewish Government kill a religious leader?” The man answers, “They are practicing for Easter.”
In a stark example of how the Arab-Israeli conflict and "legitimate criticism of Israel" are often a fig leaf for age-old anti-Semitism, the artist uses current events to bring up the ancient accusation of Jewish collective responsibility for the death of Jesus.
Religion-based anti-Semitism was a fixture of Europe for nearly two thousand years, and countless Christians lived with the certainty that the Jews had killed Christ, a belief that was formally repudiated by the Catholic Church only in the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).
In Greece, a deeply religious country dominated by the Greek-Orthodox faith, traditional anti-Semitic views such as this are still common, and are occasionally voiced by political and religious leaders as a matter of course.
