Palm Beach Post opinion editor fired after offensive Gaza cartoon. The coverage is more antisemitic than the cartoon is. ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Monday, March 03, 2025

Palm Beach Post opinion editor fired after offensive Gaza cartoon. The coverage is more antisemitic than the cartoon is.

From Stet News of Palm Beach County:

The owners of The Palm Beach Post fired Editorial Page Editor Tony Doris last month after the paper published a syndicated cartoon condemned as antisemitic.

Executives with Gannett, the nation’s largest daily news publisher with more than 200 newspapers and 19 in Florida, fired Doris on Feb. 17. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Doris, 67, had been editorial page editor since April 2021. He said he viewed the cartoon by Jeff Danziger of Counterpoint Media, which ran on Jan. 26, as anti-Israel but not antisemitic.

“They’re conflating criticism of the government of Israel with antisemitism,” Doris told Stet News. “I fully support Israel’s right to exist. … I think you can feel that way and still be open to discussion of the issue of violence that has taken place there. They don’t get to shut down the conversation just because they’re not comfortable with it.”

Doris said he was told he had been fired for violating Gannett guidelines and standards.

In “An Open letter to the Community” published Feb. 9 in The Post, the Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County said the cartoon trivialized “the suffering of Israelis kidnapped and brutally held captive for 16 months” and “even worse, it spread dangerous antisemitic tropes, including the false and inflammatory accusation of bloodlust — a modern-day ‘blood libel’ used for centuries to incite hatred and violence against Jews.”

The full-page ad, co-signed by the federation’s Palm Beach Center to Combat Antisemitism & Hatred, continued: “We cannot stay silent. Hate speech turns into hate crimes. Journalism must inform, not incite. We welcome opportunities to work with media organizations to educate the public on the danger of antisemitism.”

The cartoon is thoroughly disgusting.

It the dead of Gaza as being all civilians, and Israelis as being callous towards the death toll. it implies that caring about the hostages is hypocritical when so many Gazans have been killed because of Hamas' human shields strategy.

As far as I can tell, though, the Jewish community did not demand that anyone be fired. They wrote an open letter, published as an ad, describing how offensive the cartoon is and trying to ensure that something like this doesn't get published again.

It was Gannett's decision to fire Doris. I don't agree with that decision; I prefer to stand on the side of freedom of speech, and the cartoon, as bad as it is, does not cross the line into incitement.

But the story is being framed as the powerful Jews imposing their will on a newspaper. See this New York Times headline:

It could have said that this is a story about freedom of speech or about how skittish institutions are on offending different groups.

There is nothing wrong with the Jewish community complaining, there is nothing wrong with meeting them and understanding how this cartoon was a gross but consistent misstatement of the truth of what happens in Gaza and how it demonizes Jews, albeit indirectly.

But the Jewish community didn't fire him. They didn't, as far as I can see, even ask for him to lose his job. That was purely a Gannett decision.

Instead of writing about how a newspaper may or may not have overstepped, or about how the Gaza war coverage has been filled with bias culminating in this disgusting cartoon, this coverage itself will fuel antisemitism. The impression being given is that those Jews are again censoring any opinions they don't agree with and controlling the media.

The cartoon was awful. Framing this as the Jewish community imposing its will on an editor that didn't deserve to be fired is the real incitement.