The Guardian thinks of itself as Britain’s fearless liberal conscience, trigger-sensitive to racist ‘dog whistles’ in the language and editorial judgements of everyone except itself. It takes a special interest in cartoons published by right-of-centre newspapers which are accused of bigotry.

When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds. Other newspapers who have found their cartoons scrutinised for racial undertones by the Guardian include the Times, the New York Post, the Australian, the Boston Herald, and Charlie Hebdo.

So how exactly did Martin Rowson’s latest cartoon manage to slip past editors? Ostensibly a comment on how Richard Sharp’s resignation proves that everything Boris Johnson touches turns to shit, the illustration quickly attracted attention this morning for its depiction of the outgoing BBC chairman.

Sharp is drawn in a grotesque caricature that looks nothing like him, complete with sunken, drooping eyes, jowly cheeks, a sinister-looking grin and a noticeably prominent nose. He is carrying a box marked Goldman Sachs which contains a vampire squid. Behind him, a large pig is vomiting into a trough.

Individually, these elements are benign enough, the usual knockabout stuff of editorial cartoons. In toto, however, they take on a more insidious flavour. Antisemitic propaganda has typically depicted its targets as hideously ugly, with dark or unusual eyes, a menacing smile and a protruding nose. Such fare would also caricature the Jewish people as a giant squid leeching onto the planet. Swine, because they are considered unclean in Jewish religious law, have been used to taunt and abuse Jews. Richard Sharp is Jewish.

The depiction of Richard Sharp in today’s @guardian cartoon falls squarely into an antisemitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power. It’s appalling. Here’s why ? pic.twitter.com/RI46VmL6z8

— Dave Rich (@daverich1) April 29, 2023

Now, you might say this is a case of over-sensitivity, that it’s an unfortunate coincidence that several elements of Rowson’s drawing overlap with classic antisemitic imagery. You might note that Sharp previously worked at Goldman Sachs and that the bank was famously described by a left-wing journalist as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. You might argue that pigs in the trough is a commonplace image when political corruption is being imputed.

And it’s not impossible to imagine that a political cartoonist could create this illustration without its undertones ever occurring to him. It’s even possible to image the cartoon going through the entire editorial process, from commissioning to publication, without anyone spotting any problems. The problem is that this is Martin Rowson and this is the Guardian and they both have form.

In 2013, Rowson drew Henry Kissinger with blood-soaked hands. This on its own seems fair enough, given Kissinger’s role in shaping deadly and disastrous US policies in Indochina. Why, though, he did he depict the Jewish Kissinger with a hook nose and walking into a Bilderberg meeting no less? In 2006, the Guardian published Rowson’s take on the second Israel-Lebanon war, his Jewish knuckleduster cartoon. This involved a giant fist studded with blood-smeared Stars of David bloodying the face of a young Arab boy. The cartoon is not of an Israeli knuckleduster, with the Stars of David between two horizontal bars, as is seen in the Israeli flag. Nor are the stars blue, as they are in the flag. These are plain, simple Stars of David — the universal symbol of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.

If you’re still not convinced, here is what Rowson told the left-wing magazine Red Pepper in 2011, an interview dug up by the pro-Israel media watchdog Camera UK:

‘The Israel lobby is particularly masterful in using this to silence criticism of their brutally oppressive colonialism… You can’t win – it’s the ultimate trump card. No matter how many innocent people the Israeli state kills, any criticism is automatically proof of anti-semitism. No wonder idiots like Ahmadinejad want to deny the holocaust. They are jealous. They’d love to silence their critics like that.’

Bear in mind, this is the same interview in which Rowson said of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed:

‘You have to question the motives behind this commission, and to bear in mind the context of years of anti-immigrant propaganda in Denmark. There was no real point behind publishing this stuff other than to feed this victimisation of a minority.’

So Martin Rowson understands that satire can have questionable motives, that the political and social context is important, and that cartoons can contribute to hatred of a minority religious or ethnic group. The question, then, is why this understanding seems to fail him when it comes to Jews.

When judging a satirist, the test is whether they are as willing to lampoon the powerful without fear or favour. Which takes us back to the Richard Sharp cartoon. Were the outgoing BBC chairman a black man with left-wing politics, appointed under dubious circumstances by a socialist government, would Rowson depict him in a comparable light, with exaggerated features and imagery familiar from racist illustrations of black people? I could be wrong but I don’t believe he would, given his comments on the Danish cartoons and the ideological worldview his cartoons articulate.

Moreover, I don’t think the Guardian would publish such a cartoon. It did publish Rowson’s this morning but this afternoon the content was removed from the paper’s website. Readers were instead met with the statement: ‘The cartoon that was posted here today did not meet our editorial standards, and we have decided to remove it from our website.’ Maybe we should take encouragement from the fact they eventually deleted it, or from Rowson’s statement, issued this afternoon, which reads in part:

‘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 didn’t even think about. There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes.’

The question remains: why are some progressives who are woke to racism in most circumstances unable to see it when it comes to certain minorities whose politics they disapprove of?