To the editor:

Last week, Emory’s campus hosted Palestine week. Last Friday, an offensive cartoon was published by Dylan Woodliff equating the current situation in Gaza to the Holocaust. This weekend, a fire of unknown origin occurred at the AEPi house, which is a predominantly Jewish fraternity. One wonders if these are isolated incidents or a connection. One can gain insight from the exhibit in Emorys Woodruff Library, entitled a “The Bomb that Healed”, which referred to the bombing of The Temple in 1958. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, Oct 13, 1958 Atlanta Journal Constitution editor Ralph McGill correctly stated “Let us face the facts. This is a harvest. It is the crop of things sown”. Perhaps the fire at the AEPi house is the fruition of a similar hatred, sown by the events and cartoons of the last week. Intimidation of Jewish students has become the norm at San Francisco State University, where Palestinian supporters chanted “Hitler should have finished the job”. Jewish students have faced intimidation at UC Berkeley, Columbia University, UC Irvine, and Concordia University. I would hate to see Emory join this list.

As the grandson of Warsaw Jews who were killed by the Nazis, I found the cartoon obscene. I would guess that Mr Woodliff knows the following about Gaza. First, there is no effort to liquidate men, women and children as occurred in the Holocaust. Second, the closure of the Israel-Gaza border was done in response to rockets aimed at the Israeli cities of Sderot and Ashkelon, specifically targeting civilians. Third, Israel does not control all access to Gaza. Gaza shares a porous border with Egypt, through which explosives and weapons have no problems penetrating. Therefore, Woodliffs cartoon was not designed to provoke thought, but perhaps to provoke hate. Woodliff needs to assess what his intentions were in publishing a cartoon that he knew to be both false and inflammatory. Just like crying “fire” in a crowded movie theater, words can have consequences beyond “provoking thought.”

Jack L. Arbiser
Associate Professor of Dermatology