Ahmadinejad on the Jews

Don't get me wrong, this guy is a very dangerous man and I worry for the lives of Israelis with him in power. But it seems like he isn't the lunatic everyone thinks he is. He's making some good points and while some of them I strongly disagree with, others make sense.

As Rabbi Lerner puts it beautifully in Healing Israel/Palestine, the creation of the State of Israel in response to the Holocaust was like Jews jumping out of a burning building and landing in another building that already had occupants. Of course the first reaction of both parties would be to play the "I'm the victim!" game (and we all know how good Jews are at that).

Ahmadinejad has the standard Arab view of Zionism: that it is incompatible with Arab countries, but that doesn't mean that he hates Jews. Unfortunately the two often go hand in hand, but it seems that Ahmadinejad can make that distinction and I respect him at least for that.

Antisemitism in the Arab World

I found this picture in an article on the ADL website about antisemitism in the Arab World in regards to the presidential elections. This one on top was from Al Bayan, a newspaper from the United Arab Emirates.
I understand the criticism over Obama and McCain's relationship to the Jewish lobby: they both made trips to Israel and they are both targeting Jews for their campaigns. Considering the small size of the Jewish population in America, it is a bit striking how much attention we get (and how much pull we have). But to characterize the stereotypical Jew as a haredi shtetl Jew is not only extremely offensive and demeaning, it's also completely untrue, historically inaccurate, and shows the ignorance, hatred, and antisemitism behind the cartoons. The vast majority of Jews are not ultra-orthodox, or even outwardly religious at all, and only a couple of the cartoons in the article depicted Jews as normal looking Americans (possibly because the ones that did were not deemed antisemitic, if they even exist).
I don't understand the reasoning for using such an outdated and ignorant stereotype except for baseless hatred. When American political cartoonists represent the Chinese, for example, they definitely don't show them with buck teeth, wearing a coolie hat, doing dry cleaning, and building a railroad.
Here's another one from Bahrain:
They remind me of when I went to Egypt last summer and had a long conversation with my tour guide about world politics. He explained to me that he liked Americans but he didn't like American foreign policy because it was controlled by the Jews. I couldn't believe that those words actually came out of his mouth and for a second I tried to convince myself that I heard him wrong. I knew that ideas like that existed but I didn't realize they were so widespread that I would encounter them from the only Egyptian I would meet in my week in an Arab country. I told him that I couldn't believe that he believed that and he replied that he couldn't believe that I didn't believe it. I've tried to contact him a couple times through email to hear more about his perspective but he never responds. I think once he realized that I was going back to Tabah to cross the Israeli border he put two and two together and didn't feel like communicating with the enemy.
It's also interesting how this cartoon is of the exact same caliber but comes from a totally different source: American white supremacy.