John Cusack slammed for antisemitic retweet
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John Cusack slammed for antisemitic retweet
Actor John Cusack was widely criticized on Monday after tweeting an antisemitic image.
The actor - best known for Say Anything..., Being John Malkovich and High Fidelity - at first defended his retweet of the meme, before later backtracking, deleting it and apologizing.
Late on Monday Cusack tweeted the image, which features a hand emblazoned with a Star of David crushing a group of people. On the image is written a quote that is falsely attributed to the French philosopher Voltaire: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." Cusack wrote in his tweet: "Follow the money."
The image and the fake quote have both been widely used online by white supremacists and antisemites. While Cusack was subject to immediate criticism, he at first defended his retweet of the image, saying that he was simply criticizing the actions of the Israeli government.
Later he admitted that the image was antisemitic, not just critical of Israel, and deleted both the original tweet and his justifications.
"It's clear that even if it was Israel's flag & even if you don't have antisemitic bone in your body, it is still an antisemitic cartoon," Cusack tweeted. "Because it deploys anti jewish stereotypes in its attacks on Israel, even if those critiques about state violence are legit I mistakenly... retweeted an alt right account I thought was agreeing With the horrible bombing of a hospital in Palestine."
As the criticism continued to pile on, Cusack offered another apology.
"In reaction to Palestinian human rights under Israeli occupation, an issue that concerns anyone fighting for justice, I RT’d & quickly deleted an image that’s harmful to both Jewish - & Palestinian friends, & for that I’m sorry," he tweeted. "The image depicted a blue Star of David, which I associated with Israel as their flag uses the same color & shape. I know the star itself is deeply meaningful to Jews no matter where they stand on Israel’s attacks on Palestinians. The use of the star, even if it depicts the state of Israel- committing human rights violations - when combined with anti Jewish tropes about power- is antisemitic & antisemitism has no place in any rational political dialoge [sic]. To justify it - Would be as bad as conflating the cross with US flag when confronting US atrocities," he continued. "So I get why it was a careless dumb thing to retweet."
Reactions to Cusack's original tweet, and his rambling apology, were swift and varied.
Senator Ted Cruz tweeted a screenshot of Cusack's original tweet, and used it to score political points.
"Is John Cusack one of the freshmen trio of Dem women?" he wrote. "I’m sensing a pattern...."
The American Jewish Committee, meanwhile, poked fun at Cusack's panned 2010 film.
"If only John had some sort of Hot Tub Time Machine to go back in time and stop himself from retweeting this," AJC wrote on Twitter.
Huffington Post reporter Yashar Ali slammed Cusack's original defense, posting screenshots of his denials that have since been deleted: "His 'bot' excuse is absurd," Ali wrote. "This is disgusting."
New York Times editor Bari Weiss wrote: "Gotta love Cusack's defense: "I thought I was endorsing a pro Palestinian justice retweet" and "Its obviously meant to be the flag, put it this way I didn't think 'Jews' when i saw it...all I thought was 'Israel.'"
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I take Cusack at his word that he meant to criticize Israel not Jews in general.
However, the "money" trope is always anti-semitic. He made a big mistake, and what is left of his career will probably suffer for it.
We can say that, can't we? - He's not Muslim, so he can get called out for it!
What really feels wrong about that is that it's a minority being accused of controlling the majority. It would have been far more accurate, especially for the last several centuries, if the sleeve had a cross on it.
That cartoon is an old antisemitic trope. It is nonspecific to the Palestinians.
I wasn't disputing that. Many times throughout history populists have created a straw man out of minority groups that they blame for all their ills, and the Jewish population in Europe for the last several centuries bore the brunt of such vicious hate. They were often blamed for any bad things that would happen, accused of drinking Christian children's blood and poisoning the wells of Christian towns, and later accused of controlling the financial markets and banks of Europe when they were hit with an even worse financial depression than America experienced in the early 1930's. The European depression and subsequent blaming of the Jews and other minorities and immigrants led to the genocide of more than 7 million innocent civilians. I was just pointing out that often, when those in power feel threatened, they reverse the narrative and blame their opponents for the very things they themselves are actually guilty of as many who claimed to be Christians did against Jews in Europe and the US. And those roots of anti-Semitism are sadly deep, I never thought I'd see something as disgusting as the display of anti-Semitism in Charlottesville that wasn't on black and white film from over half a century ago, and I really never expected so many religious conservatives to defend the tiki torch marchers.
Neither did I.
Well, that was pretty awful. Kind of hard to explain that away.
The only difference is that this will most likely cost Cusack in the future (as it should) but just think, now he can run for federal office and have his anti Semitic comments defended by the Speaker of the House... I am certain he does not understand the full weight of his retweet, as Omar did not understand the full weight of her words!
Seemed kind of obvious to me, but whatever. I'm not going to get permanently bent over some celebrity's tweet. He apologized and acknowledged his error. Lots of people won't accept it because in spite of what you hear and read, we are not a forgiving country.
Tacos
It might have been forgivable if he hadn't written, "follow the money". It wasn't OK when Omar said it and it isn't OK when he does. In case you haven't been reading, but antisemitism is way up and this is just an example of why.
It does seem that way. I don't know what to make of it because it's not something I've ever felt. I do know we have a lot of people who embrace varying levels of conspiracy theory and "follow the money" isn't something that's limited to Jews. For example, I see it used in stories about Trump all the time.
Tacos,
Antisemitism is coming from the extreme right and the extreme left. It's the one thing they have in common.
I tend to think he is just not that bright. He looks out to lunch in almost every picture.
IMO if you want to criticize something, do so in your own words, not some meme that you don't even know the origins of.
Exactly.