Euro Anti-Semitism Watch: In yesterday's El Periodico, the back-page cartoon is by some piece of shit in human form named Ferreres. It shows Ariel Sharon, depicted as hugely fat with a big nose and thick lips (exactly as if El Periodico were Der Sturmer). Sharon is pushing a wheelbarrow full of human skulls and standing in front of an enormous wall of more skulls. Three innocent-looking folks, whom I assume are Palestinians, are saying to him: "The UN has condemned the construction of the wall." Sharon responds, "There's a lot of anti-Semites around here. Besides, in the caricatures, they always draw me as fat. I don't know why!" The Periodico's all-time classic cartoon, which they run several times a year, is an American flag with the Star of David in the place of the fifty stars.

Click here if you want to see the Ferreres cartoon.

On the very same page, the unintelligent, uninformed, anti-American, fat Catalan "journalist", Joan Barril (this guy is so fat that his neck bulges out over his shirt collar and makes him look like a swollen-up frog in the photo that accompanies his newspaper column. I met him once briefly. He's an asshole as a person--Spaniards who are not confident in their own intelligence, like Barril and Vazquez Montalban and Javier Nart, and especially the vicious dragonlady Maruja Torres, but who somehow have risen to levels where they are considered geniuses by the Great Unwashed, tend to be major assholes, unlike most of the rest of them--and he's much uglier in person than in that photo), has an article on the Madrid Donors' Conference. Here's an excerpt:

In half a year we've moved from preventative demonstrations to the smoke of the bombings, from the threat of weapons of mass destruction to nothing, from a war which was supposed to be a liberation to a painful and bloody occupation. Even to wage war well you have to be competent, and something is telling us that the most professional army in the world has behaved with little professionalism. And now they're appealing to the generosity of the First World, not so much to help Iraq but to pay the American bill. If you don't want to spend your money on construction, don't spend it on destruction. A donor is someone who gives. But a forced donor is not a donor, but a victim. We don't become philanthropists by handing over our wallet to a mugger.

With the recently arrived cold weather there's plenty of time to think about the sum of injustices of this war and this postwar. I imagine those generals, those pilots, and that secretary of Defense at the moment of deciding the bombing of inhabited cities with fragmentation bombs. War also has its syntax. There are bombs designed to penetrate and mutilate bodies and others to blow up buildings or cut off highways. the cost of the mutilated body is not contemplated in the fund-raising in Madrid, maybe because the cost of an anonymous Iraqi has no price and on the other hand a section of a pipeline has an incalculable value. Now everything is turning out to be very expensive. And they're asking the world to pay for the aggressors' party. And the world isn't just governments. We taxpayers are going to contribute the money so that some Spanish company can make a small profit with the crumbs from the table that Dick Cheney's friends leave behind.

Challenge: How many lies, exaggerations, and stereotypes can you find in these two paragraphs of Mr. Barril's?

Update: I have just torn out said back page of the Periodico and taken it to the toilet, where I used it for target practice. Bombed it, strafed it, and sank it.