This Week's Sneak Peek

Friday, I posted a fictional complaint about a real editorial cartoon by Republican cartoonist Michael Ramirez. The fictional complaint was based on a real complaint about a more recent cartoon of his, into which I crammed bits and pieces of other complaints about it.

In his cartoon, a man with a large nose and snarling mouth, labeled “Hamas,” stands bound with ropes to four alarmed children and a cowering woman in a hijab. “How dare Israel attack civilians …” he says.

On social media, several readers called it “in poor taste.” In a post on Instagram, Palestinian American poet Remi Kanazi wrote: “This is the Washington Post. This is the kind of anti-Palestinian racism that’s acceptable for publication.” Left-wing British activist Owen Jones called the cartoon an example of “racist dehumanization.”

Those complaints got the cartoon yanked from the Washington Post's website, only for it to be more widely circulated elsewhere than it might have been otherwise.

In old Blighty, the Guardian fired editorial cartoonist Steve Bell after Bell went public over a spiked cartoon of his based on the famous David Levine cartoon of Lyndon Johnson showing off his gall bladder operation scar shaped like Vietnam. Bell's cartoon had Benjamin Netanyahu preparing to remove a Gaza-shaped scar on his own belly; a Guardian editor thought it reminded him not of LBJ, but of the Jewish lender Shylock in Merchant of Venice demanding his "pound of flesh" — an allusion made nowhere in the cartoon.

Charging a cartoon of being anti-semitic, or anti-Arab, or racist, may be unfair when that was not the cartoonist's intent, but it works. Whatever argument the cartoonist intended to forward is immediately shut down, discarded, and forgotten, and the subject is changed to How Dare You, You Fiend!

Granted, there are cartoons that are genuinely any or all of those things. I see plenty of them when I'm rummaging through the century-old cartoons for my Saturday postings.

But the point I was trying to make Monday is that Michael Ramirez (with whose viewpoint I generally disagree) belongs to a school of cartooning that routinely if not always employs gross caricature. That school and its alumni include Clay Jones, Ted Rall, Mike Lester, Chris Britt, Joey Weatherford, Mike Peters, Tom Toles, and just about every British and Australian editorial cartoonist who has ever wielded pen and brush.

Critics who seize upon every oversized nose to censor any cartoon they think offensive remind me of a cartoon Signe Wilkinson drew when faced with similar attacks.

"My New Caricatures" by Signe Wilkinson in Philadelphia Daily News, 1992?