No honour among cartoonists (III)

Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, infamous for their graphic anti-American and anti-Israeli political cartoons in The Guardian, are not standing up for their fellow cartoonists in Denmark:

When the political cartoonist Martin Rowson draws President Bush with blood on his hands, he gets hundreds of angry and obscene e-mails. But he doesn't mind, he said, because "the purpose of satire is to attack people more powerful than you are."

Still, Rowson said, he would not have drawn the cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that were published by a Danish newspaper and led to often violent protests around the world. Rowson said the cartoons insulted a minority group -- "poor and powerless Muslims in Denmark."
[...]
Steve Bell, who, like Rowson, draws mainly for the Guardian newspaper, has been portraying Blair for nearly 15 years. He is best known for his caricatures of a maniacal Blair with enormous teeth and ears and one wild-looking eye that is much larger than the other.

In 2000, Bell drew a cartoon titled "The End of The Affair," featuring a demonic-looking Blair driving a wooden stake through the heart of a green-skinned, cadaver-like former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in a casket. More recently, he drew an excited Bush having relations with a camel, which was supposed to symbolize Iraq.

But even as a believer in harsh political satire, Bell said, he would not have drawn the Danish cartoons, including one that featured Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. He defended the Danish newspaper's right to publish the drawings, saying limitations on free speech should be "self-imposed."

"The limits are one's own integrity and one's own beliefs," he said. "Sometimes you want to offend. But you target the powerful, not the weak. In Denmark, those cartoons tapped into a lot of the nasty, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim things going on."

There is, in fact, something more repulsive than cowardice and hypocrisy: cowardice and hypocrisy masquerading as bravery. One of Tim Blair's readers hits it right on the head: "the Left has no concept of right and wrong, only strong and weak. Strong = bad, weak = good." (Another writes, "when Martin Rowson decided to become a cartoonist, it was certainly a great loss to rocket science.")

Posted by damian at February 25, 2006 10:04 AM | TrackBack