1 comment

• Mira Nabulsi

  first of all I don’t think that meeting with cartoonists for half an hour would be good enough to make a realistic opinion or even call it an experience with Palestinian or Egyptian cartoonists. I have myself a friend who is a cartoonist in the West Bank who tells me Cagle met them for like half an hour, and so just coz he happened to meet few people (and it seems to me those in Egypt were from mainstream media) doesn’t mean those you met represent the whole spectrum of political cartoons, to be able to understand media and journalism and specifically cartoons in a country you have to have a little knowledge about the history, politics and culture of that country and especially the social and political taboos and its just silly to think that your stereotypical \knowledge\ is sufficient to understand the work of those people, you might say these Egyptian cartoonists are ignorant and superficial but a good question would be why is it easy for those to criticize Israel but not the regime even with the country’s armies of unemployed and illiterate ?
  as for Palestine, I have to say that in the last 2 years I have seen as many cartoons criticizing the internal divisions between Hamas & Fateh or ones featuring economic and political hardships just as much as those criticizing Israel, if not more.. hence, you have to realize that just at the beginning of this year more than 1400 people were massacred by \the democratic\ state of Israel, Gaza lives under siege for more than two years now, many people still live in tents after the offensive and even building materials were not allowed not to talk about the severe scarcity of water and nutrition, in similar circumstances what do you expect people to draw about? does it matter to them that American media won’t like such cartoons? or are you suggesting they should edit them in a way to fit in? such a patronizing tone !!

  haven’t you noticed the numerous checkpoints one has to go through to travel around the West Bank or did the American embassy accompany you with their special cars that can travel through \Israelis only\ roads? if standing for 2 hours under the sun or heavy rain -to be allowed to simply go to your work- was ur daily routine maybe then u will realize why cartoonists creativity in portraying Israel as a monster will never be exhausted ..

  for Cagle drawing cartoons might be a passion and a nice way to make good money but for many in this part of the world it might be life-threatening !

  3 November 2009, 14:35 pm

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