Does the Washington Post have any credibility at all?
They censored this cartoon below after a few critics absurdly howled 'racism' -- all for depicting a Hamas spokesman accurately, and creating a thoughtful message that Hamas's complaints about civilian attacks are disingenuous. After all, Hamas is at war on Israeli civilians, and holds 200-some hostages.
Supposedly, the Post's critics complained about the nose of the central figure, expropriating from the complaints of caricatures directed against Jews done by anti-Semites.
Yeah, sure.
Did they want a little turned-up button nose on him?
Talk about white-ification. Talk about cultural imperialism. Where's the Washington Post's DEI department?
And more to the point, is Ramirez supposed to depict a terrorist holding hostages flatteringly?
The Hamas guy looks the way he looks and Ramirez depicted him correctly.
In fact, Ramirez's depiction of the character as evil is particularly effective, because yes, these terrorists are as evil as they look.
This is obviously upsetting to the Hamas public relations department, which would have you think that Hamas is full of sweet little daisies and Israel is the bad guy. Their urge is to censor, the way they do in the Gaza hellhole they rule with an iron fist.
Now they want to silence Ramirez from revealing the truth about them, arrogantly assuming they can take their way of goverrning over to the U.S.
And disgustingly, they found a willing partner in the Washington Post.
The Post issued the world's most groveling, oozing, grossout apology:
Editor’s note: As editor of the opinion section, I am responsible for what appears in its pages and on its screens. The section depends on my judgment. A cartoon we published by Michael Ramirez on the war in Gaza, a cartoon whose publication I approved, was seen by many readers as racist. This was not my intent. I saw the drawing as a caricature of a specific individual, the Hamas spokesperson who celebrated the attacks on unarmed civilians in Israel.
It was unintentionally ironic.
What's this "range of views and perspectives, including ones that challenge readers"? They just censored a cartoon because snowflakes falsely cried racism. Shipley was right say he did not see racism in it when he ran it -- because there wasn't any.
Now he's caving in to the pro-Hamas wokester mob, which bellows 'racism' every time it runs out of arguments.
The racism claim is one of those, and it's ridiculous. If you would want to play art critic and criticize anything about the Ramirez 'toon, you might go after his depiction of the child hostages as "Family Circus"-style bawling brats. Actually, the "proof of life" photos emerging from Hamas depict haggard, abused, terrified children with dark circles under their eyes. But this cartoon was done before those photos emerged, so the only thing Ramirez could be criticized for would be not anticipating just how vile Hamas would show itself to be.
It's an outrageous bow to the wokester mob from one of America's foremost papers of record. The tiny staff of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, which did genuinely offensive cartoons against Muslims, never backed down and never apologized when it was criticized by the terrorists. The Washington Post praised them effusively at the time for their courage.
Now they get the Hamas mob stirring against them and they themselves bow down like dhimmi.
Ramirez didn't deserve this. He is a former colleague of mine from our days at Investor's Business Daily and I don't know how he takes it, particularly when you observe him creating his art with such care and time spent. He's a genius, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and the Washington Post has disgraced itself by bowing to the censorship mob, effectively doing Hamas's public relations work for it, by suppressing his original creation.
The Washington Post ought to be ashamed. So much for democracy dies in darkness. It dies right there in the Washington Post's editorial room.
Image: Twitter screen shot