We followed the removal of the Ramirez “Human Shields” editorial cartoon depicting the Hamas way of war from the Washington Post’s site in “Ramirez on the record.” The cartoon is posted at Ramirez’s Substack site in “Free speech dies in darkness” with a collection of links to comments on the episode. I posted the cartoon here.

We learned from the Free Beacon’s Collin Anderson’s story that Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley had hand-selected the cartoon. Blowback from the newsroom resulted in its removal. Ramirez told Collin: “When the intellectually indolent try to defend the indefensible, they always seem to resort to playing the race card. They’re trying to claim that this caricature is a racial exercise, when in its specificity, it is Ghazi Hamad, who is a senior Hamas official, who went on Lebanese television praising the brutal Oct. 7 attack and systematic slaughter of women, children, and men and pledged to do it over and over again until the annihilation of Israel.”

What next? Seeking to mollify the Post’s newsroom Hamasniks in his own way, Ramirez revised his “Human Shields” cartoon to conform to their purported sensibilities. He titled his revised cartoon “Take Two” (below) and posted it at his Substack site last week in “WaPo’s self-harm” together with his essay on the episode. For some reason or other the cartoon did not mollify the Post, or so it seems.

Copyright Ⓒ 2023 Michael Ramirez. All rights reserved. Republished with permission.