Tim Blair

CARTOONIST COMPARISON

This brilliant post from Michele at A Small Victory includes a link to one of few cartoonists more revolting than The Age’s Michael Leunig. One important difference: Latuff, the chucklehead linked by Michele, is published by such sewers as Indymedia. Leunig runs in a prestigious Melbourne broadsheet.

UPDATE. Age readers reject Leunig:

I recall a very pleasant five days with my family on holidays in Madrid some two years ago. I recall riding the train system and in particular transiting through Atocha railway station.

I cried when I saw the news reports of the terrorist bombings in Madrid.

Then I got angrier and angrier at the Leunig cartoons of the past two Fridays. The subtle and perverse idea of the moral equivalence of terrorist bombers and that of states attempting to defend themselves only serves as a justification, albeit small, to those in our community and overseas who support these terrorists.

And another:

Michael Leunig has built over the years his reputation for cartoons where his little simple-minded battlers touch us with pathos and pseudo-spiritual wisdom. However, for the last two or so years, Leunig has been using The Age as a platform to present a disturbing political world view. The charming little battler is still there but the message has changed.

We are to believe that American might and amorality brought about September 11 and other anti-US terrorist acts; that Israel is responsible for the mutilated bodies in civilian buses. No doubt the Spanish Government is responsible for the hundreds dead in the Spanish trains (for siding with the US?) - and, if Leunig had the courage to state it, Australia is responsible for the dead in Bali.

Leunig's cartoons somehow serve as a justification or rationalisation for the acts of terror. Evil are the cynical Western democracies; the victims are the misunderstood suicide bombers and al-Qaeda fighters.

Posted by Tim Blair at March 14, 2004 01:59 AM