A lot of us were left speechless when Val posted a racist and insulting cartoon about Cuban-Americans from Pat Oliphant that was published in the Washington Post.
Did you ever wonder where the Washington Post draws the line when it comes to maligning or offending a specific ethnic group or minority?
If you’re like me, you probably feel like the line goes right over your mom or sister or daughter.
Well there is a line that the Washington Post won’t cross and that is offending the sworn enemies of America and all it stands for:
WASHINGTON POST, OTHER NEWSPAPERS WON’T RUN ‘OPUS’ CARTOON MOCKING RADICAL ISLAM
I guess Oliphant’s and the Washington Post’s ridicule is the price one has to pay to “interfere” and defend Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness and be against Death, Slavery and the Pursuit of Religious Fascism, the protected ones.
8 thoughts on “The Line”
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Gee, maybe if Cubans started threatening violence, maybe they could get somewhere /sarc
In Soviet Union, wasn’t Washington Post published in Moscow as Pravda? 🙂
One of the reasons why the Washington Post won’t publish cartoons deemed to be anti-Muslim is because Arabs in the USA have an anti-defamation League that looks after their interests. We don’t. As long as we don’t have institutions to defend our interests, this will continue to happen.
Maybe BUCL should take a crack at this one. Surely we should at least try.
Getting BUCL to tackle this is an excellent idea. Something needs to be done. This Oliphant smear is out and out defamation, regardless of what he “meant” or “intended.”
Olliphant’s was extremely offensive. This? this just isn’t funny. Not because it isn’t PC, it just isn’t making a funny joke.
One could argue that the line is drawn closer to religion and not ethnicity. Although next to ripping a picture of the pope on SNL, pretty much anything is allowed in that context through most comedy channels.
I think the precedent set by the uproar over those caricatures of the prophet Mohammad is what made WaPo shit themselves. Now it’s an unwritten rule to not illustrate insults at Islam? I could see why, but this censorship is stupid.
BUT ALSO:”sworn enemies of America and all it stands for,” is a little unrealistic, don’t you think? Radical Islam does not condemn the US, RADICAL ISLAMIST TERRORISTS condemn the US.
It’s not the religion, it’s the people. Radical Islam will never go away, only the agents of violence within that world can ever hoped to be stopped.
Don’t fight ignorance with ignorance, please!
When a paper (any paper) opts to run something so blatantly ignorant, prejudiced and distorted as the Oliphant cartoon, said paper cannot hide behind the excuse of simply allowing free speech, because this sort of thing amounts to hate speech.
It’s not just that the Post knew this was out of line, but that it selectively approved it because it involves a particular group. It would NEVER have done so with other minorities, regardless of free speech issues. In other words, Cuban-Americans are clearly handled (or mishandled) differently, which tells me this is not about the paper’s general policy but about BIAS.
Oliphant is an old man who may be losing his marbles and is at least seriously ignorant. The ludicrous Batista crack alone is proof of that. Therefore, he is unfit to address the public on matters concerning the Cuban exile community or Cuba. Even if he’s truly clueless as to his ineptitude in this area, the Post should have known better, MUCH better. Again, this is not a “slip,” this is a symptom of a serious underlying problem.
First, I think the Batista crack actually isn’t out of ignorance, I think it’s worse than that. There’s no way Oliphant doesn’t know Batista is dead, so he is saying through his Uncle Sam character that he hopes the Cuban-Americans in the boat sink and drown before they even get to Cuba — and thus become able to say hello to Batista in the next life.
Second, the willingness of the Post to publish that cartoon and not the Opus one reminds me of Dennis Prager’s “Law Of Conservation of Anger”: If you withhold your outrage from those who deserve it, you will end up venting it on those who don’t. Examples:
The UN withholds its anger from the likes of Iran, North Korea, Al Qaeda, Saddam, etc., and vents it all on the US and Israel.
Inner city residents have marches and protests and sit-ins and riots and are willing to move heaven and earth to castrate the local police department if they even look at a minority the wrong way, but you never hear one peep out of them in protest of gangbangers and drug dealers who kill more of them in a month than the cops do in a decade.
The motivation for this displaced anger? Somebody hit it on the head earlier: cowardice. The UN knows Israel and America won’t blow them up but the terrorists and dictators will. The inner city residents know the cops won’t retaliate at all but know with metaphysical certitude that the gangbangers and drug dealers will kill them.
And the Post knows that Cuban-Americans won’t blow up their building or lie in wait in the parking garage for them, but the Islamist terrorists WILL.
This kind of displaced anger is just another form of appeasement, which Churchill defined as “the hope that the crocodile will eat you last.”