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<h1>Cartoons that kill: The art and imagery of genocide</h1><p class="gmail-article__subhead gmail-css-1wt8oh6"><em>Why did The Washington Post publish a caricature dehumanising Palestinians amid Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza?</em></p><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-article-b-l" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><ul class="gmail-article-author"><li class="gmail-article-author__item"><a class="gmail-article-author__link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/zarrar-khuhro"><img class="gmail-article-author__image" src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/ZK-01.jpeg?resize=96%2C96&quality=80" alt="Zarrar Khuhro" height="60" width="60"></a><div class="gmail-article-author__info"><div class="gmail-article-author__name"><a class="gmail-author-link" href="https://www.aljazeera.com/author/zarrar-khuhro">Zarrar Khuhro</a></div><div class="gmail-article-author__title">Pakistani journalist, columnist and talk show host</div></div></li></ul><div class="gmail-article-dates" style="border-color:rgb(250,144,0)"><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><span class="gmail-screen-reader-text">Published On 16 Nov 2023</span><span aria-hidden="true"><br></span></div><div class="gmail-date-simple gmail-css-1yjq2zp"><font size="1"><a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/16/cartoons-that-kill-the-art-and-imagery-of-genocide">https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/11/16/cartoons-that-kill-the-art-and-imagery-of-genocide</a></font></div></div></div><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fpnvugn"></a></div></div><a class="gmail-social-share-button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" aria-label="Share on Twitter" href="https://twitter.com/intent/tweet?text=Cartoons%20that%20kill%3A%20The%20art%20and%20imagery%20of%20genocide&source=sharethiscom&related=sharethis&via=AJEnglish&url=https%3A%2F%2Faje.io%2Fpnvugn"></a><div class="gmail-article-info-block gmail-opinion-info-block gmail-css-ti04u9"><div class="gmail-social-share-buttons"></div></div><div class="gmail-responsive-image"><img src="https://www.aljazeera.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/GettyImages-1768922075-1699396649.jpg?resize=770%2C513&quality=80" alt="Injured children are seen at a hospital as the Israeli attacks continue on its 32nd day in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza on November 7, 2023." width="391" height="260" style="margin-right: 25px;"></div>Injured
children are seen at a hospital amid Israeli attacks in Deir Al-Balah,
Gaza on November 7, 2023. [Belal Khaled/Anadolu via Getty Images]<div class="gmail-wysiwyg gmail-wysiwyg--all-content gmail-css-ibbk12"><p class="gmail-p1">Genocide
is not an event; you don’t simply wake up one morning and begin
exterminating an entire people out of the blue. Genocide is a process;
you have to work your way up to it.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">And like all processes, genocide has its stages – 10
stages in all if we are to refer to the list prepared by Dr Gregory
Stanton, founding president and chairman of <a href="https://www.genocidewatch.com/" target="_blank">Genocide Watch</a>, an organisation that does exactly what its name implies.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">One of those stages is dehumanisation. This is an
important one because committing genocide is not easy; murdering men,
women and children in thousands tends to take a toll on the psyche,
causing one to perhaps face all kinds of uncomfortable questions, to
counter all manners of unwelcome thoughts that intrude into even the
most closed of minds like single spies sneaking into a well-guarded
fortress.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">Those who pull the trigger on children, those who drop
bombs on schools and hospitals, are after all presumably as humans as
the ones they murder. How then, one wonders, do they sleep at night? How
do they not see the blood on their hands every waking moment, like Lady
Macbeth wandering the halls of the Dunsinane castle?</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">The answer is simple; you live with it by convincing
yourself that those being killed are not in fact human, or at the very
least not as human as you are. If you do that right and repeatedly, you
will successfully convince yourself that murder is not murder; it’s pest
control.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">Dehumanisation has to be an ongoing process, running
concurrently with the actual extermination because, you see, it is not
just your own public you have to convince, it is also the governments
and publics of the countries that are arming, aiding, abetting and, in
some cases, cheering you on while you go about your bloody but necessary
business. This gets harder to do as eviscerated babies pile up in the
courtyards of besieged hospitals, as body bags choke the streets, and as
the world livestreams the apocalypse on smartphones.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">It’s in this context that last week’s infamous <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/8/racist-vile-cartoon-in-washington-post-ignites-controversy">Washington Post cartoon</a> must be viewed.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">On November 6, as Israel continued its deliberate and
direct targeting of civilians in Gaza in bakeries, hospitals and homes,
while clearly announcing its intention to eradicate the Palestinians,
The Washington Post published a caricature titled “Human Shields”.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">The caricature depicts a man with bestial features in a
dark, striped suit, which has Hamas in bold white letters emblazoned on
it. His comically large nose is jutting out from beneath sunken eyes
crowned by bushy eyebrows. He has several children and a typically
helpless-looking abaya-clad Arab woman tied to his body. To his left is a
Palestinian flag and to his right a partial image of Al-Aqsa and, of
course, an oil lamp. Just in case the symbolism was not clear enough.
The cartoon ticks many boxes. In his landmark study on dehumanisation,
scholar Nick Haslam writes that among the categories of dehumanisation
by imagery are depictions of the enemy as a barbarian, a criminal and a
harasser of women and children.</p>
<p class="gmail-p1">The outrage was immediate and effective; having removed
the cartoon, the editor of the editorial page, David Shipley, wrote in a
note to readers that while he saw the drawing purely as a “caricature”
of a “specific Hamas spokesman”, the outrage convinced him that he had
“missed something profound, and divisive”.</p></div><p class="gmail-p1">It’s not David’s fault, really. Like so many people across
the world he’s grown up with media and film depictions of hooknosed
Arabs as either bumbling sheikhs, bumbling bandits, or else brutal (and
bumbling) fanatics. This is a phenomenon author Jack Shaheen wrote about
extensively in his book Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a
People, which was later made into a documentary.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2">Coming back to cartoons, Arabs are not the only ones to
get this treatment – far from it. Nazi Germany was replete with images
(they’re just a Google search away) which depicted Jews in much the same
way: Their eyes are beady and their noses are hooked or bulbous,
sometimes both. All precisely calculated to produce revulsion in the
viewer, to separate the righteous “us” from the bestial “them”.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2">Take a cursory look at anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons
in World War II, some drawn by none other than famous children’s author
Dr Seuss, and you see the same techniques applied. Anti-Irish cartoons
published in the UK and US in the late 19th century also depict Irish
immigrants as beasts, and Black Americans – or Black people in general –
still find themselves portrayed as apes or monkeys. The purpose is as
simple as it is insidious and effective: to tie character to appearance,
and then ensure that said appearance is hideous.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2">The Nazis went a step further, of course, and routinely
depicted Jews as rats with (barely) human faces scurrying before the
cleansing Aryan broom. Proving that the classics never really go out of
style, in 2015, the Daily Mail took a page out of Goebbels’s playbook <font size="2">by
depicting rats scurrying into Europe alongside silhouetted Muslim
migrants who are turbaned and carrying AK-47s. The lone visible woman
was of course duly veiled and wearing an abaya.</font><span style="font-size:22px"> </span>But at least the Daily Mail didn’t portray the actual migrants as rats, thereby completely dehumanising them.</p>
<p class="gmail-p2">That honour falls to none other than Michael Ramirez, the
two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who drew The Washington Post “Human
Shields” cartoon. In 2018, the same year as the Palestinian Great March
of Return – when Israeli snipers killed 266 unarmed protestors and
crippled tens of thousands more – Mr Ramirez saw it fit to draw a
cartoon showing a tide of rats, carrying Palestinian flags and under
fire, hurtling off a cliff while blaming Israel for their fate. Clearly,
this is also something “profound and divisive” that The Washington Post
seems to have somehow missed.</p>
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