Newspaper comic strips can help explain hostility toward the United States in some Arab/Muslim countries, according to an article published in the Political Communication journal.
“If Americans want to understand the hostile feelings many people in the Arab/Muslim world have about the United States, its leaders and [the United States’] policies, they should take a hard look at the striking cartoons we have compiled from the region and published in Political Communication,” journal editor David L. Paletz told the Duke University news service.
In the article “No Laughing Matter,” Duke graduate student Matthew Diamond analyzed 32 political cartoons published after the Sept. 11 attacks in the Al-Ahram newspaper in Egypt, Pakistan’s Dawn and Chouk, Iran’s Nowrooz Daily and Iran News, Saudi Arabia’s Al-hayat and Arab News, and cartoons identified by Arabia.com as originating in Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine.
Comparing the attacks
The cartoons “posit the moral equivalence of the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. attacks in Afghanistan,” and ridicule the United States for failing to locate Osama bin Laden, Diamond’s article said.
Several cartoons depict U.S. media coverage of the war in Afghanistan as an “entertainment consumer commodity blinding viewers to the world around them,” the article said, pointing to a cartoon showing a television cameraman pointing his camera at a poster of bin Laden while ignoring a Pakistani family behind him releasing doves of peace.
Another cartoon- from the Al-Ahran in Egypt- places a picture of the World Trade Center debris and a broken jet fuselage next to a picture of a devastated Afghan tent camp and spent U.S. bomb casings.
Many of the cartoons portray the United States as a “well-equipped (but often stupid, blind, or misled) soldier,” and a “cowboy, a giant or an oversized …bomb, all extremely powerful, dominating, and indiscriminate in the application of that power,” the article said.
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