A cartoonist's immoral duty to fire missiles at the Jews

Picture: Palestinian leader Haj amin el Husseini meeting friends in the 1940's before planning the final solution. Husseini's Muslim brotherhood is the forerunner for Hamas whose thugs fire missiles at Israeli children. Leunig's duck is probably hiding under his coat.

Thomas Freedman, who used to have a column in the Melbourne Age once wrote that “criticizing Israel is not anti-Semitic, and saying so is vile. But singling out Israel for opprobrium and international sanction out of all proportion to any other party in the Middle East is anti-Semitic, and not saying so is dishonest”.

Friedman's words have come back time and time again to expose Jew bashing charlatans and no more so than the despicable Michael Leunig whose rambling justification for last month's outrageous anti-Semitic daubing was published in today's Melbourne Age.

In a long winded rant, Leunig (though denying it) merely confirms his anti-Semitic credentials by justifying his vomit inducing cartoons that liken Israel's self-defence against thousands of missiles fired at civilian targets by Palestinian terrorists to the actions of the Nazis.

This, while many others in the neighbourhood go about their normal day-to-day jobs of butchering civilians and, in the case of Syria shooting their own women and children in the face without so much as a boo or a sympathetic caricature of a duck.

To Leunig, because they have the edge in military superiority and can minimise the damage to their people through technology and better bomb shelters, the Jews in this neighbourhoid have no right to defend themselves against thousands of lethal rockets including highly sophisticated missiles supplied by Tehran and fired at major population centres by the thugs who rule Gaza.

Leunig's portrayal of the Palestinians as being defenceless against Israel's might ignores the fact that the terrorists are armed and guided by the lunatics from populous oil rich Iran (which incidentally idolises Leunig's anti-Semitic cartoons) who are bent on annihilating the Jewish State and murdering its citizens and have no compunction about taking out fellow Muslims along the way when they commit their crimes against humanity. And let us not forget that Leunig is turning a blind eye not only to the malice of these groups and their threats of genocide but also to what are real war crimes.

Leunig also ignores their chilling and hateful slanders against Israel and the Jews. Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League calls the Hamas credo "not just anti-Israel, but profoundly anti-Semitic with racism at its core. The Hamas Charter reads like a modern-day 'Mein Kampf." According to the charter, Jewish people "have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world." It claims that the Jews deserve God's/Allah's enmity and wrath because they received the Scriptures but violated its sacred texts, disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew their own prophets. "The Day of Judgement will not come until Muslims fight the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, 'O Muslims, O Abdullah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.

Only last week the Hamas  politburo chief Khaled Meshaal claimed “victory”  against Israel stating, “Today is Gaza. Tomorrow will be Ramallah and after that Jerusalem, then Haifa and Jaffa”.

By ignoring the context of the conflict and dismissing the hatred inculcated into Palestinian society by Hamas and the other terrorist groups fighting against the Jews, Leunig is not only running cover for their hateful philosophy with every deluded cartoon he draws but is damaging the prospects for peace for all people in the region by giving succour to the extremists who are the true cause of suffering of both the Arabs and the Jews in the area.

Today's rant in which he attempts to justify himself is as pathetic and as hateful as his scribbling. It is his missile against the Jewish people of who this city still contains survivors of Hitler's brutality. 

Michael Leunig has a moral duty to look into their faces, the faces of Israeli children traumatised by the missile fire of the terrorists and of the Palestinian children used as human shields by the barbarians of Hamas and the other terrorist groups  but he can't bring himself to do it.