Published Sunday, February 26, 2012, 11:03 PM
Cartoonist Ken Catalino has very recently produced a work which can be interpreted as a perfect illustration of how different freedom (for now) of speech and of the press in this country is from the situation in Afghanistan and in much of the Muslim world.
In Catalino's recent cartoon, Barack Obama -- who of course regularly makes obsequious comments like "Islam has always been a part of America" -- is shown being overindulgent to an extreme in apologizing for the accidental burning of (U.S. taxpayer-funded) Korans in which Taliban prisoners had been writing incendiary messages.
Catalino pictures Obama on his hands and knees, with lips pursed and inches away from actually kissing the rear end of an Afghan Muslim who appears, above all, amused by the lengths to which the President of the United States will grovel.
In the cartoon, Obama (whose deference to tyrannical types has previously been depicted by, e.g., cartoonist Glenn McCoy, in the context of Obama bowing to the Burger King) is apparently undeterred by the fact that the Afghan is blatantly mocking him with "Don't forget the Hallmark card written in your blood, infidel dog."
Obama has recently sent a formal letter of apology to Afghanistan’s ingrate president, Hamid Karzai, for the burning of Korans at a U.S. military base.
About the incident, columnist Andrew McCarthy has written:
... [Obama's apology] is not couched as an apology from the American people, whose frame of mind will be outrage, not contrition, as the facts become more widely known.
The facts are that the Korans were seized at a jail because jihadists imprisoned there were using them not for prayer but to communicate incendiary messages. The soldiers dispatched to burn refuse from the jail were not the officials who had seized the books, had no idea they were burning Korans, and tried desperately to retrieve the books when the situation was brought to their attention.
Of course, these facts may not become widely known, because no one is supposed to mention the main significance of what has happened here. First, as usual, Muslims — not al-Qaeda terrorists, but ordinary, mainstream Muslims — are rioting and murdering over the burning (indeed, the inadvertent burning) of a book.
As for Catalino, his political cartoons have appeared throughout the country. Catalion was recently awarded first place for editorial cartooning by the New York Press Association.
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