Wednesday, January 11, 2006
A SENSE OF NORMALITY
Age readers—bless them, for they are few—react to Michael Leunig’s disgusting cartoon:
That old Palestinian man in the wheelchair that Leunig alludes to in his cartoon - the late spiritual leader of Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin - believed that Israel had no right to exist and consequently made a career out of launching rocket attacks against Israeli villages and sending suicide bombers into cafes and restaurants in order to kill as many Israelis as they could.
Leunig’s cartoons are often tasteless - but this one is downright offensive.
Alan Freedman, East St KildaPerhaps Michael Leunig needs to be reminded that it was terrorists from the Palestine Liberation Front who hijacked the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985 and killed a partially paralysed 69-year-old American man, Leon Klinghoffer, because he was a Jew. The terrorists tossed Leon Klinghoffer’s body overboard along with his wheelchair. The contrast of the events on the Achille Lauro with Israel’s policies of targeting only combatants in retaliation for, or pre-emption of, attacks on civilians is dramatic, to say the least.
Leunig’s cartoons do nothing to promote thoughtful discussion on the issues nor do they offer the measured and educated opinions I expect from your paper. Instead they are shallow, ill-informed, deliberately hostile and shamelessly partisan.
Leon Kinal, MoorabbinFor pity’s sake, enough is enough!
I cannot cite another example of a journalist permitted to daily flaunt plainly extremist views in a wide-circulation mainstream newspaper. The drumbeat of Michael Leunig’s fanaticism has long become tiresome, but what is more disturbing is the unparalleled licence he is accorded by your editors.
No doubt ducks and teapots make for happy merchandising, but this does not excuse your endless coddling of a doctrinaire zealot.
Geoffrey Winn, East Brighton
Learn more about Leunig at his official tribute website: “With a passion for truth, he believes that his honesty of depressed, lonely, embarrassing and troublesome thoughts and situations helps individuals feel more of a sense of normality, in difficult times.”