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Comics Journalism Editor Matt Bors (Photo: Caroline Bins)

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The text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

Marco Werman: The first chapter of an online project to document life in Haiti since the earthquake two years ago was published today. It’s a piece of cartoon journalism by a team of Haitians and it’s edited by American cartoonist, Matt Bors. He teamed up with Haitian reporter Pharés Jerome and Haitian comic artist Chevelin Pierre. The first chapter is called “Tents Beyond Tents.” Bors says comics are the best way to tell Haiti’s story.

Matt Bors: If you look at Chevelin’s comics, you’re immediately put there. You’re not just reading a prose piece on the internet which I think is a lot more effective. Also, comics is very low-budget. I mean, one person can do it with a pen and a pad of paper. You don’t need to buy a bunch of equipment. You don’t need a team of editors and sound people working with you. It’s a highly effective way, I think, to get across a story, especially non-fiction stories and human stories. Comics for a long time has been associated with funny pages and super hero books, but what you’ve seen in the last few decades is comics getting more serious and more respected, and now, comics journalism is kind of the last frontier. You’ve had a lot of memoirs, a lot of non-fiction books and there’s a whole genre now of people who do journalism in comics form. You’re seeing a lot of it in the U.S., and there’s a lot of talented people doing it. So, I had the idea that a place that I was interested in which was Haiti, instead of me just popping in for a few weeks and doing a piece about it, that I really wanted to do something substantial and try to show people in the media how effective comics journalism can be and really get a Haitian perspective and do something substantial. So, we’re doing 75 pages of comics and it’s not just going to be on the anniversary. We’re going to have it running throughout the year to try to keep a spotlight on the country that is, for the most part, ignored unless a horrible tragedy is going on.

Werman: How deep is comics culture in Haiti and will Haitians be able to read this?

Bors: There aren’t a lot of cartoonists being published in Haiti. There are two main daily papers who do both have editorial cartoonists and put them on the front page unlike American newspapers, but there aren’t a lot of published cartoonists in Haiti. Getting Haitians to read this is one of our main goals, so we’re publishing in French and Creole. Today it’s only up in English but the translations for French and Creole will be online within a few weeks, and then we hope to have it published in print form in Haiti, in Creole, at some point.

Werman: Matt, ultimately, what do you want this comic book to do for Haiti?

Bors: What I want this project to do is shine a light on Haiti and its problems from a Haitian perspective. Everything that we read from Haiti is written by a foreign journalist, and so it was really important to us to have this done by Haitians. We want to shine a light on the country longer than just one day, on the anniversary. So, we’re running this project throughout the year. Then, I really want to show people what comics journalism as a medium can do and that it’s not just something done for novelty. It’s a very serious form of reporting and that it can show what’s going on there in a way better than, maybe, a lot of mediums can.

Werman: Do you hope that maybe Haitians will read this and think about their country differently?

Bors: Yes. A lot of media in Haiti is actually French languaged and most Haitians can’t read French; they read Creole. So, our goal with this is to really have it printed in Creole so that the masses of Haiti can actually read it. Yet, there’s not a lot of journalism that’s targeted towards them because they are disempowered, they’re completed impoverished and so they’re not the ones buying newspapers so they are not geared towards them. So, we hope that with this project the average Haitian can feel like they’re reading something that was written for them and by a Haitian that understands what’s going on there.

Werman: Matt Bors, a cartoonist based in Portland, Oregon and the Editor for Comics Journalism at Cartoon Movement. The first installment of his latest project about Haiti was published online today.
Matt Bors, good to meet you. Thanks very much.

Bors: Thanks a lot for having me.

Werman: You can see a few images from “Tents Beyond Tents” and a link to the whole chapter at theworld.org.

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Matt Bors was insistent that the comics journalism project about Haiti be written and drawn by Haitians. He spent a month in Haiti looking for just the right team.

He summed up his trip in a cartoon and a video that follows his thinking about the Haiti comic journalism project.

Pharés Jerome (Photo: Pharés Jerome)

Chevelin Pierre (Photo: Sandra Cériné)

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Some of Mizuki’s manga narratives also deal with his experience as a soldier in World War II. And one of his most famous Soin Gyokusai Seyo! (Translated as Onward towards Our Noble Deaths) has just been published in North America (Drawn + Quarterly, 2011). But it’s not like the super-hero stuff you’ll find in classic American war comics.

Sgt. Rock is one of those classic characters of war comic books in which fantasy meets reality. After all, he used to shoot down Nazi warplanes with just a submachine gun.

The war comics of Shigeru Mizuki are very different. They’re more like poetry meets reality. Think Terrence Malick’s 1998 war movie “The Thin Red Line” and the philosophy of war expressed by the hard-nosed Sgt. Walsh played by Sean Penn. Remember Sgt. Walsh berating the lower ranking Private Witt for going AWOL?

“What difference you think you can make, one single man, in all this madness?” Mizuki askes. “If you die, it’s going to be for nothing. There’s not some other world out there where everything’s going to be okay. There’s just this one.”

That’s the same vision sketched out in pen and ink by Shigeru Mizuki in “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths.” Only, for the Japanese soldiers he portrays, the vision is even worse.

Mizuki’s manga is set during a final and seemingly unwinnable campaign in New Guinea in World War II. The story centers on the agony faced by a Japanese platoon of soldiers whose commander orders them on a suicide mission. He sends them into battle and tells them national honor depends on them dying. They must not return home alive.

It’s a grim tale, told with a peppering of humor. It’s not comic relief though. When I met Mizuki at his small studio on the outskirts of Tokyo, he told me that for him and his fellow soldiers in New Guinea, joking was key to their survival.

Surrounded in his office by action figures of his myriad of manga characters that he’s created over 50 years, 89 year-old Mizuki told me that he only wrote what actually happened.

“All the conversations in the book,” he says, “they did take place. It was so boring digging trenches, so we had to have a laugh. Otherwise we wouldn’t have made it. Every single day, it was just digging trenches.”

During the fighting in New Guinea, the Japanese fought the Americans. In one Allied air raid, Mizuki lost his left arm. He was also pitted against his own ruthless superior officers, and the elements.

Writer and manga afficionado Fred Schodt is the author of “Manga Manga! The World of Japanese Comics.” He has met Mizuki several times, and knows his life story better than most.

Schodt says Mizuki and his fellow Japanese soldiers “were eating bugs and grass, they were practically starving. (Mizuki) himself also developed malaria, nearly died, and was nursed back to life in New Guinea by some of the natives.”

Interestingly, it was in New Guinea where Mizuki discovered what would become a lifelong interest in primitive occult practices and folklore, and that in turn fed his heightened interest in Japan’s yokai after the war.

But it was the war itself and Mizuki’s own brutal experience during it that pre-occupied his thoughts when he returned to Japan. Fred Schodt says that when Mizuki finally wrote “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” in 1973, he was motivated by two things.

“He had this built up anger about what he’d experienced in World War II, and he had this drive to sort of tell people about it,” says Schodt. “But it was also occurring at a time when there was a great political convulsion in Japan. Just a few years before he brought out the book, the streets were convulsed with riots, universities were shut, and there was a profound anti-war movement in Japan – anti-Vietnam war, and also by extension, anti-all war.”

Schodt makes the point that after World Word II, Japan was so completely destroyed, there weren’t many people who were in favor of war anyway. But Mizuki was unique in that, as an artist, he used his work to oppose the war.

Shigeru Mizuki's article in The New York Times

That makes “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” an anti-war graphic novel. It challenges the blind obedience within chains-of-command, in this case proud senior officers with life-and-death control over subordinates.

Mizuki conveys his pen and ink messages with a surreal combination of cartoon-like people superimposed against harsh realistic renderings of their environment. That’s one of the trademarks of his style. Caricatures of soldiers, for example, are crushed on their suicide mission by very real looking American tanks. It’s odd but effective.

Mizuki is cited as one of two or three leading innovators of manga in Japan. That role won’t change. But his masterpieces have been overshadowed by volumes of recent pulp manga whose narratives are mostly banal accounts of modern daily life.

Shigeru Mizuki says he wishes that would change. He wants to see more “decent” mangas.

“Mangas with more depth,” he tells me in Japanese. “Normal mangas,” he says with a slight smile. “So many mangas have been ridiculous and yes they do sell. But they need to have more substance.”

Mizuki is working on new material, a story currently serialized in a Japanese magazine. But he’s not written any stories yet based on the tragic events of March 11, although he has commented on the disaster in his own way.

A few days after the earthquake and tsunami, the New York Times published an illustration by Mizuki on its op-ed page. It shows a hand emerging from an eddy at sea, outstretched, grasping for help.

When I asked Mizuki to explain it, he said, “Modern Japan is drowning. It’s lost its sense of traditionalism. Though,” he reflects, “during World War II, Japan might have been too Japanese.” Mizuki believes perhaps Japan is now entering an international era.

Somewhere between being subsumed by the rest of the world, and being too Japanese, Mizuki sees a middle space, where the bright lights of modern Japan don’t blind its citizens from the past. And where a story like the one Mizuki tells in “Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths” may inspire younger manga artists address Japan’s many current challenges.

Rastamouse

Rastamouse is, yes, a mouse. He wears a Rastafarian-style woolly hat and plays guitar in a reggae band called the Easy Crew.

But when things go wrong in Mouseland, President Wensley Dale calls up the Easy Crew and asks Rastamouse for help.

Producer Greg Boardman said, Rastamouse hangs up his guitar, they get on their skateboards and find out what’s going on.

Yes, that’s President Wensley Dale, which — when written as ‘Wensleydale’ — is also the name of the cheese made famous by Wallace and Gromit. Like those characters, Rastamouse is brought to life in colorful stop-motion animation.

The TV show, just like the book, is all about redemption. Rastamouse helps the bad guy make amends. As Rastamouse tells one miscreant, “You make tings right and everything cool.”

A huge hit, but not with everyone

In the few weeks since Rastamouse started airing on British television it’s become a huge hit.
But not with everyone. The BBC, which broadcasts the show on its pre-school network, says its received a handful of complaints arguing that Rastamouse promotes black stereotypes.

About a hundred others have taken issue with the language used in the show, specifically the Afro-Caribbean dialect.

One of the books authors, Michael Webster, is himself Afro-Caribbean. If Michael didn’t have the culture and the heritage that he brings to the show then certainly Rastamouse wouldn’t exist, said producer Boardman.

It’s a show with multicultural appeal, but multicultural is a divisive word in Britain these days.
Prime Minister David Cameron recently declared the multicultural society to have been a failure, arguing that the British state had for too long tolerated communities living in segregation from each other — instead of fostering shared values and a common culture.

Caribbean and urban west London culture

Cameron wasn’t taking aim at Rastamouse. But still, producer Greg Boardman said his show does the opposite: it portrays no one specific community or geography but instead reflects the author’s experience of the world.

And their experience of the world is partly Caribbean and partly urban west London he said.

The British actor who provides the voice of Rastamouse, Reggie Yates, is not of Caribbean descent; his parents came from Ghana. Yates recently offered a defense of multicultural programming in a video taped for an awards ceremony.

“It’s incredibly important for not just minorities but everyone to have groundbreaking shows and shows that reflect a multicultural Britain,” said Yates, “because that way we all have the opportunity to understand each other just that little bit better.”

Caribbean culture is deeply embedded in the UK. Waves of immigrants arrived in Britain from Jamaica and elsewhere in the wake of the World War II. That didn’t happen to the same extent in the United States.

So if and when Rastamouse makes it to the US, it’s unlikely that the characters will sound the same. Boardman says what’s important is not the specific accent or dialect. It’s the stories and the attitude of Rastamouse that count.

And those things aren’t ever going to change.

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: I’m Marco Werman. This is The World. First there was the controversy over the proposed Islamic center in lower Manhattan. Then came the furor over a Florida pastor’s plan to burn a Koran on September 11^th.  Well, here’s the latest controversy about Islam and free speech. Today, a German media organization awarded a Danish cartoonist a prize.  And yes, it is that Danish cartoonist, Kurt Westergaard. In 2005, a Danish newspaper published his cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. The most provocative image portrayed Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. As you may recall, protests and riots broke out in parts of the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Dozens died in Nigeria. Danish diplomatic offices in Damascus and Beirut were torched. Since 2005 Westergaard has received numerous death threats. Today at an international media conference outside Berlin, the award committee praised what it called Westergaard’s “unbending engagement for freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, and for his courage to defend these democratic values despite threats of death and violence.” On hand today to honor the cartoonist was German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

SPEAKING GERMAN

WERMAN: In her speech she called the plans of a Florida pastor to burn the Koran on the anniversary of the September 11^th attacks, “abhorrent” and “simply wrong.” After receiving the award, 75-year-old Kurt Westergaard told reporters that he considered himself just a “simple cartoonist” but that the Internet has given his most controversial work a life of its own.

KURT WESTERGAARD:  Maybe they will try to kill me once and have success. But anyway the cartoon they cannot kill. It is invincible.

WERMAN:  Westergaard’s comments to a German newspaper today revealed a bit more of himself and his views on Islam. “In my eyes you cannot compare Islam with Christianity,” he said. “It is not a nice religion and in many ways is reactionary.” But Westergaard went on to say that he will “stand up for people having the right to practice this religion.”

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Marco Werman, Jean Plantureux (Plantu), Khalil Abu Arafeh, and Uri Fink in The World’s studios.
Photo: Catherine Murphy

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This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  Several years ago the French newspaper Le Monde ran a political cartoon on its front page.  It cleverly mixed images of the Muslim and non-Muslim cultures in France.  In a series of panels, a woman sitting at a café, her thong visible, morphs into a woman wearing a burkha.  The cartoon was drawn by Plantu, the pen name of Jean Plantureux.  His cartoons have graced the front page of Le Monde for decades now.  And that thong cartoon, when it was published, was well received, even in Egypt where it was reprinted.  Plantu says he visited Egypt at the time and heard from Egyptians directly.

JEAN PLANTUREUX:   I remember all the girls in the audience were with veil.  And I remember one of the girls asked me, Plantu, I am the veil, yes, it is my religion, but the girl with the thong, it is also another religion, it is the marketing religion.  It is very interesting.  She told me but you know, under my veil, I have a thong and the boys behind yes, yes, yes, we know she has a thong.  It was so smiling, because by the pretext of a cartoon you can say another thing.

WERMAN: You also had a gallery showing in Khartoum in Sudan.

PLANTUREUX: Yes, but it was before the – - cartoonist.  You have two story for United States before 9/11 and after 9/11.  And for cartoonists like me we have before the – - cartoonist and after.  And now we’re in the after.

WERMAN: You keep referring to the cartoon of Mohammed with a bomb in his turban that came out of Denmark and created this whole controversy.  I’ve got to say, it seemed pretty tame to some of the drawings that you do.  Do you think that there would have been a controversy if you had drawn that cartoon?

PLANTUREUX: When we draw now, all our cartoons are on the website.  It is possible now to make a manipulation and the job of – -  is to make manipulation.

WERMAN: When you say manipulation, you’re talking about certain – - will go online and find cartoons by western cartoonists and use photoshop or something to change them around.

PLANTUREUX: Yes, because their job is to make – - between western countries and Muslim countries.  And they want to use our cartoons and now with cartooning for – - I build with – - when he was General Secretary of United Nations.  We mixed all the cartoons in the world with Christian cartoonists, Jewish cartoonists, Muslim cartoonists, agnostic, and then we can build a new proposition to present very strong cartoons.  We want to make strong cartoons, but not offense against the beliefs.

WERMAN: So in other words, the internet has really made cartoons worldwide property so that before you tell a joke you kind of have to look over your shoulder to see who is watching.

PLANTUREUX: Yes, not it’s not so easy because last week I printed in my newspaper Le Monde in Paris cartoons about the Pope.  And about the pedophilia and the children in the church.  And it was like a shock when I drew.  It is like, oh my God, he is drawing a child, it is a mere child please.  Oh my God he’s drawing a priest, bishop, yes I can.  I have nothing against – - against Jesus Christ, against Mohammed, it is not my job.  My job is to draw the men and the women and the children on the earth.

WERMAN: Do you spend a lot of your time dealing with religion?

PLANTUREUX: For me no, I draw about my President Sarkozy, because it draws good guy for me because it is a caricature.  And when I draw him, everybody tells me it is a good guy, it is a big caricature, it is not a caricature, it is a portrait.

WERMAN: Some people would say it’s like taking candy from a baby.

PLANTUREUX: He is a baby, yes, yes.  But a baby with big toys.

WERMAN: Do you think you’ve become more political over the years as you’ve drawn cartoons?

PLANTUREUX: Yes, because I learn a lot every day.  Because my language is not the language with my speech.  It is a language with picture.  And the first day in your life, your language is not English, is not French, it is picture in your brains.  All is organized for the picture and I know now because Iman Bishop, they understand it is a very dangerous language and they don’t want we use this language, but it is out natural and first language.

WERMAN: Plantu’s political cartoons appear regularly in the French newspaper Le Monde.  Plantu thank you very much for speaking with us.

PLANTUREUX: Merci Beaucoup.,

WERMAN: See a thong turned into a burkha and other cartoons by Plantu and watch a video of him doing his craft at the world dot org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

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MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Political cartoons can raise an eyebrow, they can make you laugh out loud, or they can be deadly serious.  for Israeli and Palestinian political cartoonists, there is an added layer, the day to day reality of living in a tense relationship with one another.  We spoke with two cartoonists from the region.  Khalil Abu Arafeh is an editorial cartoonist with the Palestinian newspaper, Al-Quds.  His work appears seven days a week.  Uri Fink is an Israeli political cartoonist best known for the comic strip “zbeng!” about a group of fictional Israeli teenagers.  He’s also the author of “Tales from the Ragin’ Region” which is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  I asked Uri Fink what’s so funny about the conflict.

URI FINK:  I think that the best way to deal with it is to laugh about it.  That is the job actually of the cartoonist, to find the funny, not the funny but the ridiculous thing and point them out.  We Jews, we’ve used humor to deal with our problems all throughout history and that’s, I think, a continuation of the same thin.

WERMAN:  And Uri I think it’s important that our listeners kind of understand that in Israel, you’re a really big deal.  You do not just political editorial cartoons, but graphic novels and a strip called zbeng which is about a group of Israeli teenagers.  Its kid of in popularity like Doonesbury over there right?

FINK:  Well Doonesbury is my inspiration and my idol.  And also is zbeng.  I mean zbeng is my full time job to publish every week.  And every week I do something about Israeli reality.  And eventually zbeng also deals with politics.

WERMAN: I was going to ask you, does zbeng deal with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

FINK:  All the time.  All the time.  There is suicide bombings; I have to relate to that in my comics.  Every character of mine deals with the situation differently.  I once got the most into trouble when one of my character, who is very left wing, she is called Siegal, she wanted to have a day of mourning, a national day of mourning for the election of Netanyahu.  That appeared in the magazine, she said it, and then I got my first letter from the Prime Minister’s office.  Naturally my editor threw it to the garbage because it’s nonsense.  It’s a right of free speech and nobody can do anything, but that’s the only time I got into trouble.  In my regular strips, not my political strips, I use too much politics, then I get into trouble.

WERMAN: Let me turn to Khalil Abu-Arafeh.  Do you think that you could have drawn that cartoon of a woman wanting a day of mourning for the election of Netanyahu?  As I look though a lot of your work, which we can see online, I notice that you’re not that critical of Israel.

KHALIL ABU ARAFEH:  I am critical of Israel.  Israeli authority, I think is very easy to criticize, but in a subtle way without saying there is a day of mourning, for example.

WERMAN: Here’s a cartoon that you did where the people who have just killed the Palestinian people are representatives of Fatah and Hamas, the two parties of the Palestinian people.  That’s pretty harsh.

ABU ARAFEH: Yeah it’s harsh, but if you realize I couldn’t write even the name of these movements, Fatah or Hamas.  It is some sort of symbolic cartoon that there was a battle between Fatah and Hamas and the victims are the innocent Palestinian people.

WERMAN: Do you feel the pressure to make your cartoons kind of consistently pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel?

ABU ARAFEH: There is some sort of pressure, but my work is to criticize everything that I feel that is wrong, whether it was through the Israeli policy or Palestinian policy.  It’s easier for me to criticize Israel.  I’m not looking for making drawing cheering the Palestinian authority.

WERMAN: Interestingly, Uri, I just found out that though the two of you work right there essentially in the same city, you’ve hardly ever met.  You see Khalil for the first time really, here in Boston and yet I’m wondering if you hear anything in what Khalil was saying about the pressure he faces to kind of draw a certain way or skew his opinions a certain way.  Do you feel the same way on your side?

FINK:  I don’t feel it directly.  I have to be very sensitive to the Israeli way of thinking, their way of feeling.  Because you know, Israel and the Jewish people have a very complicated relationship with cartoons.  Ever since the 30′s in Europe the way they drew Jews it was always very the nose, the nose, they have a big problem with the nose.  So every time I have to draw like a religious Jew, I have to pay attention on the nose.  If I draw it too big, then everybody shouts Der Strimmer.  You know Der Strimmer was the Nazi newspaper.  Don’t draw a Strimmer – - . So every time I have to draw religious Jews with all, sometimes you have to if it’s a politician or something.  I have to give him the smallest nose possible.  It’s like there’s a big Swedish community of Jews somewhere that they all came to Israel.

WERMAN: But I mean, isn’t that kind of the irony of the Mid East conflict that Palestinians and Israelis both have big nose?

FINK:  Yes, you know I was just saying that you know.  The ultimate anti-Semitic cartoon is Yasser Arafat.  He just looks like a Strimmeruder, you know?  It’s classic that this guy looks like a Strimmeruder is giving us that much trouble.

WERMAN: Can you remind us what that is?

FINK:  Strimmeruder is the way the Jew looked in the Nazi cartoons, the Strimmeruder.

WERMAN: Khalil your cartoons are very nuanced.  Sometimes, and I’m not even sure I get the joke, there’s one that shows Israeli bulldozers about to destroy Palestinian tents in east Jerusalem.  Did Israeli actually destroy tents that belonged to Palestinians?  Or what’s the joke?

ABU ARAFEH: In fact it happens.  The meaning is maybe you find it real and actual when you see or you hear that Israeli bulldozers are destroying Palestinian houses.  But it’s ironic when you see that Israel is trying to destroy Palestinian tents, this is the idea.  Palestinian people were obliged to live in these tents because their houses were demolished so this is the irony.

WERMAN: Khalil have you ever been censored?

ABU ARAFEH: Yeah.  I have three censors in my work.  Israeli military censorship, Palestinian which is indirect and Hamas which is indirect too.  What I have as a proof is some cartoons that were canceled by the Israeli military censorship, I have the stamp of the censor and am very proud of these cartoons.  But actually this happened during the Intifada, when the situation in the Middle East was so critical and the Israeli censor was very sensitive, he did not want to hear anything about criticizing Israel, so he censored my work.

WERMAN: Uri have you ever been censored?

FINK:  Not by the government of course.  Sometimes I do well in very dark humor, especially during times of war and suicide bombings.  So once I was censored in a cartoon I did about the Israeli astronaut that was killed in Colombia.  I combined it with a period of suicide bombings and I drew these people who pick up the body parts and they got a call from NASA and NASA says to them “Houston we have a problem”.  So this was a bit insensitive.

WERMAN: That’s tough, yeah.

FINK:  So my editor censored me and I am fortunate he did at that time.  You know sometimes I get carried away, sorry.

WERMAN: So primarily your audience is Israeli and Khalil your audience is Palestinian or Arabic and some parts of the Mid East.

ABU ARAFEH: That’s right, but let me tell you one thing.  You have here a cartoon about the Palestinian flag and Hamas is trying to take part of it.

WERMAN: Right.

ABU ARAFEH: This cartoon I made in 2006 after the Hamas – - in Gaza.  And – - from Jerusalem, Israeli – - had me the same cartoon two years after.  He didn’t see my cartoon, but this was proof that whether Palestinian or Israeli live, they have something in common.

WERMAN: Khalil Abu-Arafeh’s editorial cartoons appear seven days a week in the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds.  Uri Fink writes the comic strip zbeng about a group of fictional Israeli teenagers and he is also the author of “Tales from the Ragin Region”.  You can find cartoons by both gentlemen and watch Uri Fink do the impossible, turning a Hasidic Jew into Yasser Arafat at the world dot org.  Thank you both very much.

FINK:  Thank you.

ABU ARAFEH: Thank you.

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MARCO WERMAN: In the Netherlands prosecutors are planning to charge an Arab group under the country’s hate crime law and it follows the online publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Jews. The Dutch-based Arab European League published the cartoon on its website to highlight what it calls Europe’s double standard on freedom of expression. Many Dutch-Muslims are angry that authorities have dropped charges against the politician who published controversial cartoons of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad. The World’s Gerry Hadden reports.

GERRY HADDEN: The cartoon on the Arab European League’s website depicts two Jewish men counting bones. One says, “I don’t think these are human.” The other responds, “But we’ve got to get to six million somehow.” The cartoon refers, of course, to the number of Jews killed in the holocaust. Ronny Naftaniel says the drawing’s message is an affront to Dutch-Jews.

RONNY NAFTANIEL: The Jewish community in the Netherlands is offended if the Holocaust is ridiculized or denied.

HADDEN: Naftaniel is with the Amsterdam-based Center for Information and Documentation on Israel. He took his cartoon grievance to Dutch prosecutors and they agreed that it’s offensive. They’ve given the Arab European League two weeks to take the cartoon down or face trial under the country’s hate speech laws. But the league says it won’t bend to such pressure.

ABDOULMOUTHALIB BOUZERDA: [SPEAKING DUTCH]

HADDEN: League spokesman, Abdoulmouthalib Bouzerda, told Dutch television that he would have preferred that the cartoonist not be charged. “But now let’s move forward and let the judge decide,” he said. “But at the same time,” he said, “let’s have an open debate about freedom of speech.”

Bouzerda wants that debate to center on what he and many Muslims believe is western hypocrisy when it comes to freedom of speech. In August, even as prosecutors were preparing charges against the Arab European League, it dropped similar charges against controversial Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Last year Wilders made a documentary criticizing Islam. In it he included a cartoon first published in Denmark in 2006. It shows the Muslim Prophet Muhammed with a time-bomb in his turban. This cartoon and others set off riots across the Muslim world. So Wilders gets away with insulting the prophet but Muslims go on trial for insulting Jews. What’s the difference? Dutch prosecutors did not return requests for an interview but plaintiff Ronny Naftaniel offers his take on the legal reasoning.

NAFTANIEL: If you insult Muhammed you insult the prophet. You don’t insult a people. Of course a people can feel themselves insulted but you don’t insult the people. But if you have a cartoon where Jews are depicted or Muslims are depicted saying that they are lying and that they are playing around historical truths …

HADDEN: Then you’ve crossed a legal line. In other words under Dutch law you can insult symbols of a people, even their God, but not the people themselves. Dutch Muslim leaders say that’s a legal technicality that doesn’t erase the emotional insult or the double standard. They believe the law should be changed. For The World I’m Gerry Hadden.

WERMAN: We have a global cartoon section on our website. It does not include the cartoons just mentioned in that story but how about Japanese political parties depicted as sumo wrestlers. Take a look at The World dot org slash cartoons.

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