'Zaptrash' Criticism's Receive Small Mention in MSM

Yesterday’s Sunday Independent had an adoring feature on South African cartoonist Jonathan Shapiro aka Zapiro: R15m price on his head does no justice to Zapiro.

The article praises ‘the fearless pen of Zapiro’ in light of the R15 million lawsuit launched against Zapiro by disgraced former Deputy President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, following Zapiro’s Zuma cartoons.

In discussing Zapiro’s relationship with the Jewish community the Sunday Independent reporter writes:

“Zap trash” is how bloggers refer to Zapiro’s criticisms of Israel.”

A google search will reveal that this is a specific reference to us. It’s nice to know that the author of the article (and perhaps Zapiro himself) have been reading IAS and I was pleasantly surprised to see our phrase mentioned in the article. It’s just a pity that they couldn’t go as far as to actually mention this blog's name instead of the open reference to ‘bloggers’.

We think that ZapTrash is a very apt description of his one sided Middle East cartoons and we even believe that one of his cartoons would have won an award at the recent Iranian Holocaust cartoon fest (see Sharon as an SS soldier).

His recent cartoons on the Iranian Holocaust Conference represent one of the rare occassions where he has attempted to mock an Islamic leader. (I am not aware of any Zapiro cartoon ever lampooning Arab or Palestinian leaders and even if they do exist they are as rare as snowfall in Johannesburg.)

But I don’t find these cartoons particularly sincere.  

The Holocaust conference presented Zapiro with an opportunity to really lampoon Ahmadinejad and yet all he managed to conjure up was a wimpish cartoon of a mousy leader who ‘thinks’ he has bitten off more than he can chew. Zapiro totally ignored Ahmadinejad’s genocidal aims to wipe Israel off the map, watering down the threat posed by this madman by depicting him as a harmless mouse.

Could the witty and super sharp Zapiro conjure up nothing better than a small mouse to satirise this Megalomaniac leader flushed with nuclear ambitions who believes that he can usher in a Messianic era by creating world chaos? A man who is denying a past genocide of Jewish people in order to pave the way for a future one?

Zapiro could have done much better. He just didn’t want to.

Comments

[Capetonian]

What's happening in the middle-east is a human tragedy, but not as severe as the tragedy occurring in South Africa, where the life expectancy is some 30 years less than in the West Bank.

[Gary]

Good point. Capetonian
I think part of the obsession of the government and their allies , with all this Israel-bashing is to divert attention from the decay of SA.
i.e the usual scapegoating of the Jews.

[sombre]

the life expectancy of CT is much higher than 30. miserable asses tryimg to deflect attention off the Holocaust in Palestine.

[Ariel]

I don't know what the life expectancy of either the West Bank or Cape Town is but the average life expectancy South Africa has been steadily decreasing.

What his happening in the occupied terrotories is terrible, Sombre but it is not comparible to the Holocaust.

The Holocaust was the systematic extermination of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and other people the Nazi's considered unworthy of life or as a threat with a total of about ten million deaths, of that 6 million being Jews.

By contrast over the duraion of the Israeli-Arab/Israeli-Palestinian conflicts the approximate number of deaths on the Arab/Palestinian side is some sixty thousand. There is no genocide taking place in the occupied territories and to assume as such is intellectually lazy on your part.

[Gary]

Ethiopian troops killed 500 Islamist Somali terrorists in 1 day
Can you imagine the hysteria in South Africa if that number of Pallie terrorists had been killed by Israeli forces in 1 day
Absolute pandemonium!