"Journalism is the first rough draft of history." That's the expression attributed to one Alan Barth (1906-1979) who was an editorial writer for the Washington Post. He knew that given the need for getting the news out every day, always going for the elusive "scoop" and thereby writing of events with an often unavoidable superficiality, the news would be a "rough draft" that would become more detailed, (more "nuanced" in today's jargon) in successive editions.

Barth was a strong advocate for freedom of the press and the freedom of individuals, condeming the threatened opposition of Washington bus drivers to the hiring of black workers, and incurring the anger of Senator McCarthy for his support of people investigated as Communists. He may not have been the first to use some form of the expression, but he was humble enough to recognize its truth and courageous enough to keep drafting.

Another great quotation regarding journalists is the dictate that they should "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable". Wiki says it came from a speech by Eleanor Roosevelt but that she had adapted the line from a collection of sketches by a journalist, Peter Dunne who wrote several pieces in the vernacular of an uneducated Irish immigrant with a perceptive grasp of many social institutions, including this which I steal but credit to Wikipedia staff:

Th newspaper does ivrything f'r us. It runs th' polis foorce an' th' banks, commands th' milishy, controls th' ligislachure, baptizes th' young, marries th' foolish, comforts th' afflicted, afflicts th' comfortable, buries th' dead an' roasts thim aftherward.

Now let's look at editorial cartoons which are, according to Emanuele Del Rosso who is Head of Communications and PR with the European Press Prize, "the first rough laugh of history". I turned my attention to some political cartoons when the NY Times a few years back decided to stop carrying them. Of course those so-recently-unemployed cartoonists were the first to express opinions on their dismissal. The Times had said that the cartoon that caused them to make such a major policy change was too offensive to be printed in a major journal such as theirs.

The cartoon showed a Netanyahu-faced dog with Israel-starred collar tags tugging its Trump-faced master who was wearing a yarmulke. I'd show you, but I couldn't find a copy and I'm not even sure the description is complete. But you try unpacking the elements of the drawing. When I did, I came up with these:

Israel bulldog, particularly Zionist right-wing Israeli politicians, are leading the "master" in the form of right-wing US politicians such as Donald trump who will wear any hat if he thinks it gives him power and/or prestige.

Rupert Murdoch himself took to Twitter in 2012 to comment for the London-based Sunday Times after a Gerald Scarfe cartoon depicted Netanyahu building a wall with the bodies of Palestinians, saying "Gerald Scarfe has never reflected the opinions of the Sunday Times. Nevertheless, we owe a major apology for a grotesque, offensive cartoon."

I sympathize with the cartoonists. Editors and owners can print what they want of course, but I hope what they want sometimes is to "afflict the comfortable", and both Netanyahu and Donald Trump have been far too comfortable with the deaths of 40,000+ Palestiians. There have also been lots of anti-fundamentalist Muslim cartoons printed over the past few years and some of them have brought murder instead of censure upon their creators. And of course with our modern techno-media globalization it is true that a cartoon that gets a chuckle in one country will spark murderous outrage in another.

Cartoonists try to capture situations in one shot, if you will. They are not writers of editorial articles, or textbooks; nor are they or investigative journalists. They are out to afflict the comfortable with that one good shot to capture a situation as they see it. Here's what Michael Leunig from Australia had to say:

Cartoons are ambiguous, they have many meanings. They are not legal documents. They are not acts of parliament, you know -- but they're often treated as if they're an act of parliament. It's just a cartoon with an ambiguity, hopefully with a question…

Up there I used "fundamentalist Muslim" to try to avoid conflating groups of homicidal mysogynistic maniacs of that faith with practitioners of Mohammed's "religion of peace". I also try to distinguish my criticisms of homicidal Jewish Zionists from peaceful advocates for negotiated solutions such as Jewish Voices for Peace, many of them students at recent university encampments. And, of course, there will be exceptions. Some of those defenders of Palestine may chant insulting slogans and some Jews, no matter how peace-loving, must feel and express vengefulness towards the clique that massacred innocent relatives.

But slogans are designed to be deliberately controversial and to arouse strong feelings. Bill Maher is one high-profile personality who represents those who are very critical of students protesting Israeli war crimes in Gaza. He rants by cherry-picking events and some of those slogans to suggest all such protests are misdirected by ignorant, coddled youngsters. Not true, as even a cursory reading of the actual speeches and stated aims of the protest organizers would show.

"From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free" is a strong rhyming chant and it can be interpreted as calling for the annihilation of Israel or for freedom from repression for Palestinians. I think it is pertinent that many of the requests for injunctions to stop such protests were dismissed because judges found no actual cases of anti-semitism on many of the campuses. 

Vengeance is a human reaction in any of us below the level of a saint. When your relatives have been killed by Hamas militants you will understandably want reprisal against the perpretators of the crime. That is where a rule of law – for us, the deliberations and rulings of our UN International Court of Justice – must be exercised or we will be left with primitive, retributive acts as our only recourse such as the "pay-back laws" of the New Guinea highlands or the "eye-for-an-eye" code of early mid-eastern societies.

On the other side, the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris are only the most prominent of victims of Islamic-perverted terrorists seeking their brand of retribution for insults to their religion. To intentionally fan the coals of grief, however, and urge vengeful reprisal on all members of some identified ethnicity or culture is a crime as self-serving as the violence that precipitated it.

If we think a figure in a drawing represents all Jews and thereby defames all Jews instead of ridiculing a particular person (Benjamin Netanyahu) and a particular expression (radical Zionism), then of course for us it will be anti-semitic, but even that term should be used cautiously. As a renowned educator from Israel told me once in a graduate class, "I'm a Jew and along with members of my political party, I write scathing criticsms of Israeli policy. If you did it, Derek, you would be dismissed as 'anti-semitic' probably even by western, ie. Gentile, newspapers". The evidence from the Times in New York and London definitely supports that view.

I have tried to track down the source of a statement that so well captured the response of media outlets to the murders at the Charlie Hebdo press in Paris The speaker/author was some person from a middle-eastern country and he was responding to editorials in "western" journals to the effect that if reporters and cartoonists wrote or drew things that were offensive to terrorists, well then, they had caused their own problems. The message was "Don't upset the people who will be upset enough to want to kill you." The quote I remember, and if anyone can source it for me please do, was that "A shameful burkha of silence has descended over the free press of the western world". Now there's a brilliantly succinct description of editorial caution or cowardice.

I'm going to close with a set of editorial cartoons. I have inset the cartoonist's name so that you can search for their home pages and I used only one for each individual in keeping with Creative Commons protocol. Notice your reaction, and perhaps even if it is a "reaction" or a "response". Now there's an appropriate anecdote to close this ramble.

Queen Elizabeth was criticized for not giving a statement quickly enough following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The reported conversation went something like this:

Reporter: Why has Her Majesty not given her reaction to the news?

Secretary to the Queen: Her Majesty does not react. She will, in due course, respond.

So, how should the world (the United Nations) respond to events in the mideast? And how will the rabbis of local synagogues address their congregations on this Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur?