There’s nothing I hate more than the shame-on-you school of journalism. When I receive email from the right or the left about how this and that so and so just said such and such, how could he/she, they should be fired, on the spot, their children should be hauled out of school, their dog should be sent to the pound – whenever my email program is soiled by that garbage, I delete. It’s not for me.
I’m saying this because the cartoon you see on top, which was run by the Los Angeles Jewish Journal last Friday, was forwarded to me by something called “Truth Revolt” with the following message:
On Friday, October 11, the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, which is handed out free to virtually every synagogue in the city of Los Angeles and which has a circulation of 50,000 copies and 150,000 weekly readers, ran the following cartoon, comparing the Tea Party to Islamic jihadists.
The Journal has both readers and advertisers acutely attuned to the needs of victims of Islamist terror. For the Journal to run such a cartoon comparing Tea Partiers, who simply want less government spending, to Islamist terrorists who murder babies in pizza parlors, is despicable.
Email editor Rob Eshman at [email was enclosed] to express your displeasure.
I’ve no idea how many have gone ahead and emailed Eshman expressions of their displeasure. It’s a legitimate thing, we at the JPress online have a variety of feedback functions, too. Some of you have been truly insightful with your comments, others we had to ban for repeated use of inappropriate language, some of those we banned claim to have launched several minor jihads that did not end up involving any virgins, thank God.
I feel the obligation to express my deep reluctance at the task of doing the shame-on-you which I’m about to perform. But here I go:
Rob Eshman, publisher and editor-in-chief of TRIBE Media Corp./Jewish Journal, you really ran that cartoon?
After we, Democrats, have been complaining for three straight decades that our representative institutions are dead, that they betray the voters, day in and day out, that they are the running dogs of the robber barons, that they watch, paralyzed, as America’s wealth, both real and potential, is being stolen and replanted in South East Asia – after all those decades of waiting for politicians with a backbone who would stand up to the powers that be, even if the experts and the bankers and all the planetary media say they’re the devil himself – when those radicals, God bless them, dare look the president and their own feeble bosses in the eye and say a big, resounding No – you ridicule them as suicide bombers?
Did you expect them to look and act like Abbie Hoffman? Do you look and act like Abbie Hoffman? I knew Abbie Hoffman, and you’re nothing like him, but that’s just my little name dropping thing, ignore it.
I wonder why someone of your smarts and ability to think outside the box would fail so sadly to recognize a political revolution when one finally shows up.
Are you so worried about your bank account and your bonds, that you can’t see that the very Capitalistic system is being challenged from within, by its own true believers? That the Tea Party may be crazy and Jesus jumpy, but it’s refusing to betray the people who sent them to Washington – when was the last time your congress member stood up to power?
I couldn’t care less about the comparison between the Tea party and the suicide bomber, even though it’s such an old idea, Aaron Sorkin already used it in the first season, not this one, but last year’s, of “Newsroom,” when the Jeff Daniels character calls them the American Taliban. So you ran a much-used joke to depict an authentic act of democratic rebellion as the wholesale murder of innocents.
In the words of Abbie Hoffman (my acquaintance): Rob Eshman, you’re giving hypocrisy a bad name.