To those who doubt the mainstream media’s left-wing bias, consider the latest example from The Washington Post. Liberals in the Post’s newsroom forced the paper to yank a cartoon critical of Hamas.
The complaints registered against the drawing included the typical rant that it was “racist.”
The controversy began last week when Post Editorial Editor David Shipley picked the cartoon that depicted Hamas leader Ghazi Hamad using women and children as human shields while declaring, “How dare Israel attack civilians,” according to the Washington Free Beacon.
Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning artist Michael Ramirez drew the cartoon.
Ramirez told the Free Beacon he presented at least seven options to Shipley, who made the final decision.
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Liberals quickly denounced the decision. According to the Post, which reported on its own decision to delete the cartoon, the gripes aimed at Ramirez criticized Hamad’s “large nose and snarling mouth.”
Shipley caved on Wednesday and took down the cartoon. He expressed “regret” about having “missed something profound and divisive” related to the image.
“A cartoon published by Michael Ramirez on the war in Gaza, a cartoon whose publication I approved, was seen by many readers as racist. This was not my intent. I saw the drawing as a caricature of a specific individual, the Hamas spokesperson, who celebrated the attacks on unarmed civilians in Israel,” Shipley wrote to his Post colleagues.
That came after Post staffers shared “many deep concerns” about publishing the cartoon, as Executive Editor Sally Buzbee wrote to her employees after the cartoon was taken down.
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Ramirez told the Free Beacon that he drew the cartoon after Hamad appeared on Lebanese television to praise the Oct. 7 massacre of more than 1,400 Israelis, which included the “systematic slaughter of women, children, and men.”
“When the intellectually indolent try to defend the indefensible, they always seem to resort to playing the race card,” Ramirez told the Free Beacon.
“I am presenting this because I think this is a blow against democracy and the freedom of speech,” Ramirez added. “I’m a big believer that America has to have the free expression of ideas to advance thinking.”
In a separate interview with Fox News on Friday, Ramirez said it was not “hidden knowledge” that Hamas launches attacks from civilian areas.
Fox News noted that the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which also employs Ramirez, published the cartoon and stood by it.
Ramirez told the Free Beacon that he thought about quitting but opted to stick it out a while longer in order to not give the liberals their satisfaction.
He said he “did not want it to appear that this cancel culture had succeeded in pushing me out of the job.”
“You don’t have to be a mind-reading person to think that this was going to occur,” Ramirez added. “It just seems to be the way these newsrooms are politically designed.”
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