Cartoonery is a powerful weapon against the powerful – richly deserving of satire. How privileged we are to benefit from so many cartoonists who perennially spring from nowhere to harness a craft that transcends language barriers and cuts through literary density.

The rogue state of Israel has naturally provided bounteous raw material for the graphic artist’s talent. Unhappily, the omnipresent diehard Israel support squad finds unpalatable even the minutest adverse treatment of the object of their devotion. Self-censorship of media editors helps. Failing that, considerable weaponry is brought to bear against the transgressor and her/his employer.

The Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff has delivered stinging graphics for decades against Israeli terrorism and has maintained his presence in the face of ongoing pressure.

In 2002, Michael Leunig, regular in the then Fairfax Media’s Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, offered a diptych graphic juxtaposing Auschwitz in 1942 with Israel in 2002. Jenin was then under siege. The Age’s editor, Michael Gawenda, declined to publish it.

Leunig, albeit best known for his whimsy, subsequently had published numerous powerful graphical denunciations of ongoing Israeli terrorism – all the while being viciously verbalized for his audacity.

In October 2023, Steve Bell, veteran UK Guardian cartoonist since 1981, was sacked for a tame cartoon depicting Israeli Prime Minister and mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu is shown cutting a Gaza Strip outline on his stomach. Editorial declared it an allusion to Shylock’s ‘pound of flesh’ and thus an ‘antisemitic trope’. Puleez!

Bell has been a giant presence. The lobby had him in trouble in 2012 when he (accurately) depicted perennial Prime Minister Netanyahu manipulating as puppets the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague and ‘Special Envoy of the Quartet on the Middle East’ Tony Blair. Bell got away with that one and countless others (Ariel Sharon was a favorite target).

Israel has since become more odious (if that’s possible), the Guardian itself has become part of the lobby rather than opposing it, and the lobby itself more clamorous (if that’s possible). So Bell had to go.

Media proprietors and editors face a constant barrage from ‘official’ Jewish organizations and Zionist foot soldiers whenever their media publish anything that puts Israel in a bad light. Which of course is inevitable. The proprietors, management and editors get worn down, succumbing to the pressure.

An exemplar of this phenomenon occurred in July 2014 in the Sydney Morning Herald. The occasion was Israel’s Operation Protective Edge (sic) in Gaza. House cartoonist Glen LeLievre captured the view from Sderot ‘Heights’.

SMH columnist Mike Carlton penned an uncompromising accompaniment. Carlton claimed: “The onslaught is indiscriminate and unrelenting, with but one possible conclusion: Israel is not fighting the terrorists of Hamas. … Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs.” Sound familiar?

This is 2014, by the way. The newspaper and Carlton personally were deluged with complaints. Carlton responded in kind to some of his abusers (the Murdoch media, hysterical then as now, jumped on board). Editorial sought to discipline Carlton, also publishing an apologetic byline. Carlton, the only then columnist calling a spade a spade with respect to Israel, resigned (alas) in disgust. LeLievre’s cartoon, however, was merely a slight tweaking of photographs of the Sderot hilltop party (he added the remote), so he survived to cartoon for another day. Meanwhile, the voyeurs are still at it on the Sderot hilltop.

Mr Fish (aka Dwayne Booth) has been poking at Israel’s perfidy for years, predominantly at Harpers magazine, then with Chris Hedges on SheerPost and elsewhere. Booth has (or had) a ‘day’ job lecturing at the Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania. Booth was sacked in March 2025.

Booth had been under attack since at least February 2024 when an outfit called The Washington Free Beacon (never trust any organisation with ‘free’ in its title) went after Booth as an antisemite. Its post-sacking gloating is here. The relevant Fish cartoons, accompanying Hedges’ text, had been appearing since the blanket barrage on Gaza following the Hamas’ murderous breakout on 7 October 2023.

One Mr Fish cartoon, in particular, aroused hostility. Three ‘upper-crust power brokers’ (Booth copied the New Yorker style) are chatting in comfort while downing blood and dissing a friendless dove as a ‘lousy antisemite’. The cartoon, for godssake, is labelled a ‘blood libel’ and yet another antisemitic trope. Here a trope, there a blood libel – there is no end to the omnipresence of antisemitism!

Another one has Netanyahu shovelling skulls – touché! A third cartoon has Nazi concentration camp prisoners holding placards denouncing Israel such as ‘Free Palestine’, ‘Gaza the world’s biggest concentration camp!’, etc. This one, titled “Never Again and Again and Again” accompanied a Hedges column (31 December 2023) titled “Israel’s Genocide Betrays the Holocaust”. Absolutely correct and brilliant. It is verboten to compare the Israeli leadership and military to Nazis. But if the shoe fits …

The UPenn student newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, threw in its two bits, 8 February 2024. The author Castiglione interviews the usual suspects – professor of modern Jewish history J.T., Penn Hillel Vice President of Israel Engagement (sic) S.W., and Executive Director at Penn Hillel Rabbi G.G. Castiglione encapsulates the angst: “Jewish community members said that Booth’s cartoons crossed a line, serving to prop[a]gate harmful messages rather than convey a nuanced opinion about the Israel-Hamas conflict.” Rabbi G.G. adds: “the conflict between Israel and Palestinians was ‘complex and complicated’”.

UPenn’s interim President Larry Jameson labelled Booth’s cartoons as ‘reprehensible’. Jameson appears as ‘interim’ because the extant President Elizabeth Magill had resigned in December 2023 after harassment by a McCarthyite Congressional Committee seeking to stamp out pro-Palestinian dissent (‘antisemitism’) on campus. Several very wealthy (Jewish) UPenn patrons were reducing their sponsorship and threatening more cuts. Merely days before Booth’s sacking, the Trump Administration announced that it was freezing $175 million of federal funds. The formal explanation given to Booth for his sacking was ‘budgetary reasons’ and that claim rings true!

The inquisitorial storm-troopers and friends have stretched the antisemitism trope to meaninglessness. They exhibit no self-respect, indeed no brains and no humanity. The situation is not complex nor complicated, and no nuance is involved. I see no Occupation. I see no genocide. It’s Zionist bloodlust in the cause of Lebensraum.

In the Daily Pennsylvanian, Rabbi G.G. ‘expressed concern’ that “this type of speech contributes to a sense shared by many Jewish students that Penn is not a wholly welcoming environment for them”. The poor darlings. Here’s to a Faculty of unadulterated Zionist brainwashing. The self-constructed ghetto it is. But how does one market it?

Apparently the bizoids directing the famed Wharton business school want a quiet campus but are they prepared to tolerate the repression of intelligence regarding a festering sore of global iniquity? Can one quarantine the repression of ideas? Can one sieve the intrusion of reality onto campus? Are UPenn, Columbia, etc., craven under pressure, on the verge of going to hell in a handbasket?

If one searches for Dwayne Booth on UPenn’s Annenberg School of Communication, only two items appear. Booth himself is gone. The second, 13 December 2018, is titled ‘Symposium Spotlights Political Cartoonists at Risk’. Ah, the ironies. Notes the report:

“Fewer than 40 staff editorial cartoonists remain in America, down from about 2,000 in 1900. … But as purveyors [of] satire whose irreverence glints the knife blade of truth to power – government, church, civic, and otherwise – their success.

“It’s not a dying profession,” said cartoonist Ted Rall … “It’s a profession that is being systematically murdered.”

Meanwhile, the duo Chris Hedges and Mr Fish will continue to powerfully combine word and image to enlighten us on the reality that Academia, for ‘budgetary reasons’, is increasingly incapable of providing.

The post The Zionists Have Speared Mr Fish first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.