A former Hamas Health Minister of the Gaza Strip, Dr Basem Naim, has embarrassed himself with his failure to understand a cartoon. Dr Naim tweeted the picture (above) believing he was making an anti-Israel statement only to find he had in fact ended up defending Israel against United Nations (UN) mistreatment.
As reported by UN Watch, the “clearly confused Hamas leader” seemed to believe the cartoon made the case for Israel’s expulsion from the UN, tweeting the cartoon with the comment “#Israel out of #UN #IsraelTerroristState“.
The Executive Director of UN Watch, human rights activist and international lawyer Hillel Neuer, decided he should help out. Choosing to ignore E.B. White’s advice (“Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but the frog dies in the process.”) he retweeted he Hamas doctor’s post, adding: “Very confused Hamas ex-health minister tweets Israeli cartoon ridiculing UN anti-Israel bias”.
Dr Naim still did not get it. For him the explanation of the picture was that Israel does not deserve to be a UN member because of “its war crimes against our people”. This was the prompt for Neuer to explain the joke for the hard of thinking, showing step by step how it ridicules the immorality of the UN’s anti-Israel bias.
He started by pointing out the real target of the cartoonist’s pen:
He then took the Hamas doctor through a staged explanation. Beginning:
He continued: “Second, you see the cobweb on the Sudan shelf, depicting @UN_HRC indifference to Darfur genocide?” And then helping Dr Naim to understand the provenance of the cartoon he added: “Third, you see the Hebrew letters where the Israeli cartoonist signed his name, Vladik Sandler?”
Neuer concluded: “Well, Doctor (of medicine and terror?), these are indicators that cartoon you posted means very opposite of what you thought.” At this point Dr Naim did concede he had made an error:
Dr Naim could have saved himself a lot of trouble had he realised the cartoon came from The Israel Cartoon Project (TICP). The group explains its purpose on its Facebook page, stating:
“TICP (The Israel Cartoon Project) is a platform for leading Israeli cartoonists and pro-Israeli cartoonists from around the world. The project was created with one goal in mind; telling the world what Israel is really all about.
“Many Israelis and indeed, many Jews, encounter complex advocacy challenges in the face of global Anti-Israeli Campaigns, TICP was created as a result of the need for a creative new approach to those issues.
“One of our main challenges is creating as much ‘buzz’ as the other side in light of the fact that we are heavily outnumbered. We strive to increase the reach of Israeli advocacy and its ability to captivate and engage different target audience groups, giving Israel a chance for a fair fight in that arena.”
Unwittingly, Dr Naim has ended up assisting TICP in its mission.