Things are crazy out there, and getting crazier. From the Washington Post:
Cartoonists rely on iconography. Symbol is ready metaphor, and not just such trite-and-true staples as donkeys and elephants and American eagles. No editorial toolkit is complete without the darkest of symbols — the emblems of evil that never lose their emotional impact. The KKK hood. The noose. The swastika.
When employing the most vile of emblems, editorial cartoonists sometimes mine the embedded power for hyperbole. So it is that the Anti-Defamation League might have presumed New Jersey cartoonist Jimmy Margulies was being hyperbolic when several days ago, in reaction to Arizona’s new immigration law, he drew Gov. Jan Brewer’s state as the mustache of Hitler.
Point made. But powerfully. Arizona puts the “AZ” in “nAZi.”
The cartoon brought an immediate complaint from the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman:
We are seeing these offensive and inappropriate Nazi and Holocaust comparisons come to the fore in the public debate once again. We saw it in the health care debate, and now we are seeing it with Arizona.
It is disturbing that in speaking out against the bill a number of individuals have taken to using Nazi comparisons, in describing the legislation as being reminiscent of Nazi policies that required Jews and others to carry identity cards, or in comparing the governor and other Arizona officials as being like Hitler… No matter how odious, bigoted, biased and unconstitutional Arizona’s new law may be, let’s be clear that there is no comparison between the situation facing immigrants, legal or illegal, in Arizona and what happened in the Holocaust.
Click here to see the editorial cartoon and read Margulies’s response to Foxman. Then tell us what you think.