Tag: The Washington Post.

  • Renowned Washington Post faced extreme backlash for cartoon dehumanising Palestinian children, deleted later

    Renowned Washington Post faced extreme backlash for cartoon dehumanising Palestinian children, deleted later

    Washington Post was slammed on the internet on Wednesday for a racist cartoon dehumanising the Palestinians. Right now the number of Gazans killed in Israeli airstrikes has reached 10,000. The cartoon has since been deleted, while Post has put out an editorial note.

    The offensive drawing shows a crudely drawn Arabic man labeled Hamas with three children and a woman tied around him with ropes.

    “This is the kind of anti-Palestinian racism that they think is acceptable for publication,” slammed Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi.

    Palestinian journalist Ahmed Eldin re-shared the post to point out how the racism Palestinians are enduring in the Western media is similar to how the Jews were drawn as evil with physical features that compared them to rats or cockroaches.

    “Before the Holocaust, Jews were portrayed as irrational and evil, with physical features that made them appear akin to cockroaches and rats. These images dehumanized Jews to justify their mass extermination. Now, the Western press is doing the same to Palestinians. The source of this obscene and offensive piece of propaganda masquerading as a “political cartoon” by Michael Pramirez is not a lesser-known publication, but rather the widely recognized

    @washingtonpost. Regardless of the validity of the claims regarding Hamas using human shields, the notion that thousands of children being killed can be justified or deemed acceptable as collateral damage is absolutely unacceptable. The dehumanization of Palestinians, which serves as a pretext to permit and rationalize their mass killing, is a disturbing trend that seems to have no boundaries within American discussions and debates.”

    ‘What’s more troubling than this racist depiction,” Palestinian-American poet Mohammad El-Kurd wrote. “Is that the Washington Post thinks it’s OK to kill civilians if, hypothetically, ‘terrorists’ hid behind them. Even if the “human-shields” myth was true, only those who kill civilians are responsible for the act of killing.”

    Columnist and writer Fatima Bhutto tweeted her outrage:

    “This cartoon is so anti-Muslim, so racist it boggles the mind that any newspaper could print it. Beyond which, Israel has murdered over 4,000 children- do you have absolutely no shame depicting Palestinian children in this manner? What a disgrace.”

    The Washington Post opinion editor David Shipley published an apology for the cartoon on their website and took it down:

    “A cartoon we 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. However, the reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that. Our section is aimed at finding commonalities, understanding the bonds that hold us together, even in the darkest times.”

  • ‘Since 2001, I have repeatedly warned that the Afghan war was unwinnable’: Imran Khan

    ‘Since 2001, I have repeatedly warned that the Afghan war was unwinnable’: Imran Khan

    Prime Minister Imran Khan says he was surprised to see that no mention was made of Pakistan’s sacrifices as a US ally in the war on terror for more than two decades. “Instead, we were blamed for America’s loss,” he wrote in an op-ed for The Washington Post.

    “Since 2001, I have repeatedly warned that the Afghan war was unwinnable. Given their history, Afghans would never accept a protracted foreign military presence, and no outsider, including Pakistan, could change this reality,” wrote PM Khan.

    PM Imran Khan lashed out at successive Pakistani governments, saying that they had sought to please the US instead of pointing out the flaws of a military-driven approach in Afghanistan.

    “Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf agreed to every American demand for military support after 9/11. This cost Pakistan, and the United States, dearly,” he stressed.

    “Those the United States asked Pakistan to target included groups trained jointly by the CIA and our intelligence agency, the ISI, to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Back then, these Afghans were hailed as freedom fighters performing a sacred duty. President Ronald Reagan even entertained the mujahideen at the White House.”

    “Once the Soviets were defeated, the United States abandoned Afghanistan and sanctioned my country, leaving behind over 4 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and bloody civil war in Afghanistan. From this security, vacuum emerged the Taliban, many born and educated in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan,” read the opinion piece.

    “Fast forward to 9/11, when the United States needed us again — but this time against the very actors we had jointly supported to fight the foreign occupation. Musharraf offered Washington logistics and air bases, allowed a CIA footprint in Pakistan, and even turned a blind eye to American drones bombing Pakistanis on our soil. For the first time ever, our army swept into the semiautonomous tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, which had earlier been used as the staging ground for the anti-Soviet jihad. The fiercely independent Pashtun tribes in these areas had deep ethnic ties with the Taliban and other Islamist militants,” wrote Khan.

    The prime minister pointed out how, between 2005 and 2016, 16,000 terrorist attacks were conducted against Pakistan by over 50 militant groups, who saw the US and Pakistan as collaborators.

    “We suffered more than 80,000 casualties and lost over $150 billion in the economy. The conflict drove 3.5 million of our citizens from their homes. The militants escaping from Pakistani counterterrorism efforts entered Afghanistan and were then supported and financed by Indian and Afghan intelligence agencies, launching even more attacks against us,” he wrote.

    The premier lashed out at former president Asif Ali Zardari, referring to him as “undoubtedly the most corrupt man to have led my country”, accusing him of not worrying about the collateral damage caused by US drone strikes. He said former prime minister Nawaz Sharif was no different.

    “Tragically, instead of facing this reality, the Afghan and Western governments created a convenient scapegoat by blaming Pakistan, wrongly accusing us of providing safe havens to the Taliban and allowing its free movement across our border. If it had been so, would the United States not have used some of the 450-plus drone strikes to target these supposed sanctuaries?”

    “Surely Pakistan is not to blame for the fact that 300,000-plus well-trained and well-equipped Afghan security forces saw no reason to fight the lightly armed Taliban. The underlying problem was an Afghan government structure lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the average Afghan,” he wrote.

    The prime minister said the “right thing” right now for the world to do would be to engage with the new Afghanistan government, adding that if assured of constant humanitarian aid, the Taliban will have a greater incentive to honour the global community’s demands.

    “Providing such incentives will also give the outside world additional leverage to continue persuading the Taliban to honor its commitments,” he wrote.

    “If we do this right, we could achieve what the Doha peace process aimed at all along: an Afghanistan that is no longer a threat to the world, where Afghans can finally dream of peace after four decades of conflict. The alternative — abandoning Afghanistan — has been tried before,” warned the prime minister.