One German Paper's Cartoonicide

[Kellanved]

With tensions still simmering over the Danish cartoon scandal, a German newspaper provokes Tehran with caricatures of the Iranian national soccer team adorned in suicide-bomber belts. It was a joke, the paper says, but the Iranians aren't laughing. Plus, Tehran postpones negotiations with Russia over its nuclear program.

With the embers from the Danish cartoon dispute still burning, one Berlin newspaper appears to be on a suicide mission. On Friday, the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel ran a cartoon by Klaus Stuttmann portraying the Iranian national team at the World Cup wearing suicide bomber belts and the German national team dressed in Bundeswehr army uniforms. You know, free speech and all that. The cartoon reads: "Why the Bundeswehr absolutely has to be deployed at the World Cup."

The Iranian embassy in Berlin has demanded an apology for the cartoon and is considering taking legal action over the matter. But in a navel-gazing interview with the same newspaper that commissioned the sketch, the cartoonist says his aim with the drawing was simply to criticize the debate in Germany about whether the army should be deployed domestically to provide additional security during the World Cup soccer tournament in Germany.

Of course, in times when Danish embassies are being torched in the Middle East, its products being boycotted and a Tehran newspaper calling for a Holocaust cartoon contest, this type of humor is especially sensitive these days. The paper asks Stuttmann if maybe one should be more cautious as a caricaturist in the wake of the uproar over the Muhammad cartoons. "Of course I was cautious," he responds. "Besides, I never would have drawn caricatures like those my Danish colleagues drew. I thought the drawings in Jyllands-Posten were a gratuitous provocation." After all, who would seriously find anything offensive about portraying Iranian soccer players as suicide bombers?
...
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,400795,00.html

[xultar]

1. I will be angry if this causes riots. This is a good cartoon and goes

right up to the line and tap dances on it. It doesn't however go over it.

[Kellanved]

4. It has

http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5771

Any excuse will do, or so it seems.

[NoPasaran]

2. Okay, this is rather tasteless

But is it really any worse than images of "Hitlery Clinton"?

[Earth_First]

3. So this is how it all goes down...

The xenophobia has created a backlash in Muslim countries, and it will all go down because of a handful of cartoons.

I'm literally shaking my head in disgust.