mohandasgandhi:

timekiller-s:

sarahlee310:

cartoonpolitics:

“Politics makes strange bedfellows” ~ (Charles Dudley Warner)

Perfect.

Beautiful.

Cartoon by Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Er, I get the point of this but I think there are a few pretty problematic elements as well. (I won’t even get into how ridiculous it is to have a nuclear warning symbol on a badge headed with “Iran.”)

I feel like a lot of the criticism that surrounds the Iranian government isn’t based in policy disagreements but the fact that it’s an Islamic theocracy. Sure, it’s funny to poke fun at how ridiculous Santorum’s statements are and compare them to equally ridiculous statements made by a leader who wasn’t even elected into office but the West has this view of the Middle East that’s inherently problematic. We see Islam as an “evil,” “violent,” and “irrational” religion because we have very little knowledge of it. Individuals who pervert and manipulate Islam to suit their own agendas are highlighted in our media and we rarely see what Muslims are actually like. So, here we have this comic of a leader of an Islamic country our media vilifies, not for its massive human rights violations against its own people but for its fringe characters and pursuits of necessitated self-reliance, and he’s portrayed, once again, as the ultimate enemy of the United States, and somehow Rick Santorum is just like him. Rick Santorum is just like this Muslim leader of this Muslim country that wants to destroy the United States. Never mind why Iran has shown hostility towards the United States, how it has suffered at the hands of U.S. imperialism, or why the Iranian Revolution happened in the first place.

All we know is that Iran is evil and Muslim, its illegitimate Muslim leader says outlandish stuff, and both he and Rick Santorum have compared the United States to Satan, therefore, Santorum and his statements are evil just like that irrational, nuclear, Muslim Iran. The comic perpetuates the myth that Iran is a viable external threat to the United States - here’s its leader who has referred to the United States as “the Great Satan” wearing a badge with a nuclear warning symbol as the West threatens war over its peaceful nuclear program. Here’s yet another depiction of an anti-American Muslim conflated with religiously-inspired undertones, almost suggesting, including Western perceptions of the region, that Islam and the Middle East are existential threats.

I understand what the comic meant to do but, given the seriousness of the current political climate, the messages it projects are harmful and almost propagandist. Even jokingly, it neither accurately represents Iran or Rick Santorum. 

That badge especially is just so absurd, and it’s a perfect example of how this association between Iran and the Nuclear Threat is instilled, both consciously and subconsciously, into peoples mindset. These sort of suggestions and juxtapositions are interpolated into all the dominant media, without it ever having to explicitly vocalize (because they are easily disprovable) notions of Iran as a serious threat to the United States. Then once these ideas are sort of built into the psychological schema people employ, they’re virtually ineradicable, facts become irrelevant. I can’t count how many times I’ve been talking with some right-wing/ conservative, or often even center-leaning (in America at least) person, and I’ll point out the lack of proof behind these things, and they’ll just give that unctuous, condescending smirk, and be like “oh now you don’t really think Iran’s not making nuclear arms, do you?” Particularly in America, were people like to fancy themselves “down-to-earth” vis-a-vis those bookish leftists in their ivory tower, that “peculiar unforced force of the better argument” carries very little force at all.