The News

It's strange.

The last cartoon that I drew seemed funny when I drew it. And the very next day I read it and I found it depressing. Todaý's cartoon however is completely different! It seemed depressing to me as soon as I did it.

So maybe it'll seem funny to me tomorrow?

Jerusalem (1997)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from July 1997.

I posted it because of this piece of late-breaking news:

"Born in Jerusalem?: "The question of Jerusalem's sovereignty is going to the U.S. Supreme Court, but not to resolve the Middle East conflict. M.B.Z. v. Clinton is instead about the power of the U.S. president to decide if the passports of Jerusalem-born Americans list "Israel" as their birthplace, the New York Times reports. More broadly, the justices suggested they will decide whether a related 2002 law infringes on the president's power to recognize foreign sovereigns.

More narrowly, the case is about Menachem Zivotofsky, who was born in the holy city. His parents want "Israel" rather than "Jerusalem" to be his formal birthplace, and so did Congress when it passed the law directing the State Department to record Jerusalem births as having taken place in Israel. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama say this unconstitutionally limits their powers, since U.S. policy for six decades has been to leave Jerusalem's status to Israel and the Palestinians."- see source

So what do you think about George W. and Obama's agreement on this issue?

the Bright Side

I resolved to do a funny cartoon for today. I drew it yesterday, but humor is a funny thing. Looking at it now, what seemed to me yesterday to be funny seems really depressing to me today.

I decided to go ahead and post it, but I'd really like to know. Was it funny to you? Or depressing? Or both? Or ...?

Fertilizer Bomb (1995)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from 1995.

The sixteen year-old cartoon was about the terrible Oklahoma City Bombing in which Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people and injured more than 680 others by setting off a fertilizer bomb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Building.

I posted the cartoon today because of the terrible bombing in Oslo that is in the News.

According to reports out of Norway:

Calls to regulate fertilizer after bomb

July 25, 2011
"Calls for stronger regulation of the sale of ammonium nitrate fertilizers have been made following the suspected use of the materials in the bombing of Oslo on Friday July 22 - with experts suggesting that new EU regulations set to be introduced in Norway are not enough.

Commercially-produced ANFO is used as explosives by mining firms and other enterprises. Anders Behring Breivik is alleged to have produced his own ANFO explosives from fertilizers.

The alleged perpetrator of the bombings and the subsequent shootings on Utøya island, Anders Behring Breivik, is known to have obtained large quantities of fertilizer through an unincorporated firm he founded in 2009 called Breivik Geofarm, which he claimed would cultivate and sell vegetables and fruits." -more

Your thoughts?

U.S. Policy

America's current policy in the Middle East and North Africa is a confusing mess. Of course in a few years, the historians will explain it all to us. It'll turn out to have been inevitable.

In today's cartoon I wanted to show two non-Americans discussing the situation. Did I succeed? Nu? So do they look "non-American"?

The Cloud

I just got a new computer. The super powerful, cutting edge workhorse I bought just a few years ago is now a slow outdated model with something wonky in its motherboard. So now I have a brand new computer. It's a super powerful, cutting edge workhorse.

But the new machine runs Windows7 and the latest version of Word ...so I'm dealing with a learning curve.

The last machine had oodles of gigabytes but the new one has a terabyte of memory. "So", says I to the computer guy "Ï'll have tons of space to save my data."

To which the computer guy asks "Have you considered keeping your data in the cloud?"

Keeping my data in the "cloud" sounds cool. What it really means is keeping my data on somebody else's computer instead of on my own. Which sounds less cool.

While I'm at it, permit me to rant about tablets. Tablets are the latest "cool" device, but I'm haunted by the idea that had tablets been invented first, then everybody would now be rushing to buy the latest cool advance ...the laptop! It's just like a tablet but it has a real keyboard attached!

I write and sketch all my cartoon "roughs" in little spiral-bound notebooks. Over the years I've gone through hundreds of notebooks. All now sitting on shelves and packed into boxes. I often think of scanning them, but the truth is that long after my hard drives have lost their magnetism (and my saved data) those notebooks will remain stable. They'll keep their data for hundreds of years longer than any digital memory will.

Here's a thought, suppose they'd invented the computer first... would we all now be rushing to buy the latest cool advance ...the spiral notebook?!

Automation (1987)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon was published on July 21, 1987.
A cartoon I drew exactly 24 years ago today!

I'd moved to Israel sixteen years earlier in 1971 and was now back on a trip to the States. I was amazed at the advanced state of what we called "automation" back in 1987.

In 2011 America's hope for the future is not automation. It's "job creation."

Changing times.
Sigh.

Murdoch and Wikileaks

It was not that long ago that progressive media pundits and newspapers were treating Wikileaks as some kind of asset to democracy, and Julian Assange as some kind of hero. I fumed over the damage done by the publishing of criminally obtained secret documents. So now the hacking for newsworthy items is back in the news. Only this time it's Rupert Murdoch's people who've done it. And all hell has broken loose?!!??

If Assange was a hero, why isn't Murdoch? And if Murdoch is to be universally reviled, why not Assange?

And, while we're asking questions, has anyone commented on the fact that both Murdoch and Assange are Australians? Are there any conspiracy theorists out there who could come up with an explanation?

Hmmmm?

Summer Heat Wave (1977)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from August 1977.
34 summers ago!

Dry Bones was in its fourth year of publication.

I had originally introduced Mr. Shuldig (now my alter ego) as a "problem-solver." This was his solution to the crushing heat wave we were having back then. We're having a summer heat wave now and I'm supposed to go out tonight.

I think I'll try Shuldig's trick, it sounds like it could work.

The Seasons

The pleasant, heady days of Arab Spring are behind us. They were the good old days when the West had inhaled the sweet fresh breezes of change and they had fantasized about democracy and the blossoming of a new Middle East. It was a time of innocent hope and pretty flowers and cute, cuddly bunny rabbits. It was spring. But somehow, almost without their noticing it, the seasons have changed. Somehow we’ve slid into summer. A long hot Arabian summer where the unforgiving sun burns the sky above you and the heat of the ground rises in waves around you.

Solidarity in Egypt morphs into fiery Moslem attacks on Coptic Christians. NATO No Fly zones in Libya turn into targeted assassinations, bombing raids, and ensnarement in a civil war. In Syria the heat incinerates its victims with the entire world watching. Yes, we are in the depths of Arab Summer, and the West is trying to ignore what is now gathering strength on the horizon. It is a bitter, fierce, and inevitable season that approaches and one for which America and the West seem totally unprepared; it is Iranian Winter.

Before the Western pundits gave us the term Arab Spring the thing that they nattered on about was the Arab Street. It was a fascinating notion. It went like this. The Arab world was a collection of dictatorships and monarchies. Each state worked on the principle of one man – one vote, i.e. the man who was in charge was the man with the one vote. This meant that nobody, especially not Western politicians or journalists, knew what the people living in these totalitarian countries wanted, thought, or believed. There was no way to gauge public opinion because the public was afraid to give its opinion. So the supposed experts on the Middle East invented the next best thing. They called it the Arab Street. And for some time we’ve listened to them explain to us what the so-called Arab Street was thinking and what the Arab Street wanted until the explosion of Arab unrest caught them by surprise. So they coined the term Arab Spring to explain what had happened.

When I was a kid in Brooklyn there was a popular children’s story that I loved. It was called the Grasshopper and the Ant. It’s one of Aesop’s Fables but I had a Little Golden Book version. I seem to remember there having been a Disney animated movie of the tale. The plot of the little morality play involves a grasshopper who fiddles around all summer and an ant who prepares for the coming winter. The moral that is drawn is based on the assumption that the ant is industrious and that the grasshopper is lazy and just looking for fun. But maybe Aesop and the publishers of the Little Golden Books and Walt Disney had it all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t that the grasshopper was lazy and just looking for fun. Maybe he was just too dumb to know that it wouldn’t be summer for ever. Maybe he just didn’t know that winter was coming, like the folks running America’s foreign policy. The impact of a nuclear-armed and missile-equipped Islamist Iranian state on the course of history will be profound …and more so because America let it happen.
.

Your thoughts?

Circumcision

A bill to ban circumcision of all males under the age of 18 will be on the ballot in San Francisco this November. This is alarming because circumcision of all males is the single most basic ritual of Judaism. Banning circumcision is a direct attack on the practice of Judaism, even if it is presented as having other motives. In fact, history shows us that viral antisemitism always comes to town in disguise, usually portraying its motives as a need to protect innocent victims from demonic Jews.

In the past, violent lynch mob pogrom attacks on Jews and Judaism were launched to protect the peasants and townsfolk from Jews who had “poisoned the wells”. The Nazis were just trying to protect racial purity. More recently, Jew-hatred has been packaged as an attempt to protect the “Palestinian” natives from the evil colonialist Jewish State, and now, in 21st century California, the attack on Judaism is being promoted as protecting Jewish babies from their demonic Jewish parents.

A second characteristic of the behavioral virus we call antisemitism is its compulsive use of cartoons in spreading its libels. Antisemitic movements from Nazism to Fascism to Stalinism to contemporary Islamism all share a surprisingly intensive use of antisemitic cartoons in their campaigns. And so it is with the framers of the anti-circumcision bill.

The bill was written by a private non-profit organization based in San Diego, California with chapters in sixteen states. It is led by someone named Matthew Hess. Their goal is a nation-wide ban on the practice of circumcision and, sure enough, Matthew just could not resist the compulsion to draw those standard Nazi blood-libel caricatures of fiendish Rabbis sacrificing innocent babies. Hess, to push his campaign for the anti-circumcision bill, wrote and edited a propagandizing comic book called Foreskinman. The work is incredibly rich in Nazi ideology and filled with vile antisemitic imagery. The shockingly blatant antisemitism of the piece was so obvious that, in response, the woman who had been a proponent of putting the same bill onto the ballot in Santa Monica has now withdrawn the measure from consideration.

The comic book stars a blond, Aryan-looking superhero who interrupts a circumcision ceremony, beats up the fiendish, grinning Rabbi (named Monster Mohel), thrashes the Rabbi’s machine gun-toting Jewish accomplices, and takes the Jewish baby from his Jewish father. The child’s father shouts “Give me back my son” but our Nordic hero flies the terrified baby off to safety.

The baby, now rescued from the Jews, is taken on a two-day trip to a group of beach-dwelling pagans …and given to them. As the pagan woman who has been given the stolen Jewish baby announces at the end of this touching saga, she is now free to “raise him as one of our own.”

The history of the attempts to destroy Judaism is punctuated with anti-circumcision laws. In 167 BCE the Syrian Greek occupiers of the Land of Israel banned circumcision. A few hundred years after that, the Roman occupiers of the Land of Israel banned circumcision in their attempt to destroy Judaism. The Nazis banned circumcision, as did the Stalinists. Banning circumcision is simply a synonym for banning Judaism.

And while we’re at it, here’s a question for you. Why does the Christian calendar start on January 1st? Shouldn’t the Christian calendar start on December 25th? …the day of Jesus’ birth? What made January 1st so important? It’s simple. January 1st (when baby Jesus was 8 days old) was the day of his circumcision.

Your thoughts?

Once Again (2001)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from July 2001.
Ten years ago.

and "once again" it's all true.

Ask the Expert

As a political cartoonist I'm supposed to present my explanation of current events. The problem is that trying to explain the motives behind America's current inconsistent "Arab Spring" policy is REALLY difficult. So, baffled, I decided to comment on my plight!

Today's cartoon features a TV Middle East Expert answering questions that have been "tweeted in" to him.

Old Age (1998)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from October 1998.
It's a cartoon that requires some explanation today..

John Glenn had been the first American to orbit the Earth. He had done it in 1962. Thirtysix years later, after a career as an American Senator, Glenn went on a second NASA flight.

At age 77, on October 29, 1998, Glenn became the oldest person ever to go into space. He went on a shuttle mission, as a passenger. Of course with the closing of NASA, all future American Astronauts will also go as "passengers" ...aboard Russian space ships.

Yikes!

NASA

American TV News shows proudly reviewed NASA's achievements, and the NASA website proclaimed "The end of the space shuttle program does not mean the end of NASA", but I could only feel that yet another part of America's "specialness" is gone. Another piece of the dream has been let go. Is America giving up? Is her leadership role really over? Is it really the start of China's century? * * * Is Obama responsible for America's shocking decline, or is he simply recognizing facts and bowing out gracefully?

Security Briefing

As I write this it looks like the flotilla has been stopped and a "Fly-In" of "activists" is in the works for this weekend. So I thought about our airport security people and how they'd be preparing, and came up with a cartoon that I hope gave you a chuckle.

Meanwhile, According to Y Net:

"Israel bars 300 activists from flying to Israel

Ahead of fly-in, state issues blacklist of pro-Palestinian activists blocked from boarding Israel-bound flights. Organizer says airlines complying, cites emails sent to passengers canceling trips 'as per Israel's instructions'

Israeli security has distributed a blacklist among foreign airlines, featuring names of 300 activists who will not be allowed on Israel-bound flights. The measure comes in preparation for the pro-Palestinian fly-in, which is scheduled to take place over the upcoming weekend.

Israel told the airlines that the blacklisted individuals, most of whom come from France, are unauthorized to enter the state. The air carriers, in turn, promised to prohibit these individuals from boarding flights." -more

Netanyahu and Pollard (1996)

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from July 1996.
Fifteen long years ago.

Bibi Netanyahu is Prime Minister, Jonathan Pollard is still in prison, and Jonathan's wife Esther is still fighting for the Prime Minister to secure her husband's long overdue release.

Please click for the Facts of the Pollard Case.

Ever Again

We are now facing a major global outbreak of viral antisemitism. As usual, it is spread by the same “secret viral codes” identified in my YIISA working paper on the topic. The power of the internet to virally spread images means that this outbreak could easily become a pandemic. And through the Internet, China (formerly isolated and unaware of the virus) is likely to become quickly infected. The need for anti viral products is obvious.

The knowledge that antisemitism is a virus (and that it is spread largely through an easy to recognize set of graphic “Secret Images”) provides an opportunity for actually and effectively fighting the phenomenon. Using standard anti-viral techniques as a guide opens the way to fight the contagion.

I am now planning a special Dry Bones project to develop anti-viral products with which to battle the virus. I'll need a couple of serious donors to fund the operation. blog@mrdrybones.com

Ambassadors

Today's Golden Odie cartoon is from July 6, 2001.
Ten years ago.

The Ambassador who was leaving back then was an American Jew. AsI write this Israel is about to welcome a new American Ambassador. He's also an American Jew.

I, of course, have nothing against American Jews, and I certainly don't want to be politically incorrect, but frankly I'd feel more trusting with an American Ambassador to Israel who was an Evangelical Christian.

Sunday School

A major challenge for each generation is to pass on what it has learned to the next generation.

But the next generation perceives life, and our words, through the prism of its own reality ...and what we say is often not what they hear.

Which is what makes it a challenge.

...And the subliminal message of today's cartoon.

Escape Clause

The latest from the Voice Of America:

"Organizers of an international flotilla are accusing Israel of sabotaging a second ship that they planned to include in a mission to break an Israeli naval blockade of the Gaza Strip.

The organizers said Thursday they had discovered damage to the engine of the Irish boat Saoirse in the Turkish port of Gocek, where it had been berthed for the past few weeks.

They called the damage an act of sabotage committed by professional divers and blamed it on Israel, which has warned it will not allow the flotilla to breach the Gaza blockade.

An Israeli foreign ministry official ridiculed the allegations, telling a Swedish news agency that they sound like a plot from a James Bond movie.

The organizers said the Irish boat could have sunk, resulting in fatalities, if it had gone to sea with a damaged engine. On Monday, they reported similar damage to the Swedish ship Juliano at the Greek port of Piraeus and also blamed it on Israeli sabotage."

-more