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Every joke is a tiny revolution, as Orwell said. Which is why authoritarians so detest comedy.
Actual comedy, that is. What is passed off as ‘comedy’ on late night US television, or Australia’s ABC, for instance, are very much not. They’re Maoist Struggle Sessions pretending to be comedy. The tell is that audiences on these shows don’t laugh: they clap and cheer. A laugh is a gut reaction, clapping and cheering is a salute, an exercise is obedience.
Humour, Orwell elaborated, brings down the high and mighty with a bump. The high and mighty don’t like it, which makes it even funnier. In the old days, an outraged autocrat might cut out the tongue of an impudent jester. These days, they sue them.
From the Australian:
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi has threatened to sue The Australian for defamation and demanded an apology over a Johannes Leak cartoon that portrayed her wearing a Hamas headband and whitewashing a wall bearing the words ‘October 7’, claiming the depiction was “racist” and would cost her votes at the next election.
How the depiction is ‘racist’ is anybody’s guess. The only likely explanation is that, to the racist left, portraying ‘people of colour’ accurately is ipso facto racist. Consider the screeching over Mark Knight’s cartoon of Serena Williams. It’s instantly recognisable as Williams. The left claimed it was ‘gorilla-like’. Which says more about how the left sees black women than about anyone else.
To their credit, Leak and the Oz are telling Faruqi where to shove it.
The Australian has told Senator Faruqi it will not accede to any of her “grossly hypocritical” demands, and that the cartoon – which it argues is clearly protected by truth and honest opinion defences – will remain online.
The cartoon, published on Monday last week, shows the Greens deputy leader using a roller to apply white wash to obscure the date of the Hamas terror attack on Israel in which almost 1200 people died, while saying: “What’s the big deal? It’s just a bit of paint …”
The truth:
Faruqi used almost those exact words to dismiss a vandalism attack on the Australian War Memorial by pro-Hamas activists. She is never seen anywhere these days without her pallyrag. She posed for a since-deleted photo with activists holding anti-Semitic placards. She refused repeatedly to concede whether or not Hamas should be dismantled.
In its response to Senator Faruqi’s lawyers, The Australian said it was “surprised and bemused that your client is threatening legal action given her comments can only be understood to mean that the barbaric Hamas regime, a listed terrorist group and the perpetrators of the October 7 atrocity, has some legitimacy if it is supported by the Palestinian people” […]
Senator Faruqi’s refusal to declare that Hamas should not play a role in a future Palestinian state has been widely condemned, including by Anthony Albanese, who said the Greens’ position on Israel was “appalling”.
“If a senator is asked to support a terrorist organisation … it is pretty clear what she should have answered – which is Hamas has no role,” the Prime Minister said.
Let’s be honest, though: Faruqi is just the grotesque head on the festering boil of Greens politics. Never forget that Greens politicians openly and cheerfully marched alongside a Muslim mob chanting “Gas the Jews!”, just two days after the October 7 atrocities.
It didn’t take much for the Greens to show their true face to the world. That a hugely talented cartoonist draws cheeky caricatures of that nasty visage is nothing more than holding them up to well-deserved ridicule.
If a cartoon costs them votes, then, frankly, that’s the least they deserve.
