Quick religous riddle
If you're going to do a political cartoon about a friendly foreign dictatorship, do you think it might be useful to use images that aren't considered offensive by the citizens of that foreign dictatorship?
There's a popular islamic belief that dogs are unclean (I'm not sure where this belief comes from -- it's been a looong time since I've read the Koran [and that only in translation], but I don't recall much about dogs aside from the oft-quoted Sura 18 -- but many believers do think that dogs are unclean), and if you don't believe this ill-founded prejudice, there's a long tradition of dogs being considered as nothing more than obedient servents. So if you already suspect that your government has become a puppet of the United States, it's just possible that seeing cartoons in the US press showing your country as a "good dog" might tend to piss you off (cf: Tony "the poodle" Blair) and provoke public demonstrations (which the, ahem, US-backed government will then call "riots" to avoid the PR taint of shooting demonstrators.)
It's more personal when the empire that controls your country refers to you as nothing but "good doggies" than when someone comments, for the 100th time, that torturers working for that empire are desecrating bibles Korans. Don't believe it? Look at the United States -- we don't care if 100,000 Iraqi civilians get killed, but if 4 mercenaries working for a US company die, it's time to raze a few cities to the ground, and if another 4-5000 civilians die in the attack, oh well, it's not as if they were Americans or anything.
(cartoon via Hullabaloo)
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This isn't really even relevant, but it still makes me laugh--I mean, the cartoon really sums up how Americans feel about Pakistan. And, yeah, it's offensive probably to Pakistanis, but it's also the War on Terra in a nutshell--horseshit.
Pakistan isn't turning over any important al Qaeda people to the United States!
Why would they? Pakistan TRAINED them. Pakistan equipped them. The people of Pakistan have a higher opinion of bin Laden than George Bush.
They're NOT hunting bin Laden. They're NOT hunting any important al Qaeda people. They're NEVER going to. The CIA knows this. The NSA knows this.
Everybody knows this, except for Americans.
I don't know whether it's funny or sad.