‘Grow Up’: Cartoonist Speaks Out after Washington Post Censors Hamas Drawing

Last Tuesday, the Washington Post ran a cartoon by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Ramirez satirizing Hamas’s claims that Israel targets Gazan children, showing the terrorist group’s spokesman, Ghazi Hamadi, using kids as human shields. By Wednesday, after what executive editor Sally Buzbee called “deep concern” from staffers and letters written by subscribers, the Post pulled the cartoon, which many readers and employees reportedly saw as racist.

“The reaction to the image convinced me that I had missed something profound, and divisive, and I regret that,” wrote opinion editor David Shipley in a note atop letters from readers taking issue with the cartoon. “Our section is aimed at finding commonalities, understanding the bonds that hold us together, even in the darkest times. In this spirit, we have taken down the drawing.”

In an interview with National Review, Ramirez — who has a unique agreement whereby he publishes drawings in both the Washington Post and the Las Vegas Review-Journal (which, for its part, did not pull his drawing) — said he will not bow to the spurious charges of racism he has faced since the cartoon ran.

“This was designed with specificity. It’s focused on one individual and represents one organization and their claims of victimhood,” Ramirez told NR. He said those who considered the cartoon racist are engaged in conflation and “just can’t look beyond Hamas and distinguish the difference between a known terrorist group and Palestinians.”

He told NR he believes the accusations of racism on his part stem from an inability to reckon with the tactics Hamas uses, like employing children as human shields, as he depicted in his drawing.

“When the intellectually indolent cannot defend the indefensible, they pull the race card,” he said.

The backlash to the cartoon stemmed partly from allegations that Hamadi’s facial features had been exaggerated in a racially stereotypical manner. Ramirez explained to NR — and provided examples of other cartoons of his demonstrating as much — that he does so for all his subjects regardless of ethnicity.

Ramirez explained the process by which he learned that the cartoon was pulled, telling NR that he generally sends Shipley a minimum of three different drawings each day, but on Tuesday, he said, he sent over eight or nine.

“He immediately sent me an email saying, ‘This Hamas one.’ He really liked that, and I think that was the one I liked the most myself,” Ramirez said. “When this all blew up, I got a call from David, and he said, ‘we’re getting a lot of fire from this cartoon’ . . . about an hour later, he called me up and told me that, when it came down to it, they were going to pull the cartoon.”

Ramirez emphasized that he respects Shipley’s leadership of the opinion page, saying he has a commitment to ideological diversity but that the ability of what he called a “faction of juveniles” to dictate editorial decisions is a problem not just for the Post but for journalism as an industry and the country as a whole.

“The free exchange of ideas is the foundation of our democracy, and the purpose of an editorial cartoon is to be the catalyst for thought,” he said. “By promoting the thoughtful exchange of ideas, we forge a consensus through the fiery heat of debate. I think political correctness and the woke movement are bad for democracy.”

Ramirez said it is the responsibility of people in positions of power to protect those values.

“It is sad that people who oppose a political viewpoint have to invent diversions to quell the debate; we should be better than that,” he told NR. “America should be better than that. We need some adults in the room. If it scares you — a cartoon — maybe you need to grow up.”