‘SPECIFICITY’

Washington Post Cartoonist Defends His Hamas ‘Human Shields’ Caricature

Two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Ramirez said the point of the cartoon was to lampoon a particular Hamas official rather than all Palestinians.

The editorial cartoonist behind a controversial sketch depicting a Hamas official using civilians as human shields defended his work after The Washington Post retracted it last week. The cartoon, originally published in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which has stood behind it, was blasted by critics for perpetuating racist stereotypes, with the Hamas representative drawn to have an exaggerated nose and heavily arched eyebrows. Michael Ramirez told CNN over the weekend that the cartoon was meant to lampoon the features of one particular official, Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad, rather than all Palestinians. “The point of the cartoon is in specificity,” he said. Ramirez, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, told Fox News on Friday that he believed it was “empirically true that Hamas uses civilians, both Palestinians and Israelis, as human shields.” He said he weighed walking away from the Post, which syndicates his cartoons twice a week, but ultimately decided “if I quit, then the cancel culture people win.”