Why Rashida Tlaib Couldn’t Take This Joke

Rashida Tlaib, meet Samuel Pennypacker.

The Michigan congresswoman is furious about an editorial cartoon poking fun at her record on Arab terrorism. She says it’s “racist.” Pennypacker, the governor of Pennsylvania in the early 1900s, had a solution to the problem of nettlesome cartoons: Ban ‘em!

Irritated by a series of caricatures in the Philadelphia North American in 1912 that portrayed him as a parrot, Governor Pennypacker promoted legislation in 1903 that outlawed the depiction of a person as “a beast, bird, fish, insect, or other inhuman animal.” 

Cartoonists responded by depicting the governor in non-animal forms, including trees, turnips, and beer steins. The law was repealed four years later by Pennypacker’s successor.

The episode illustrated the power of a cartoon and helps explain why politicians sometimes respond so hysterically to them. An editorial cartoon in the New York World is believed to have played a decisive role in the 1884 presidential election. Thomas Nast’s biting cartoons in Harper’s Weekly helped bring down “Boss” Tweed, the corrupt 19th-century New York City politician. (Dispatching his goons to lean on Nast, Tweed reportedly told them, “My constituents can’t read. But they can’t help seeing them damned pictures!”) During World War One, the U.S. government regarded cartoonists as so influential that it created a Bureau of Cartoons to mobilize them in support of the war effort.

Terrorists and dictators take cartoons seriously, too. An editorial cartoon in the Baltimore Sun in 1931, challenging the lynching of a local African-American man, triggered riots by racist mobs outside the Sun’s offices. Islamist terrorists angry over a cartoon massacred twelve staffers at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015. 

Syria’s most famous editorial cartoonist, Ali Ferzat, now lives in exile in Kuwait, to which he fled after he was brutally beaten because of a caricature he drew of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad. Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas has suspended cartoonists from the staff of the official PA newspaper, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, when he has disapproved of their views. Algerian political cartoonist Ali Dilem has been prosecuted so many times for his satirical drawings that there is now a law on the books, known as the Dilem Amendment, which mandates a year in jail for insulting Algeria’s president.

The cartoon that’s bothering Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, drawn by Henry Payne in National Review, portrayed her as the owner of an exploding pager similar to those used by Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.

Tlaib said it was “disgraceful” that National Review published “this racism.” She predicted it “will incite more hate + violence against our Arab & Muslim communities, and it makes everyone less safe.”

If a politician or a columnist falsely accused a U.S. congresswoman of being associated with an anti-American terrorist group such as Hezbollah, it would be perfectly understandable that she would denounce the publication of such libel as disgraceful. But an editorial cartoon is satire. The entire premise of that art form is to use exaggeration and absurdity to make a humorous point. The Payne cartoon about Tlaib is no more “disgraceful” than skits satirizing politicians on Saturday Night Live.

An editorial cartoon is satire. The entire premise of that art form is to use exaggeration and absurdity to make a humorous point. The Payne cartoon about Tlaib is no more “disgraceful” than skits satirizing politicians on Saturday Night Live.

Moreover, Tlaib herself has provided plenty of ammunition to inspire cartoons such as Payne’s. 

She responded to October 7 with a statement that in effect justified the massacres, calling them a response to “the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid.” Her statement did not even mention Hamas. The Union for Reform Judaism denounced Tlaib’s statement as “shameful” and urged her to retract it. She ignored the request.

Soon after that, Rep. Tlaib publicly invoked the phrase “From the river to the sea” (advocating the destruction of Israel), a popular slogan among Arab terrorist groups. That earned her an official censure by the House of Representatives. 

Tlaib voted against a bill preventing perpetrators of the October 7 atrocities from entering the United States. She voted “present” on a resolution condemning the Hamas gang-rapes.

A prominent American supporter of Hezbollah, Abbas Hamideh, was invited by Tlaib to her 2019 dinner celebrating her election to Congress, and she posed for photos with him. This past summer, Rep. Tlaib said it was “genocidal” for Israel to strike at senior Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr, in Lebanon.

It’s not as if Payne created his cartoon from thin air. His satirical comment was anchored in years of Tlaib rationalizing Arab terrorism , identifying with the goals of Arab terrorists and opposing anti-terrorist congressional resolutions.

So it’s not as if Henry Payne created his cartoon from thin air. His satirical comment was anchored in years of Tlaib rationalizing Arab terrorism, identifying with the goals of Arab terrorists, opposing anti-terrorist congressional resolutions, and even posing for photo-ops with an unabashed supporter of a terrorist group. If you do that sort of thing, eventually some astute cartoonist is bound to notice.

Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry, coauthored with Craig Yoe.