The Four Color Media Monitor

The Times of Israel reported 2 documentaries about cartoonist Spiegelman, author of Maus, will be screened at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival, and in the article, some more troubling clues to what's wrong with his mindset turn up:

Spiegelman will not be in Jerusalem for the event; he’s only been in Israel once, for a bar mitzvah trip in 1961, which he described as uncomfortable in an interview with the New York Review of Books in March this year.

“Every young man carried a rifle,” he told the New York Review. “I am very grateful that my parents ended up in America after the war. I’ve always been more comfortable taking my chances in the Diaspora.”

I get the feeling the man who reportedly says he's spent much of his life trying to not think about Israel is an opponent of the 2nd Amendment to boot. I get the strange feeling he sees little difference between armies representing goodness and the National Socialists of Germany from WW2. And that's decidedly troubling.

The New York-based Spiegelman has related to Israel’s war with Hamas sparingly but fiercely over the last two years, collaborating with cartoonist Joe Sacco to create the comic “Never Again!”

In it, he and Sacco draw themselves and their pained reactions to the war sparked by the Hamas terror onslaught in Israel on October 7, 2023. Spiegelman calls Israel’s actions in Gaza “genocidish,” while remarking that he doesn’t ever want “Maus” to be a recruiting poster for the Israeli army.

Still, said Philip Dolin, one of the filmmakers behind “The Hell of Auschwitz: Maus by Art Spiegelman,” the Hamas-led atrocities weren’t part of his film, noting, “you don’t have to talk about everything.”

Perhaps it's better if he didn't, because his collaborations with Sacco tell enough what's disturbing about Spiegelman's MO. That said, something very absurd turns up in the article:

There are no bans on books in Europe, said Horovitz, but caution and concern about antisemitism are present in her life in Paris, a subject that she discusses with her children.

What kind of naive idiocy is this? Back in the early 90s, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses was banned in some areas (and only recently, un-banned in India) and it could happen to him, it's not impossible for it to happen to Spiegelman's GNs. But if he really sees nothing wrong with Islam, that could make one reasonably wonder if Spiegelman would conclude it's okay for the Religion of Peace to determine whether his work should remain in print or not, in contrast to the sources he complained were censoring Maus in USA schools. A serious flaw in this news is that, while it brings up antisemitism in France, it doesn't clearly mention that Islamic fundamentalism is driving it in modern times.

Somebody said in the comments section:

Maybe Art Spiegelman should have gone back to Israel after his bar mitzvah and got to know it better, become more acquainted with the realities lived there. It might have caused less confusion and taken away the equivalence he seems to give the horrors of the Hamas invasion and Israel's response in Gaza. It's about not only surviving, Art Spiegelman, but ensuring attempted genocide cannot take place again.

Yup. Unfortunately, Spiegelman's somebody who's given clues he's not interested in writing about how victims of horrifying crimes in modernity feel. That double-standard cheapens the impact of Maus, plain and simple. What Spiegelman's told just compounds my disinterest in watching his documentaries.

Labels: censorship issues, comic strips, conventions, Europe and Asia, history, islam and jihad, misogyny and racism, moonbat artists, msm propaganda, politics, terrorism, violence