In Which Publication and Which Year Was This Cartoon Printed?

Why, in 2006, as the editorial cartoon in the alt-weekly Sacramento News & Review. I should note that Si Frumkin, who alerted me to this, reports that the News & Review responded to a complaint with this:

We have received your letter to the SN&R; thank you for your input. As a result of the outpouring of Emails that have come to us related to the Kloss cartoon of August 3rd, we'll be running a special full page of letters on the topic in our issue of 8/17/06, as well as an editorial statement about the decision to publish the cartoon.

Should be interesting to see what that editorial statement says.

Sacramento News & Review Cartoon:

The newspaper publishes an explanation: "In this case, Kloss [the cartoonist] used the Star of David symbol — which is displayed prominently on the flag of the government of Israel — to depict his view that Uncle Sam is locked into a single position in that region." Here's the cartoon:

Seemed to me that when someone is in a pillory, it's because someone else has locked him into it, not because he's just abstractly "locked into" it. And it also seems to me that in context the Star of David, without the horizontal bars that distinguish the Israeli flag from the general symbol of Jews, is more reasonably interpreted as a symbol of Jews, not of Israel. As I read the cartoon, it was suggesting that Uncle Sam is locked in to something Jewish, not just something Israeli; but in any event, he was locked in by someone else, not by himself — could it be ... the Jews? (It surely can't be Israel, since Israel has very little power to lock the U.S. into anything.)

If you share my interpretation, then I suspect you take a pretty dim view of the cartoon. If, on the other hand, you think the cartoon is more reasonably interpreted simply as Uncle Sam having locked himself into support for Israel, then you would likely see little wrong with it. It's your call.