Was it a misguided joke or just an insensitive cartoon?

I was deeply disturbed by the cartoon. Basically it was a drawing of the YouTube video, and if you were to watch the clip you would understand how upsetting and important it is for the people of Iran and certainly not funny.

Replacing the YouTube logo with "YouDie" is simply not funny and captioning it "NEDA!!" was not funny either. The man sitting next to her screaming for her to stay awake and not be afraid was a close relation to the victim, but your cartoonist tried to turn it into some form of satire.

I am deeply disturbed that your staff did not put more effort into researching this obviously misguided joke. The people of Iran are struggling and dying for their freedom and democracy. This woman is a martyr in their eyes, currently the poster child for their protests as her death and rapid spread of the video has caused more riots and unrest in Iran. Hopefully you will understand that this is not funny.

A VERY OFFENDED READER

BANGKOK

The cartoonist explains

The problem is that many readers go for the initial understanding of my cartoons and invariably get emotional about them. The idea of this cartoon was to show the cynicism of YouTube and the five-star ratings on a video of someone dying. I do not deny that this video was useful because it was the only information available on the event.

The problem is that information is getting more and more emotional (emotion is the enemy of real information and the beginning of a demagogy). Do you think that the millions of people who saw this video care much about Neda or whether they simply watched it to get their daily thrills - consciously or not? It's like watching the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It's purely emotional, and if you watch it 20 times like most of us have done, you do it for the emotion it provokes, not for the information it brings. YouTube is useful but it is also setting a new trend where the lines between information and entertainment are becoming more and more blurred. That is why in my cartoon I put the "five-star rating" that YouTube put on its version, to show that I did not like the "entertainment" aspect of it.

The other misunderstanding, mainly from Americans readers, is that all political cartoons are supposed to be funny.

As a French person myself, I can say that European cartoonists are generally more serious, more cynical, more tasteless, more bloody, more realistic and less funny or politically correct. Yes it's a cultural difference that has sometimes caused problems when readers of an English-newspaper overseas can be very homogenous.

No, this cartoon was not meant to be funny at all. It is very serious and is meant to carry a lot of gravity. The idea that I wanted to depict something funny is what usually causes outrage among readers. But the biggest mystery is that some readers actually assume that I would be so insensitive as to make fun of a young dying girl. If my cartoon is not clear enough, the first thing that should come to the mind of the reader is "Alright, it can't be that the cartoonist is making fun of Neda dying because no journalist in his right mind would do that. So what is he really trying to say in his cartoon?"

Also, why should the cartoonist become the villain in this? Shouldn't it be the Supreme Leader of Iran? I didn't kill anyone…

STEPHFF - THE CARTOONIST

BANGKOK