“Islamophobic” Cartoons from the Arab World

While some in the West bend over backwards not to be “Islamophobic” or critical of Islam — and while Muslim heads of state and the OIC scold the West for the same — below is an idea of the sorts of cartoons that appear regularly in Arabic language media (my translations appear beneath each image):

The man to the left, who is labeled as a “moderate Muslim” — and who represents the Muslim Brotherhood — says, “Before he slaughters you, permit me to tell you that he does not represent the true Islam…"

At the very top, the turbaned man tells the other, “Whoever wants to believe or not to believe [in Allah/Islam] is free to do so.”

The man responds, “I have chosen not to believe” [bottom left cartoon].

“Bad choice!” says the turbaned one as he slices the other’s head off [bottom right cartoon].

In the first image (to the right), the man exclaims, “Islam is a religion of mercy and peace!”

In the next image (to the left), we see what he’s about as he says, “Now who is the son of the dog who says otherwise?!”

Top: “Who among you desires the enforcement of Sharia?”

Middle: “Who among you desires to live in a nation in which Sharia is enforced?”

Bottom: “Who among you desires to live in Europe or America?”

An African jihadi (representative of Boko Haram, Al Shabaab, and the like), rebukes a poor, starving villager woman: “It is forbidden to eat the food delivered by the UN because it is infidel!”

The woman replies: “And that grenade in your hand which was made by the infidels — is it permissible?”

Raymond Ibrahim is the Judith Friedman Rosen writing fellow at the Middle East Forum

Raymond Ibrahim, a specialist in Islamic history and doctrine, is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022); Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018); Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013); and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). He has appeared on C-SPAN, Al-Jazeera, CNN, NPR, and PBS and has been published by the New York Times Syndicate, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Weekly Standard, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Jane’s Islamic Affairs Analyst. Formerly an Arabic linguist at the Library of Congress, Ibrahim guest lectures at universities, briefs governmental agencies, and testifies before Congress. He has been a visiting fellow/scholar at a variety of Institutes—from the Hoover Institution to the National Intelligence University—and is the Judith Friedman Rosen Fellow at the Middle East Forum and the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute.
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