The art of taking offence

Ian Bell

GERALDScarfe and Steve Bell, two men who colour in drawings for t he London papers, have been causing offence. This, as any decent cartoonist will tell you, is easy to accomplish. Funny pictures bother some people far more than any number of words. This is strange, but true.

Last weekend, the Sunday Times published a drawing by Scarfe showing Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, building a wall with blood-red cement. Between the bricks, crushed in agony, were Palestinians. Above them, Netanyahu glowered, sword-like trowel in hand.

On Wednesday, the Guardian’s website ran Bell’s regular op- ed comment cartoon, this time on the wording of the independence referendum. “Do You Agree That Scotland Should Go And ... Itself ?” ran the lettering. The missing word was blotted out by a potato-headed caricature of a cross-eyed Alex Salmond in Saltire face-paint.

The two cases were not equivalent, of course. No-one is about to die for Scottish independence. Reactions to the satires were strangely similar, for all that.

Hardly had Scarfe’s work appeared than he had the AntiDefamation League, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and the Israeli ambassador levelling accusations of anti-semitism. Scarcely was Bell’s art on the web than hundreds of comments had appeared. Many of those from Nationalist Scots – there were others – denounced the cartoon as racist.

At the Guardian, as elsewhere in civilisation, there is no worse charge. Poor Bell – no relation; none whatever; his loss and so forth – has been ploughing a lonely furrow since the last election, when his forward-thinking paper advised readers to vote Liberal Democrat in the “progressive” cause. Who couldn’t be a maverick in such a circumstance? Being funny is trickier.

The missing part of his drawing was one of those F words, but I don’t think “free” is the one we’re looking for. It doesn’t seem likely, either, given the droll image of Salmond, that a sentiment was being put into