Steve Bell, the much celebrated satirical cartoonist, has been fired from his job at the Guardian, otherwise known as the Grauniad. He was fired for making a cartoon piece that sort of depicted Israeli leader Netanyahu with a Shylock style pound of flesh in the shape of the Gaza territory on his body. While this may be highly offensive to many, should it have been cancelled and deleted from the world? Yes, it is skirting the edges of offensive antisemitic trope land, but satire and cartoons are meant to skim those surfaces, to shock, to make one think.
Steve Bell is most certainly very far-left in his politics and is probably a full-on communist, but that is not a crime in itself. The far-left inhabit pretty much all of the media and world of entertainment/comedy. All the Big Tech companies are extreme far left, and now many corporations virtue signal to far-left activism. So why was Steve Bell, bell-ended, by the same far-left ideologues who run the entire facade of the media?
As babies were being slaughtered in their cots and entire families kidnapped and taken to Gaza, Steve Bell chose the side of the terrorists who were committing these atrocities against unarmed women and children. He would, of course, not dare to depict the bloodthirsty savagery of the Hamas terrorists in a bad light. This, to his far left compatriots, would be an affront to his communist Leninist values, or whatever soviet Marxist section he idolises so much. Where Steve Bell went wrong was he was so entrenched in far-left ideology, which is inherently anti-Semitic, that he was compelled to fall on the side of the terrorists. There is no other way for far-left socialist/communists to go, they have to take the route of cowardice and are inherently so indoctrinated, they have no morality left in their staunchly red commie souls. This is a supreme trap for any satirist, to be entrenched in a political ideology that skews their entire viewpoint, and it also makes them very predictable. The other trap for any satirist is to do their work too soon, and this is the ultimate spot that Bell failed in. The blood was still fresh on the cots of the Jewish babies who were beheaded by Hamas savages. Steve Bell still went ahead with no qualms, and at the end of the day he paid the ultimate price. The good satirist does not go in for the kill immediately after an atrocity of this kind, he must let the event simmer for a while before acting. Think it over, let it ferment like a good wine before unleashing their wrath.
That being said, there are no rights or wrongs in satire and satirical cartoonist Steve Bell did what he did, and he does what he does, so in satirical terms he is and was on point. You can completely discount everything written in the previous paragraph, satire is a sacred art, there are no specific rules, and it should be protected wherever and from whoever it emanates in all its forms. As for offensive material — stop using kid gloves for everything. If you don’t like it, fuck off, don’t look at it, go and do something else. Satirists should be able and allowed to express any fucking thing they want because life in general is not always nice and happy. Nasty shit happens a lot, stuff that is shocking. Good satirists like Steve Bell deal with it, the good, the bad and the ugly. Shame the Grauniad finally went to cancel a satirical cartoonist who lives and breathes through his anger and vitriol for pretty much everything. That is what a satirist is and should be. Humans should be allowed to see and feel all parameters of their spectrum of emotion without fear of cancellation. You know when cancel culture, wokism and censorship is getting really bad when the far-left are even cancelling their own people. Now, that is fucked up!
Adieu, farewell Mr. Bell…
