Carlos Latuff

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Graphic art by Carlos Latuff, published on Indymedia website in 2002.

From the Forgiveness series.

Carlos Latuff is a controversial political cartoonist , born in November 30, 1968, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He has been published in DMagazine (Italia)[1],Power of Working Class magazine(South Korea), and other newspapers and magazines.[2][3] Latuff's works have also been published on different Indymedia websites and on the Gush Shalom website.

In 2006, Latuff placed second and won $4,000 in the Iranian International Holocaust Cartoon Competition with an image comparing the Israeli West Bank barrier with the Nazi concentration camps [4].

In August 2006, comics strips from Latuff's "Tales of Iraq War" series were published, along an interview, in "Al Raed", magazine[5] read by Sunni insurgents in Iraq^{[citation needed]}.

1 Themes
2 Controversies
3 Sources
4 External links
5 See also

[edit] Themes

Since his trip to West Bank in 1999, Carlos Latuff has been invited by the Palestinian Center for Peace and Democracy [6], and authored several comics about the Middle East situation. Particularly, in his "We are all Palestinians" cartoon series, various groups, including Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, Black South Africans in Apartheid South Africa, Native Americans, and Tibetans in China, are shown stating "I am Palestinian".[7]. His work called "Forgiveness" displays drawings of Muslims and Jews illustrating quotes from Buddha, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Victor Hugo and Voltaire [8].

Latuff has also made a series of comics criticizing the Iraq War in his "Tales of Iraq War" series[9].

[edit] Controversies

In 2002 the Swiss-based Jewish organization Aktion Kinder des Holocaust sued the Independent Media Center(IMC, also known as Indymedia) of Switzerland on the charge of anti-Semitism. The reason was a cartoon of Latuff's "We are all Palestinians" series, published in Swiss IMC website, which depicted a Jewish boy in Warsaw Ghetto saying: "I am Palestinian."[10][11][12]

The criminal proceedings were suspended by Swiss court. The official judgement stated that:

Even if the observer is emotionally biased against the Jewish people with this [cartoon], it is not the Jewish people as such that is being criticized, but their political behaviour towards the Palestinians. The issue is not a certain characterization of the Jews, but their stance in the current conflict. The constitutional equality of the Jews as human beings is thereby not denied. (p.2, paragraph 1.2.)

Aktion Kinder des Holocaust stated, in its reply:

The district attorneyship talks about "THE Jewish people", which seems to have "ONE political behaviour" towards Palestinians. The invention of a homogeneous Jewish attitude of "the Jewish people" is a manifold, scientifically proven anti-Semitic/anti-Jewish stereotype! Not only is the "Jewish people" denied pluralistic political attitudes - this view specially is the basis for the anti-Semitic frenzy of the existence of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.[13]^{[citation needed]}

In Autumn 2006, Latuff came second in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition sponsored by the Iranian government. A cartoon by Latuff depicting Alan Dershowitz masturbating over the killing of Lebanese citizens, which illustrated an article by prominent anti-Zionist Norman Finkelstein, provoked further controversy.