Mission Accomplished: Wicked Cartoons by America's Most Wanted Political Cartoonist (Paperback)

by Khalil Bendib (Author), Norman Solomon (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
At once rueful and hilarious, this collection by widely syndicated, Berkeley, Calif.–based, Muslim American political cartoonist Bendib graphically illustrates the Orwellian relationship between the rhetoric of freedom among the powerful and the realities faced by those on the receiving end. These topical single-frame tableaux, mostly drawn from 2003 to this year, are ingeniously detailed and only occasionally dated. One shows a military graveyard with headstones converted into filling-station pumps, while another presents the Statue of Liberty as pregnant with political prisoners, the world's largest penal population and detainees in U.S.-sponsored camps and secret prisons worldwide. Bendib is an equal opportunity offender who connects the dots with gusto—whether dogging the Bush administration's blunders in Iraq or post-Katrina New Orleans; nuclear proliferation; racism in the U.S.; corporate welfare and waste; Islamophobia; the faux democracies of Middle Eastern autocrats; or Israel's continuing occupation and colonization of Palestinian land (one memorable image has Bush in Siamese twinship with Jerry Falwell's Christian Right, lecturing Palestinian voters on the democratic necessity of separating church and state). Those inclined to see the Bush administration's war on terror as an excuse for imperial aggrandizement and corporate greed will find Bendib's no-holds-barred satire fiercely funny. Those not so inclined, beware. (June)
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Product Description
n an increasingly Manichean geopolitical world, Bendib happens to be both "Us" and "Them," American and Muslim, a walking oxymoron - a "Clash of Civilizations" made flesh. He is the only American political cartoonist with an in-your-face non-Eurocentric perspective, a voice of the voiceless.

Distributed to 1,700 small and mid-size newspapers across North America, Bendib's cartoons are the only widely circulated editorial cartoons free of the usual corporate narrative and they offer a radical, indigenous perspective in a visual medium accessible to all. Bendib's cartoons shine a light on such topics as the corrupting influence of money on democracy, African-American and immigrant issues, environmental degradation, labor and class struggles, U.S. imperialism and Zionism, the scapegoating of Arabs, Muslims and other people of color, as well as the complicity of our Orwellian mass media in maintaining the status quo.

Bendib's cartoons are very popular with legions of alternative, educated, left-of-center readers (especially in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, New York and campus towns across the USA, as well as much of Canada, the UK and Australia) hungry for humorous voices of dissent and with many forgotten constituencies in this country, which are slowly becoming a majority: African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, South Asians, Latinos, immigrants of all stripes, worldwide indigenous communities ravenous for edgy humor reflecting their specific concerns.

The son of survivors of the Algerian war of independence, Khalil Bendib was born in Paris during the Algerian revolution and grew up in Morocco and Algeria before coming to California at the age of 20. After an eight-year stint with the Gannett Newspapers (based at the San Bernardino County Sun), in 1995 Khalil weaned himself from a steady paycheck by resigning in disgust over increasing censorship of his work.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: Interlink Books (July 13, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566566916
• ISBN-13: 978-1566566919
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #840,631 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Khalil Bendib is one of a kind, August 31, 2007

By	Nima Kharrazi (Brea, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As much as people like to talk about politics, there's nothing like a satyrical comic. One frame, maybe 2 and this image can evoke such responses. I've shown Khalil's work to my family, coworkers and friends. The reactions I got were from pure love and admiration, all the way to confusion and anger. That's how you know someone is doing their job and Khalil does his job in this book. Well.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Both sidesplittingly funny and bitterly insightful , September 3, 2007

By	Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

Award-winning cartoonist Khalil Bendib, whose work is seen in over 1,700 newspapers across North America, presents Mission Accomplished, a collection of his sharp-edged political cartoons lampooning greed, hypocrisy, arrogance, moral ineptitude, and worse, both in America and abroad. An American Muslim, Khalil Bendib does not shy away from tackling issues ranging from terrorism to globalization to militarism, genocide, underfunded infrastructure at home, and much more. Especially harsh criticism is leveled at the ruthless excesses of Zionism, America's ill-planned Iraq occupation and the chaos in its wake, and corporate welfare heaped upon thieving institutions such as Haliburton. Most cartoons are in black-and-white; a few are in color. One particularly telling cartoon shows an empty gasoline pump labeled "Uncle Sam Gas, $2.85 per Gallon" and cars lined up for miles to fuel at a gasoline pump labeled "Death to America Osama Gas Only, $2 a Gallon". At once both sidesplittingly funny and bitterly insightful into the paradox of human greed that keeps America stymied in failure, Mission Accomplished is highly recommended.

5.0 out of 5 stars Takes A Bite Out of Everyone, December 27, 2008

By	Tonn Borde "Tonny" (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

Bendib takes no prisoners, and no one gets out alive. Especially tough on the Bush Administration and Israel, he's not beyond taking Islamic terrorists to task, either.

I can't understand why his cartoons aren't better known by now, except that his viewpoints deviate from the mainstream. But they're certainly viewpoints worth laughing at and with.

My only complaint is that often, in coming down hard on Israel, his cartoons can border on anti-semitic (that is, anti-Jewish).