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) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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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