Here’s the cartoon, by Cameron Cardow of the Ottawa Citizen, that USA Today selected as its daily editorial cartoon for February 2:



It’s not a terribly hard cartoon to parse: Islam is the modern equivalent of Nazism, and threatens a new Holocaust. The cartoon lists entities that have nothing in common with each other aside from their connection to Islam–political movements like Hezbollah and Hamas, who have been the targets of far more violence than they are responsible for, along with groups like ISIS and Boko Haram, terrorist groups whose victims are primarily Muslim. Hezbollah and ISIS are actually engaged in intense warfare with each other.

In case you missed the point, the cartoon puts one of the holiest phrases in Islam–“Allah Akbar,” or “God is great”–in the mouth of a Nazi skeleton.

(Along with its roll call of Muslim villains, the cartoon includes the phrase “politically correct”– which I can only take to mean that people who criticize the politics of cartoons — for example — are a kind of Nazi too.)

No doubt defenders of the cartoon will say that it’s only talking about the bad kind of Islam, which is just as persuasive as making a list of all the horrible people you can think of from a particular ethnic group and then saying that you’re only talking about the bad people from that ethnic group. One would hope USA Today would decline to make such a smear its daily editorial cartoon.

UPDATE: You can send feedback to USA Today’s editorial page editor Brian Gallagher at bgallagher@usatoday.com.