Alas, poor Leunig

An Iranian newspaper publishes his foul cartoon and still he complains. Such monstrous self-pity. What's the beef?

I DON'T understand why Michael Leunig, the savage Age cartoonist, thinks he is such a victim.

Yet so hurt did he feel among the olive trees of his Euroa hermitage that, he confessed this week, even "God came in from the paddock and placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder".

Shouldn't God have just got on with the weeding, or whatever he does in Leunig's paddocks to help our official National Living Treasure? Get a grip.

Such monstrous self-pity, when all an Iranian newspaper did this week was do what Leunig demanded another paper do: publish his foul cartoon that portrayed Israel as the Auschwitz death camp, down to the same famous entrance.

It's the same cartoon with the same message, whether published in Melbourne or Tehran, so what's the beef?

Gracious, Leunig has complained often enough that the wretched thing wasn't published. Now that it is, he's still complaining.

I hope only this time his sobs finally wake his paper and public to the fact they've harboured in their hearts of sticks and fluff a cuckoo of hate.

It was back in 2002 that Leunig first drew this cartoon. The then editor of the Age refused to publish it, and a miffed Leunig complained his editor "just didn't get it".

But I think Iran's popular Hamshahri newspaper certainly did. It was running a mock-the-Holocaust cartoon competition to pay back Denmark for publishing cartoons of the Prophet, when a hoaxer from the ABC's Chaser program, improperly claiming to be Leunig, sent in the very kind of thing it seemed to want. It gratefully published it.

Interesting contrast, by the way. A Danish newspaper mocks Islam for being violent, and an Islamist newspaper hits back by mocking Jews for being dead. That's a warning.

As soon as Leunig heard he'd been set up, he emailed Hamshahri asking it to withdraw his cartoon.

At first I thought, good, he finally realises to his shame this work is liked most by Jew baiters, working under a fascist who wants Israel "wiped off the map". But Leunig instead praises these same editors for "courteously apologising" to him. "They cared," he sighed. Sweet anti-Semites.

AND here is the quality of his I find so disturbing. Leunig is a man who tends to see the best in tyrants and terrorists, and the worst in those who defy them. He is the fashionable moral relativist who does not just blur the line between good and evil, but switches the labels.

And so he draws Prime Minister John Howard gloating over the dismemberment of Iraqi children but on Christmas asks us to "find a place in our heart for the humanity of Osama bin Laden", "our relative".

He says he's "resisted the rise of facism", but on Anzac Day demonises the Anzacs who actually did that work as men with a "latent murderous impulse" who obeyed a "call to homicide".

He calls the terrorist chief of Hamas "an old Palestinian man in a wheelchair", but says the elected leader of Israel who had him killed is a "war criminal". Perfectly illustrating his moral inversion, he draws George W. Bush as bin Laden.

I SHOULD not be too hard on Leunig personally. It's his fans who are the worry, adoring a man who seems in hatred with humanity and its works, finding peace only in a cult of nature.

His contribution to the National Gallery of Australia was a video of a man pissing on his own face. Christmas, he has said, "is the most appallingly sad time". Our cities are "monstrous and traumatic", and "urbanism has become a merciless mechanism which hurts and damages the spirit".

He has the modern green spirit, so human hating. "When I'm in a relationship with the natural world a bit more I feel happier and I'm stronger," he confesses.

And this is the man who has made a fortune through his reputation for sweetness. Let this cartoon catastrophe of his at last alert his fans to the kind of company he spiritually keeps, and the dangers such fellow haters pose to us all