Rabble.ca Attacks Pope Benedict

From Joanne Laucius in yesterday's Ottawa Citizen we learn of the following:

A Catholic media monitoring group is furious over an animated cartoon that depicts Pope Benedict XVI giving a statue of the Virgin Mary a Nazi salute and muttering "Heil Mary!" in a slight German accent. The cartoon, a shot at the Pope's past as a member of the Hitler Youth, appears on the left-of-centre website rabble.ca, published by prominent Canadian feminist writer Judy Rebick.

"We don't think any group should be ridiculed in this way," said Joanne McGarry, executive director of the 5,000-member Catholic Civil Rights League.

The cartoon, by Toronto artist Mike Constable, is anti-Catholic and insulting, she said. "It's a slam to Catholicism and the Pope." But social crusader Rebick argues that the cartoon, titled A Creature of Habits, is funny.

Go have a look for yourself and you be the judge. Click on the cartoon figure of the pope in the top left hand corner. I think it more juvenile than funny.

The current cartoon is a reference to the Pope's past. As a 14-year-old, he was drafted "against his will" into the Hitler Youth in 1941, according to his memoirs. He served in the army from 1943 to 1945. He was never a member of the Nazi party. Last week, in a major address, the Pope condemned "the genocide of the Jews."

Ms. Rebick said the purpose of Mr. Constable's cartoons is to make people uncomfortable. "If he annoyed people, then he was successful."

Indeed he was. As for Ms. Rebick, that paragon of politically correct virtue, I am not surprised at her reaction. I simply note that if this were an attack on Muslims or Jews instead of the Pontiff we were considering, she'd be pontificating at length on the need for government mandated sensitivity training for cartoonists.

But those Christians and their HIDDEN AGENDAS .... well, that is another thing altogether. The leftist diversity shibboleths against "hurting other people's feelings" do not apply.

Hypocrites!