UNESCO's Cartoonish Idiocy

Credit: Eran Wolkovsky, Haaretz

The leadership of UNESCO has officially complained to the Israeli government about a satirical cartoon in Ha'aretz. The cartoon, shown above, depicts Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak instructing Air Force pilots to hit UNESCO offices in Ramallah on their way back from attacking nuclear facilities in Iran.

This complaint is so dumb on so many levels. First of all, it's quite clear that the cartoonist was attacking Netanyahu and Barak, not UNESCO. They are depicted as overreacting to the admission of Palestine as a member state of UNESCO. Second of all, what do they expect the government to do? We're a democratic country. Our government doesn't control the newspapers (maybe accept for the free daily Yisrael Hayom, owned by Sheldon Adelson, a Netanyahu supporter).

Maybe UNESCO is too used to working with non-democratic regimes that it thinks that it can complain about what appears in newspapers, and the government will make things go away. Rather than spending time filing silly complaints, the organization should be finding new ways to fund itself, now that the United States and other countries have stopped paying it.

ThunderCats and Democracy

A new ThunderCats* series has started airing in the States. This reminded me of the fact that three of my favorite shows - ThunderCats, He-Man and She-Ra - all had magical sword-yielding princes as their heroes. As an adult, I'm not crazy about the idea of shows teaching kids that there are certain people who were born to lead, due to the fact that they were born to the right families.

I've read that the new ThunderCats show has changed a lot of the elements of the original. For instance, Lion-O is no longer a kid trapped in an adult's body. He's a teenager now. However, he is still the Lord of the ThunderCats, just because his father was king. The show is about him learning the leadership skills required of a man in his position.

If it were up to me, I'd change the storyline to something more democratic. I'd start the new show with Lion-O's father declaring the end of the Thunderan monarchy and a transition to a democratic republic. One aristocratic ThunderCat does not want to lose the privileges of power, and schemes to become king himself. However, he can't do it alone, so he calls the mutants, who do a bit of overkill. They destroy the planet, leaving the traitor without a kingdom.

Lion-O and his fellow ThunderCats flee to Third Earth, where he is not expected to become a leader, because of his father's wishes to end the monarchy. However, he still wants to learn leadership skills, because he'd like to earn the leadership position, rather than inherit it.

Wouldn't that be a better, more democratic and educational version?

* As you may have noticed, my logo includes the ThunderCats' Sword of Omens. No deep thought went into choosing the elements of the logo. If I remember my thought process, I wanted a pen and a sword, but since I knew that wasn't very original, I wanted the sword to be special. So, I thought of television shows I liked as a kid. I don't remember why I didn't use the sword from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which inspired this blog's title. Perhaps it wasn't distinctive enough, so I chose another 80's favorite - ThunderCats.