Daniel Pipes and "Campus Watch" Use a Stogie Cartoon

My friend Cinnamon Stillwell contacted me last Friday and told me Campus Watch, an organization headed by middle east expert Daniel Pipes, wanted a cartoon for their website. The cartoon was to be a response to John Esposito, a professor of middle eastern studies at Georgetown University.

Esposito is a "dhimmi" with regard to Islam and refuses to believe anything bad about the religion. He is of the Edward Said school of "Orientalism" which posits that Muslims are nicer than pie and have only been naughty when provoked by Christians, Crusaders and other unwilling victims. Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia. It is a society of middle east scholars who keep watch on the pro-Islamic happenings on college campuses and who refute scholars and books who misstate facts, especially when expressing the dhimmi view. John Esposito is one of the worst of this (dhimmi) genre and there's a rumor that he has a dotted line tatooed around his neck that says "Cut Here."

In any case, Esposito regularly trades barbs with Pipes. Last month he referred to Campus Watch scholars as "a legion of devils" that Christ would have cast out. Those scholars include Daniel Pipes, Martin Kramer, Steven Emerson and Bernard Lewis.

Google any of their names and read the Wikipedia bios on these four men. They are impressive. They have such large and well-developed brains that they have to push them around in wheel barrows. For instance, Daniel Pipes has a PhD from Harvard in medieval Islamic history and Bernard Lewis is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton University. Martin Kramer used to teach at Tel Aviv University and has also lectured at Georgetown, Brandeis and Cornell. He has a PhD from Princeton. Steven Emerson is an investigative journalist with an MA from Brown University. He is a terrorism expert, has written about 7 books on radical Islam, and helped make the film "Obsession." Under achievers they are not.

Anyway, Cinnamon and Campus Watch Director Winfield Myers asked me to make a cartoon of John Esposito being frightened by the legion of devils, with faces of Emerson, Lewis, Kramer and Esposito, and I did so. I created red bodies with Poser 7, but everything else is Photoshop.

You can see it at this link. Campus Watch will post the cartoon tomorrow.