WAPO TOOK DOWN HAMAS CARTOON AMID STAFFERS’ ‘DEEP CONCERNS,’ INTERNAL MEMO INDICATES:

Sally Buzbee, the executive editor of the Washington Post, sent an email to staff members on Wednesday night acknowledging their “many deep concerns and conversations” about a cartoon criticizing Hamas that the newspaper earlier in the day published and then deleted.

In the email, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, Buzbee wrote:

Dear colleagues,

Given the many deep concerns and conversations today in our newsroom, I wanted to ensure everyone saw the notes sent out tonight by The Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, to Post readers and to his staff in opinions.

My best, Sally

Buzbee forwarded an email that Shipley had sent opinions staff in which he said he had personally “taken down” the cartoon. Shipley included the full text of an editor’s note in which he publicly expressed “regret” that he had “missed something profound, and divisive” in publishing the image.

“A cartoon published by Michael Ramirez on the war in Gaza, a cartoon whose publication I approved, was seen by many readers as racist. This was not my intent. I saw the drawing as a caricature of a specific individual, the Hamas spokesperson, who celebrated the attacks on unarmed civilians in Israel,” Shipley wrote.

The cartoon depicted an individual, labeled “Hamas,” with children, a baby, and a woman strapped to his body. “How dare Israel attack civilians…,” the man said in a speech bubble.

Like the hostage posters anti-Semites are pulling down in major cities in the US and Europe, WaPo staffers don’t want to be reminded of what they actually support. Which is odd for a paper who’s slogan is “Democracy dies in darkness.”