The Forgotten Cartoon Controversy of Ali Farzat

Barry Rubin's "The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East" includes the following tidbit, largely lost to history, of another Euro-Arab cartoon controversy (pp. 28-29):

In 1988 an exhibition at the Institute du Monde Arabe in Paris had featured one of [Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat's] cartoons showing a general doling out medals from a stewpot to a man in rags. Implicitly this criticized one of the Arab regimes' main ways of retaining power: by stirring up war and conflict as a substitute for material achievements. Officals of Iraq, then at the end of a long bloody war with Iran, accused Farzat of making fun of their country, ironically confirming his observation by this act of recognizing it. The Iraqi government [i.e. Saddam's regime] threatened to withdraw funding for the exhibit and, although the show was on free French soil, Farzat's cartoon was removed, an example of how the regimes' repression is so often accepted, and even reinforced in the West.

Draw your own parallels. Back in 1988, though, there was a small happy ending:

But the other cartoonists rebelled, adding their own names to the offending picture and threatening to remove their work. For once, Iraq backed off.