Remember that time Pat Robertson blamed the earthquake in Haiti on Haitians pact with the devil? Funny enough, a rabbi is now blaming it on Eli Valley, a comic book artist who we've published on this site! Nice work, Eli!

That shana punim's deceiving! Note the costume of the Goyim Gift Devil and the Evil RedEyes! Clearly, this man caused some shit. But really: no.

Valley's a Jewish comic book artist often published The Forward, a very famous Jewish weekly. His cartoons take on any number of issues relating to different aspects of Judaism, and people sometimes (as they're wont to do) disagree with some of the things he has to say. One time, his comparison of extreme Zionists to monkeys was spiked by The Forward, so we ran it here. Too bad we can't claim publication credit for his most recent comic, in which Valley clowned on "ultra-Orthodox Judaism, outreach to young, secular Jews, and perceptions and misconceptions of authentic Jewish life." It was pretty goddamn funny!

Not everybody thought so, however. Via the Kvetcher, Rabbi Avi Shafran, an Orthodox Rabbi-Blogger and spokesman for Orthodox congregation and advocacy group Agudath Israel, noted in an essay entitled "The Earth Trembles" that...

The very week of the recent catastrophe in Haiti, a national Jewish newspaper published a comic strip featuring grotesque depictions of religious Jews and aimed at disparaging Jewish outreach to other Jews. Those are examples of anti-Orthodox invective. But ill will and its expression, tragically, know no communal bounds – in fact, the offensive comic strip seized upon intemperate statements made by Orthodox Jews about others. Had we only eyes like the Chofetz Chaim's, we would discern that hatred and the misuse of the holy power of speech are not small evils. We would understand that they shake the very earth under our feet.

Chofetz Chaim = The Book on Jewish Speech, or the Rabbi who wrote it, which or who I doubt covered comic books, but regardless, Valley's comic isn't by any means grotesque. That's neither here nor there, though, because the point is that it didn't start an earthquake. All Shafran really manages is to serve as irrefutable evidence that all bigots, regardless of race, ethnicity, or religious beliefs are all just the same indistinguishable ignoramuses whose words and rhetoric only make the world worse, and only serve to push humans in the opposite direction they should be moving: apart.