The Australian has published a letter from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry in their September 22 letters column, in response to Bill Leak’s “Waffen-SSM” cartoon:
I refer to Bill Leak’s cartoon (“Waffen SSM”, 21/9). It can be readily accepted that hyperbole is a stock in trade of any cartoonist, and Leak is entitled to give satirical expression to his opinion that certain advocates of same-sex marriage are intolerant to any contrary point of view. Yet to compare them to Nazi SS divisions does little credit to the point he was presumably trying to make.
To liken any advocate of SSM to the perpetrators of mass murder and cruelty in the Nazi era is an inversion of history. In Nazi Germany, about 100,000 suspected homosexuals were arrested and up to 15,000 of them were interned in concentration camps where many were killed.
As a political cartoonist, it is Leak’s job to be provocative and controversial, but this was not his best work.
This is the original cartoon:
