How else would one depict conflict between Sunnis and Shias?

I don’t know if you’ve seen this letter to this week’s edition of the magazine, from a person called Chris Doyle. He is a member of the ‘Council for Arab-British Understanding’ and has taken exception to last week’s cover cartoon. He objects that the drawing of ‘two bearded, large hooked nose, weapon-wielding men’ was a stereotypical way of depicting a possible war between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

Yes, you utter idiot. That’s what cartoons do. They look for the easily definable, so that they might have a meaning to people. Would you have preferred the cartoon to be of two people with average sized noses dressed in lounge suits and clean shaven and bearing no weapons? Do you think that would have done the job?