Tom and Jerry were borrowed by Hanna-Barbera from tales of Regency bucks (I can't remember whether apaches or mohicans), by Pierce Egan, detailing the adventures of Jerry Hawthorne and Corinthian Tom. Pierce Egan, some seminar taught me, may have been an influence, or the characters Tom and Jerry may have been, on Dickens and his "Pickwick Papers." The very phrase "Tom and Jerry" entered the language -- see Eric Partridge -- to mean "disorder, rowdiness, etc."

Pierce Egan's "Life in London" should not be confused with a later "Life in London," this one a decided influence on Dickens, the sociological study avant la lettre "Life in London, or London Labour and the London Poor" by Henry Mayhew, reprinted in four volumes by the samaritan house of Dover Publishing some 30 years ago.

For further proof that the cat-and-mouse cartoon of MGM using the names supplied by Pierce Egan must indeed be just as sinisterly anti-Islamic as is claimed, one can offer lexical evidence: the dismissive phrase "street Arab" occurs in the books of Pierce Egan, of Henry Mayhew, and of Dickens as well.

And the anti-Islamic conspiracy being conducted through cartoons pitched to the young has no end. Think of that outwardly innocent beep-beeping Road-Runner, who keeps inveigling poor Wile E. Coyote into setting traps for him, and then manages to turn the whole thing on its head, so that again and again and again, it is Wile E. Coyote who has terrible and undeserved damage inflicted on him by the implacable and cruel Road-Runner, while the Road-Runner, who should be destroyed, never is. Don't overlook the fact that the blithe Road-Runner makes repeated use of WMD supplied by the Acme Missile Company, which apparently puts no conditions on its use by him, and nowhere, not in a single Road-Runner cartoon, does anyone -- not even the United Nations -- seem able to stop the Road-Runner from behaving in such a consistently brutal fashion toward the tormented Wile E. Coyote, whose every well-meaning endeavor is so consistently foiled.

We know what that cartoon is really about.

We weren't born yesterday, you know.