| Identity Of Obama Joker Designer Debunks Racism Smear | | Print | |
|
Much to the chagrin of the establishment left, Firas Alkhateeb is not a Republican and not a white supremacist
Paul Joseph Watson The revelation that the author of the Obama Joker poster is a politically independent Muslim-American, and not a Republican white supremacist as the establishment left had hoped, puts the final nail in the coffin of the smear that the poster depicting President Obama as Heath Ledger’s version of the Joker in Batman was in any way racist. “The Los Angeles Times tracked down the artist of the evocative, unflattering depiction of President Obama as The Joker from The Dark Knight and he may not be whom you pictured,” reports ABC News, implying that many on the left pictured the culprit to be some kind of white robe wearing Klan member, if the hysterical reaction of the media when the posters first began to appear in LA was anything to go by. Shortly after the flyers began to be seen around Los Angeles, the L.A. Weekly and other leftist news outlets denounced the image as “racist” and “dangerous,” claiming that the picture represented “Obama as a black-and-white minstrel in reverse”. Washington Post writer Philip Kennicott called the image a “subtly coded, highly effective racial and political argument”. It turns out the image was created not by a Republican white supremacist but by a Muslim-American of Palestinian descent who didn’t vote for Obama or McCain. Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old senior history major at the University of Illinois, created the image as a reaction to the Christ-like status being afforded to Obama by the establishment, and also in protest at Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel as his chief of staff. “Emanuel is a fervent anti-Islam voice in Washington,” he wrote on his Flickr page. “A Zionist, he takes a hard line stance against the Palestinian cause, and shows a clear anti-Muslim racism. Besides that, he is the embodiment of ‘political partisanship’ that Obama was supposedly going to change!” Alkhateeb created the image by using a software program to “Jokerize” the photo of Obama which was carried on the front page of Time Magazine. He then uploaded the picture to photo-sharing site Flickr, where it sat relatively unknown for two months, before traffic exploded after a still anonymous individual began plastering the poster up around Los Angeles with the word “socialism” added underneath. “After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ,” Alkhateeb said. “From my perspective, there wasn’t much substance to him.” Speaking of Obama’s performance so far, Alkhateeb commented, “In terms of domestic policy, I don’t think he’s really doing much good for the country right now,” he said. “We don’t have to ‘hero worship’ the guy.” He wrote: “Note: I am neither Democrat nor Republican, Conservative nor Liberal, didn’t support Obama or McCain. I just call it like I see it.” Alkhateeb also responded to artist Shepard Fairey’s criticism of his Joker picture. Fairey worked with the Obama administration to create later versions of the Orwellian “HOPE” poster that Obama personally praised. After the Joker image received attention, Fairey said it lacked intelligence. “He made a picture of Bush as a vampire,” Alkhateeb said about Fairey. “That’s kind of speaking with two faces.” Alkhateeb’s identity and the reasons behind why he created the image firmly close the lid on the smear that the poster has racial overtones or is in any way “dangerous,” as liberal news outlets claimed. Once again, the establishment’s attempt to play the race card in an effort to deflate burgeoning populist opposition to Obama’s political agenda has failed miserably. Despite the best efforts of the corporate media to imply that any criticism whatsoever of Obama is racist – as MSNBC host Carlos Watson enunciated last week – the continued grass roots rebellion against Obamacare, the cap and trade scam, prolonging Bush’s wars, and the banker bailout will not be cowed by attempts to chill free speech by using the race card to intimidate people away from exercising their free speech. Campaign proves grass roots can send powerful message even in an age of corporate controlled media lockdown
Paul Joseph Watson The Obama Joker posters are still spreading virally across the country and the world as the authorities panic at the power of the grass roots to reach the masses almost in an instant, flying in the face of an establishment media which is controlled by a handful of powerful corporations. The success of the Obama Joker poster campaign, started anonymously in Los Angeles and amplified after it was incorporated into an Infowars contest, can be measured against the achievements of America’s foremost contemporary street artist, Shepard Fairey, who was responsible for designing the Obama “HOPE” flyers that were posted in public places before the 2008 presidential election, an image labeled “the most efficacious American political illustration since ‘Uncle Sam Wants You’” by New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl. Fairey admitted that he was in contact with the Obama campaign team following the release of the early versions of his poster, and that they directed him in creating new posters. The original poster carried the word “PROGRESS,” but this was later changed to “HOPE” on the insistence of the Obama campaign, along with two other versions which read, “VOTE” and “CHANGE”. President Obama himself later wrote to Fairey expressing his gratitude to the designer for putting out the images and also lending support for people who were posting them in public, an action which attracted little attention from the authorities, who on the contrary reacted hysterically to the anti-Obama Joker posters and immediately sought arrests and denounced the flyers as “vandalism,” characterizing them as some kind of assault on “victims” of a dastardly crime. Fairey was largely dismissive of the Obama Joker poster, rather pedantically arguing that it wasn’t grammatically correct because the word should have been “socialist” not “socialism,” but he was forced to admit that the posters sent a powerful message. “The artwork is great in that it gets a point across really quickly,” Fairey told the L.A. Times. “The Joker is a sinister, evil character that can’t be trusted. And if they want to make that parallel with Obama — bam.” It took the best part of a decade for Fairey’s iconic “Andre the Giant Has a Posse” street art to go viral, but in the Internet age, the Obama Joker image has already trumped it in a matter of weeks. The flyers have already hit Wall Street, Tokyo Japan, Berlin Germany, and hundreds of towns and cities across America. Attempts on behalf of authorities and the media to propagate the contrived hoax that the majority of people are “disgusted” by the image have been proven fraudulent by polls showing that most people support the first amendment rights of people to post the flyers. Likewise, efforts to chill free speech and intimidate people from exercising their first amendment have merely been met with an intensified effort to post more and more of the Obama Joker posters. Early claims that the poster had racist overtones were shot down when images were unearthed of George W. Bush depicted as the Joker, as well as a blood-sucking vampire. Lazy attempts to play the race card in an attempt to dismiss the grass roots power of the Obama as Joker meme failed completely. Indeed, caricatures of political figures have been part of the fabric of American society for hundreds of years. Satirical lampooning of authority figures by means of stylized cartoonish parodies is an American tradition, and has nothing whatsoever to do with racism. The success of the Obama Joker poster campaign, concurrent with Obama’s rapidly sinking popular approval figures, is proof that even in the face of a locked down corporate media owned by a handful of interests, the people can still communicate with the masses and obtain instant recognition by means of viral campaigns coordinated through the alternative media and the Internet. Get the posters in graphic image and PDF format here. |
