Much to the chagrin of the establishment left, Firas Alkhateeb is not a Republican and not a white supremacist
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
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.
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