Is the Obama joker poster racist? I’ll leave that to others to decide (it’s below).
It turns out, however, that it is based on the work of Firas Alkhateeb, a Palestinian American student at the University of Illinois. (The "Socialism" underline is not in his original, which was rendered as a Time Magazine cover.)
In this Los Angeles Times interview, Alkhateeb doesn’t quite make his motivation clear. He sees Obama’s popularity as the product of undue adulation; he closely watches Middle East news and he thinks Obama is doing a better job in the region than Bush did. Last yeat, his preferred candidate was Dennis Kucinich (a liberal and the presidential candidate perhaps most identified with pro-Palestinian views), but on domestic issues, Alkhateeb likes the GOP and thinks Obama is going nowhere.
So… do the hard-right pro-Israel Web sites continue (here, here, here and here) to run with this portrait?
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