An attempt at selling untruths or magazines
Leiloni De Gruy/Special to the NNPA from the Los Angeles WAVE
Issue date: 7/27/08 Section: Politics
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Judging by the opinions expressed in interviews, on blogs, television broadcasts, in print and online publications and around water coolers across the United States, many observers have decided that the drawing - which shows the would-be First Couple bumping fists in the White House, under a portrait of Osama bin Laden - falls under the latter.
While Barack Obama himself said Tuesday night on CNN's "Larry King Live" that he had seen and heard worse than the drawing, his surrogates have employed much stronger language.
Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement, The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.
Activist Najee Ali of Project Islamic HOPE, who issued a call for a boycott of the magazine on the day it arrived on newsstands, believes it was offensive and in poor taste to project Obama as an Islamic terrorist and his wife, Michelle Obama, as a gun-toting Black militant. It plays into false stereotypes about Muslims being terrorists and Michelle being an angry Black woman.
Los Angeles City Councilman Bernard Parks, who has also pushed for a boycott of the magazine, told CNN, "I think it's outrageous that we'd have a cover that would depict racism, sexism, anti-religion, also anti-patriotism.
In an effort to defend the caricature, produced by designer Barry Blitt, New Yorker editor David Remnick said in a statement that the cover's "The Politics of Fear" combines a number of fantastical images about the Obamas and shows them for the obvious distortions they are. The burning flag, the nationalist-radical and Islamic outfits, the fist-bump, the portrait on the wall - all of them echo one attack or another.
The attacks Remnick speaks of are probably familiar to most who have closely, or even casually, followed the 2008 presidential campaign.
After the Obamas publicly shared a fist-bump on the night he secured his party's nomination, one broadcaster referred to the common greeting as a terrorist fist jab; months before, Barack Obama came under fire for comments his family's former pastor made in the aftermath of Sept. 11, seen as suggesting that the terrorist attacks may have been spiritual retribution for America's own international wrongdoing.
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