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Unforgivable!
New Yorker Cover Depicts the Obamas as Terrorists
by Lloyd Williams
The closer Barack Obama gets to winning the White House, the more
determined his adversaries have become to derail his campaign by any
means necessary. Remember how Hillary refused to drop out of the race in
May because she said that June was the month Bobby Kennedy was
assassinated? Hint-hint. Or how one of her surrogates, former Senator
Bob Kerrey, stated that Obama might be a Muslim Manchurian Candidate
pre-programmed to hide his true anti-American agenda until after
becoming President? Hint-hint.
Similar hateful sentiments have been echoed in the caricature of the
Obamas contained on the cover of the July 21st issue of the New Yorker
Magazine which shows the couple sharing one of their famous fist-bumps
in the Oval Office, ostensibly celebrating soon after his inauguration.
What is disturbing about the controversial tableau is that Barack is
depicted in Arab garb complete with turban, and looking suspiciously
like Osama bin Laden whose portrait has replaced that of a prior
president on the wall. The not so subtle suggestion being made here is
that a vote for Obama is a vote for an Islamic radical terrorist.
Meanwhile, Michelle is attacked in a different way, being drawn with a
big afro and a machine gun slung over shoulder in front of a fireplace
with a United States flag burning in it. These images are designed to
imply that she’s a Sixties-style black militant who hates her country
and advocates a violent revolution.
How dare the New Yorker put an automatic weapon in her hands! Are they
trying to get her killed? What the heck is its rationale except to hint
that she’s a traitor guilty of treason who deserves to be shot? And why
link a natural hairstyle with anti-American sentiments, as if to say
that African-Americans who don’t straighten their hair but wear it as
God intended are automatically suspicious and unpatriotic!
Listen, this country has a rancid, wretched history of vigilante and
state-sanctioned violence when it comes to dealing with black folks it
deems a threat to the status quo. All I have to do is mention a few
famous martyrs like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton and
Medgar Evers to remind you of that long, ugly legacy of extermination
marked by thousands of lynchings and assassinations.
So, sorry, I’m not buying New Yorker Editor David Remnick’s defense of
his periodical’s incendiary cartoon as a satire of popular
misconceptions about Obama. That shocking and offensive cover was no
sophisticated parody, but rather a scare tactic, a fairly literal
prediction of America’s worst nightmare as defined by some race-baiting
bigots.
Frustrated at failing to derail his campaign, Obama’s detractors have
grown increasingly desperate. And desperate times call for desperate
measures. The power elite has ostensibly declared open season on Barack
and Michelle as they stand poised on the brink of becoming the first
black President and First Lady of the United States with this
thinly-veiled appeal to the redneck class to do polite white society a
favor by putting a bullet in their heads.
Remember how Muslims all around the world reacted in unison to that
Danish cartoonist’s drawing of the prophet Muhammad with a bomb tucked
in his turban? Well, African-Americans ought to have sense enough to
complain to the New Yorker and to boycott all of its advertisers for
such an irresponsible, potentially devastating hit job one would expect
from the Ku Klux Klan, not from a supposedly intellectual, Ivory-towered
publication.
Attorney Lloyd Williams is a graduate of the Wharton School and a
member of the NJ, NY, CT, PA, MA & US Supreme Court bars.
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Lloyd Kam Williams
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 Lloyd
Kam Williams is a syndicated film and book critic who
writes for 100+ publications around the U.S. and Canada. He is a member of
the African-American Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics
Online, the NAACP Image Awards Nominating Committee, and Rotten Tomatoes. In
addition to a BA in Black Studies from Cornell, he has an MA in English from
Brown, an MBA from The Wharton School, and a JD from Boston University. Kam
lives in Princeton, NJ with his wife and son.
IMDiversity.com is committed to presenting diverse points of view.
However, the viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of
the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or
employees at IMD.
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