New Yorker pictures Obama as Muslim

14Jul08

Controversy has been whipped up in the US, as copies of the New Yorker hit the news stands today carrying an illustration on its front page of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama dressed in Muslim attire.

Defended by the publication as a visual satire on right-wingers’ perception of Obama, the cover, which adorns the Christian politician with a turban and his wife with a gun, has been perceived as over-sensational and wildly inappropriate.

I agree. If the message of this cover were transmitted through any other channel of communication, be it a photograph or text, it would be outrageously defamatory. This is because nowhere in this picture is the viewer informed that he or she is interpreting the couple through the psyche of a third party. Rather than a viewpoint, the picture is framed as fact. If this was a headline, it would have to read ‘Critics Perceive Obama To Have Muslim Tendencies’ to avoid legal action.

To portray a possible fiction as fact in any medium, even if it is cartoon, in a news domain displays inherently unsound editorial judgment.

However, I am not lobbying to ignore these attitudes. It would be wrong to fail to address the projections of Islam on Obama by a minority group of small-minded Americans, who fail to understand that a name pertaining to a certain ethnicity does not induct that individual into the associated religion – for that is the entirety of the logic behind the Obama slur.

If the New Yorker wishes to examine a truly crippling flaw of the US electorate, it should be this: Why in a supposedly racially and religously plural society is the biggest threat to Obama’s campaign his late father’s perfectly respectable, but in the US untypical, religious stance?

Filed under: Muslim, New Yorker, al Qaeda, obama, politics   |  1 Comment