Obama ‘Joker’ Artist Unmasked: He’s A Fellow Chicagoan
That strong gust of wind some of you felt last week was the winds of Change blowing Barack Obama’s house of cards down. It’s amazing to me how many multitudes of former Kool Aide drinkers have put their cups down and been reformed. I realized Obama himself would ultimately reveal to the masses what a fraud he was. But honestly, I never thought it would happen this quicky. I figured a year, maybe two tops.
Yesterday, I spent the better part of two hours reading this post on the Entertainment board on AOL Black Voices forums. The post is titled “Say It Ain’t So, Barack!” It was so enlightening to read intelligent, well thought out political commentary from black people for a change! I wanted to copy & paste some of those comments on my blog, but there were too many good ones!
Now comes word that the artist who created the infamous Obama ‘Joker’ posters has been unmasked, and he is a fellow Chicagoan! His name is Firas Alkhateeb, and he is a senior history major at the University of Illinois.
Alkhateeb crafted the now famous Time magazine cover featuring Obama in clown makeup on Adobe Photoshop software and uploaded the image to Flickr. At first he got a thousand hits, but the hits exploded after an anonymous visitor downloaded the image and removed the references to Time magazine. The anonymous artist added the word “Socialism” and hung copies of the image around L.A., making headlines throughout the country.
The LA Times newspaper tracked the image to the Flickr account and the page was taken down. Flickr said they removed the page due to copyright violations. Alkhateeb is adjusting to his newfound fame after giving The Times an interview, but he’s concerned about the backlash from Chicagoans.
“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.”
9 Responses to “Obama ‘Joker’ Artist Unmasked: He’s A Fellow Chicagoan”
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I am convinced that your sole purpose in life is to live out your frustrations of who you are as a person, through your blog, and to provide us with 99.9 percent of misinformation when it comes to matters concerning the president…your messiness is amusing…
ARTICLE COURTESY OF NBC LOS ANGELOS, TITLED “Obama “Joker” Artist Is a Bored College Student”
Updated 3:23 AM PDT, Tue, Aug 18, 2009
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Posters mysteriously appeared on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago depicting Obama as the white-faced Joker from Batman. At least we now know who created the image.
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The mystery artist who sparked a firestorm of controversy for portraying President Obama as the white-faced Joker from “Batman” has been unmasked. Turns out he was just joking around.
Firas Alkhateeb, a 20-year-old Palestinian-American college student from Chicago, said he created the image last winter break when he was bored and after messing around on Photoshop, The Los Angeles Times reported. After using an online tutorial to “Jokerize” a portrait of Obama from the Oct. 23 cover of Time Magazine, Alkhateeb uploaded his work to image-sharing site Flickr, where it amassed 20,000 views, he told the paper.
From there, Alkhateeb said someone else downloaded his work and made a poster with the word “socialist” written below the president’s picture as a caption. The poster began appearing on the streets of Los Angeles and Chicago earlier this year. It has been denounced by some critics as racist or the work of conservative activists.
Alkhateeb, who did not vote in the last presidential election, said he never meant to make a political statement. He told the Times he thought President Obama was doing a good job with foreign policy but not on domestic issues. As for the “socialist” tag, well that’s just “immature,” Alkhateeb said.
Sandra, the same people who were last to jump on the Obama band wagon were skeptical african americans. If you recall, many AA’s, especially those lead by our modern day civil rights leaders (who themselves rejected Obama in the beginning)didn’t accept him until our white counterparts put their faith in him beginning in Iowa. Now the first people to abandon the train are the same ones who placed their hope in Obama based on the opinions of others and sensationalism – they were converted on a Sunday at church.
Sandra my biblical believes teaches me that NO Human is capable of correcting this corrupt system that we live in. So with that said, Obama is no worse than any other politician – IMO he’s the lesser of the evils. They are all imperfect humans leading imperfect humans. Since you clearly feel that Obama isn’t the answer to our problems, tell me who is? Sandra, don’t be influenced by the fear of a bunch of scared white people whose only beef with change is a black man holding the most powerful position in the world that historically was given to white men whose qualifications were elevated by thier pigmentation.
lol thanks kcicero. sandra is a mess.
did TIME really use that for the cover, or did the guy make that too?
what surprises me is that people are this up in arms about HEALTHCARE!!!! for our own yet we go to Iraq and other nations and give free healthcare as a former vet freedom isn’t free but like my grandma always said charity starts at home. The president is trying to help get us out of a mess he did not create, and give him credit for that where were these same folk when we are sending our soldiers to die for an afghani man to withold food if his wife doesn’t give him sex when he wants it. For shame one thing niccas will always do is tear each other down
We should be weary of generalizations of groups of people that the media is hell bent on distorting…with that said I do agree with over 95% of what you said…it is mind boggling what we do for other countries but can’t reciprocate here in our own borders.
@ ladyjustice all you can do is laugh and shake your head at Sandra sometimes, lol. I believe time used his work for the cover. This whole thing is just ludicrous to me. We already have socialism in our country in the form of child care services for low income, food stamps, health care for low income individuals, and health for those from poor backgrounds in need of money for college. These people are such hypocrites!
That cover never appeared on Time newstands. The student used a Time cover to photoshopped.
I think most people take Sandra’s blog for what it is … a satirical look at everything … not just the Obama post.
If the reader bothers to learn for themselves … just google … even better, click the source link Sandra provides for you.
Incredibly amazing how the real articles from the source are so different once they’re quoted or referenced here.
Must be one more of those ’8 wonders of the blog’ things.
Came across the Photoshopped image a few days after it had been uploaded and nearly everyone that linked to it stated that it was redone from the original clear pic of Obama that Time Magazine used on their cover. A tale of two photos?
Btw, I’m not new to Flickr as I’ve been a member since it was founded in 2004, and way before Yahoo acquired it.
The very same whiners are the same ones who haven’t called their reps and campaigned (we should all be part of this if we want reform) for reform.
“Monday was the day of the liberal revolt on health-care reform. … What’s been striking, however, is the implicit argument that this is somehow a simple failure of liberal will. … The unifying idea here is that someone can just go into a back room and torture (the Senate Finance Committee’s) Max Baucus and Kent Conrad. But how? … [H]ealth-care reform is not a negotiation. It’s a campaign. … Winning it will require persuading the key votes to change their mind, either by offering them other inducements in the bill or applying direct and aggressive political pressure (identifying a lot of viable primary challengers and creating a credible promise of funds, for instance). Trying to say ‘no’ for longer than they can will simply result in reformers losing everything they want, and opponents getting exactly what they demanded.”
I read the comments over at BV. It’s clear they don’t understand politics very well.