| NEW YORK | RUPEE NEWS | July 26th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | The New Yorker as the ad goes “is the best magazine in the world, perhaps that best magazine that ever was“. However it has a blind spot– Muslims.
The New Yorker routinely publishes article which historians will judge as Islamphobic. The Obama article didn’t just disparage Senator Barack Obama, it but also denigrates all Muslims and Islam. It is amazing that the Democratic party was inflamed becauseit showed the presumptive Democratic candidate in a negative light, was silent about showing 10 million Muslims as personification of the Neocon vilification. The commentaryabout demeaning an entire section of American society was absent. The silence is deafening.
Why does the New Yorker constantly print anti-(Muslim)American articles? Is it for business reasons? The New Yorker prints sensational articles because “sensation” sells.
The cover was not satire it was dispicable, vile and horrible. Our first amendment protects abominable speech but at the very least the we don’t have to appreciate NeoKKKon philosophy which demenas 5% of our patriotic population.
Skeleton of Jesse Owen compared to an ape by the evil Nazis
We reproduce some other vile dispicable cartoons at the bottom of this article and challenge the New Yorker to publish them as humerous pieces.
Jesse Owens was portrayed closer to a monkey in the 1936 Olympics by Hitler
We challenge the New Yorker to publish a parady of Jesse Owens compared to a monkey.
Irene Papoulis of West Hartford Trinity College elqquently desribes some of the problem
Cover Makes Us Squirm, But It Forces A Discussion By IRENE PAPOULIS July 20, 2008
When I first saw The New Yorker magazine cover online on Monday, I felt the outrage. Here was a cartoon of Barack Obama dressed as a Muslim, bumping fists with his wife, who is armed and wearing her hair like a revolutionary Angela Davis.
How could the magazine foist such an offensive and unfair image on us, one that would become fixed in our minds throughout the presidential race? Were the editors secretly anti-Obama, or did they just have extremely stupid judgment?
I then went to the gym and hooked myself up to the television pundits. One young guy, I didn’t catch his name, was the solitary outlier on a panel of outraged voices. “I think it’s brilliant,” he said, “brilliant satire.”
Whaaaaaat?
A Childish Stunt That Only Shocks And Offends. The host, and the rest of the panel, condemned him. How could he be so wrong? He tried to defend himself but got crushed under the wave of opprobrium, and, perhaps because the news was so fresh and he hadn’t had time to think things out, he couldn’t find the effective argument he needed. The host let the others dismiss him, and I got off my cardio machine feeling comfortably outraged on the Obamas’ behalf.
Later that day, though, that one dissenting man’s perspective kept staying with me. Brilliant satire? Online, I looked up other cartoons by Barry Blitt, and remembered some from The New Yorker, like the one depicting Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rove sitting in an office filled with water almost up to their necks. I like that cover, and it certainly pushes an edge. Why is this one so different?
Well, I argued with myself, mirroring the way pundits and regular people were arguing across the country, this one is different because it has no basis in fact. One could legitimately argue that the Bush group actually is drowning, or that, as depicted in another of Blitt’s covers, President Bush actually does serve as a kind of handmaiden to Vice President Cheney.
But there is no truth in the idea that Michelle Obama has even a molecule of terrorist leanings. Was it her unfairly parsed statement that her husband’s becoming a serious candidate for president made her proud of her country for the first time? Please. She’s fully ensconced in the American capitalist system. And her husband simply is not a Muslim!
But the “fact” of the cover is that some people do perceive the Obamas that way.
The television hosts kept citing figures from a recent Newsweek poll saying that a surprising number of voters in the United States actually believe Obama became a senator with his hand on the Koran. How did they get that idea? It’s his name, apparently, along with the propagation of images like the Blitt cover. Those voters are so dumb, or so goes the reasoning, that all the facts in the world won’t deter them from their knee-jerk beliefs, which respond to images in a way that words can’t reach.
Given those dense voters, the cover, even if intended to be the opposite, becomes just another tool supporting the anti-Obama forces.
But what if the cover works best solely because of the discussions it fosters? What if it is forcing people, whether dense or not, to confront their – our – usually unspoken attitudes about the Obamas? Do some of us see them as “other”? If so, how? The cover makes us think about such things, things that affect our voting and that, if we don’t have to, we tend to be content to pretend aren’t there. But they are there.
This, I think, is the argument that the lone pundit would have made if he’d had more of a chance to think it out: The cover is not one you can just look at quietly, chuckle to yourself, and move on – if it were, it would be horrendous. But it almost insists that you talk about it with someone, and all the public talking can make people shift their perceptions. The cover’s satire invites us as a country to confront our secret biases, and to discuss them.
Maybe I’m naive to think that the cover’s challenge that we explore our inner bigotries could penetrate to the people who need it most. But I think it’s worth believing that art can work profoundly when it simultaneously makes us squirm and forces us to have a conversation. Irene Papoulis of West Hartford teaches writing at Trinity College.
