When posters depicting Barack Obama as Heath Ledger's Joker began appearing on the streets of Los Angeles and on the Internet earlier this summer, it's unlikely anyone attributed the image to a 20-year-old college student who didn't even vote in the last election. But Firas Alkhateeb, a senior at the University of Illinois in Chicago, confirmed to the Los Angeles Times on Monday that he created the poster while tinkering with Photoshop after finishing an online tutorial.
Alkhateeb downloaded the picture of Obama from a recent Time magazine cover, "Jokerized" it, and popped it up on his Flickr account along with his other Photoshop experiments (including a mash-up of "Napoleon Crossing the Alps," with Napoleon on a motorcycle instead of a horse) and some recent travel snapshots. On Flickr, it attracted a few thousand hits, before someone unknown to Alkhateeb pulled it from the page and began distributing it.
As Christopher Weber reported two weeks ago, the picture -- with the addition of the tag "socialism" -- began appearing as a poster all over Los Angeles and quickly gained traction on the Internet. It launched speculation over whether it had been created by a conservative group and arguments over whether the image was racist. Things further snowballed when, as David Corn reported, Rush Limbaugh entered the fray. Referencing the image, the radio host said that Obama's demeanor was a mask used as a "tactic for fooling white people."
Asked by the Times about the reason for the image, Alkhateeb said: "After Obama was elected, you had all of these people who basically saw him as the second coming of Christ. From my perspective, there wasn't much substance to him."
He said he prefers the Democrats on foreign policy matters and the Republicans on domestic issues. Asked to name a politician he could support, Alkhateeb cited liberal Ohio Congressman (and former presidential candidate) Dennis Kucinich.
As for the "socialism" label on the posters, which Alkhateeb did not add to his picture, he says he's as puzzled as anyone. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," the history major told the Times. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really . . . immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?"
