UNM Students Protest Use Of Hajo’s Bin Laden Cartoon

The television station KOAT in Albuquerque, New Mexico has coverage of a student protest over the use of a Osama Bin Laden cartoon that students say depicted the President of the United States as a monkey -- a racial caricature they felt was insulting to them as well as the president. There's some video footage included that if nothing else indicates that University of New Mexico students have one ass-kicking advocate in the young woman unpacking the complaints -- she's pretty terrific; I want her to go to bat for me the next time I need someone to articulate my viewpoint.

Unless KOAT is using one cartoon to represent another, the cartoon in question seems to be one from the cartoonist Hajo that uses the Lion King "circle of life" visual tropes often used as a gentle satire of the President's "chosen one" status as the basis for a gag about Osama Bin Laden being at another point on such a circle. So the cartoonist is depicting President Obama as the mandrill-baboon hybrid that is the character Rafiki, and while I'm sure it's meant in the nicest possible way, it's at the very least monumentally unfortunate. Certainly I can't imagine a student newspaper editor choosing to run that piece of the 10 billion others out there.

The editors have since apologized in verbal and written form.
 
posted 10:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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