Creator of Obama 'Joker' Poster Revealed
KTLA News
Firas Alkhateeb (KTLA-TV)
4:33 AM PDT, August 18, 2009
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LOS ANGELES -- We now know who created the controversial poster showing President Barack Obama as Heath Ledger's "Joker" character from "The Dark Knight."
Turns out, it was a 20-year-old college student from Chicago who was apparently bored during his winter break.
Firas Alkhateeb, a senior history major at the University of Illinois, crafted the picture of Obama using Adobe's Photoshop software, The Los Angeles Times reported.
Alkhateeb says he used an online tutorial to "jokerize" the October 23 Time Magazine cover of Obama. He then uploaded the image to the photo-sharing site "Flickr," where an anonymous person stumbled upon it, digitally removed the "Time" reference and instead gave it the headline "Socialism."
That poster began popping up on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities about a month ago, creating a stir.
The image went viral online, crashing the website that first posted images of it and rising to the top of Google's "Today's Hot Trends" list.
Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable President Earl Ofari Hutchinson condemned the poster and called for its creator to take responsibility for the image.
"Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery," says Hutchinson, "it is mean-spirited and dangerous."
"We have issued a public challenge to the person or group that put up the poster to come forth and publicly tell why they have used this offensive depiction to ridicule President Obama."
Alkhateeb insists he was not making a political statement with his version of the poster.