Original Obama Joker Artist Unmasked

People all over the U.S. have been looking to find the creator of a joker-faced Barack Obama image that has circulated on the Web recently. As it turns out, it was a 20-year-old Palestinian-American named Firas Alkhateeb who was just playing in Photoshop.

Who would have ever imagined the evil genius behind the Obama Joker poster was not some sinister right-wing propagandist working Penguin-like in his dark basement, but a very young and liberal Palestinian-American history major attending the University of Illinois, on the President's home turf? As the LA Times [url= t=_blank]reports, Alkhateeb said he first uploaded the now-viral and highly controversial Obama Joker artwork to the photo-sharing site Flickr on January 18. The image showcased Obama's joker face on the cover of Time magazine (the "socialism" tag was added by someone else later) and he said it generated a couple thousand hits over the next two months. The image featuring the Time cover was taken down from Alkhateeb's Flickr page after someone informed Time about the fake cover shot. The company told Alkhateeb it was removed due to copyright-infringement concerns. Alkhateeb described how he was modifying some Kodak photos with Photoshop, and even took a tutorial online to learn how to "Jokerize" images, a tutorial no doubt inspired by the huge success of 2008's box office smash Dark Knight. While Alkhateeb's Time magazine cover mock-up has become famous, a variation of it boasting a huge "socialism" tag along the bottom of the image also went viral. While he is not much of an Obama fan, he also said he doesn't like the "socialism" line added to his image. "It really doesn't make any sense to me at all," he told the LA Times. "To accuse him of being a socialist is really ... immature. First of all, who said being a socialist is evil?" Alkhateeb said he is more of a fan of Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich and believes that the artist of the Obama HOPE poster was a two-faced hypocrite. Much more at the RedState blog and the LA Times.