Tough Pigs News Extra updated November 2, 2001
The Bert Affair
It was so obviously a hoax that it never occurred to most of us that it could possibly be real... but there it was, in an Oct 9th Reuters newswire photo of a pro-Osama bin Laden rally in Pakistan. Protesters were holding a poster with a collage of photos of bin Laden, plus... waitaminute, is that Bert?
Yup, ol' buddy Bert accidentally found himself linked to the most important and gruesome news story of our time. Here's excerpts from a couple of news stories that give all the bizarre details.
Bin Laden's Felt-Skinned Henchman? Sunday, Oct 14, 2001 by Michael Y. Park
NEW YORK -- Do the global terror links reach even as far as Sesame Street? Is Bert the Muppet a henchman of terrorist mastermind Usama bin Laden? The answer is clearly no, but puzzled newspaper readers are still wondering how the Sesame Street icon ended up in a news service photograph of a pro-bin Laden protest in Bangladesh. The pictures showed demonstrators holding up a large poster in which bin Laden and Bert are standing next to each other. The picture quickly began making the e-mail rounds Wednesday morning, astonishing people and provoking laughter from Los Angeles to Switzerland to South Korea. The poster is a collage of pictures of bin Laden in white robes or camoflauge fatigues and sometimes lecturing with a microphone in his hand, all ringing a large portrait of the bearded Saudi exile. Along the bottom is printed "Usama." On the right side of the picture, just past the right shoulder of the large portrait, is irascible Bert, bosom buddy of Ernie. The photographs do not appear to have been doctored. They were taken by news photographers covering at least two different demonstrations from different angles on at least two separate days. The first known Bert-bin Laden posters appeared on Oct. 5 in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, and photographs of them were printed by the Dutch news service Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau and the Associated Press and Reuters news services. At least one other photograph including the posters was taken at another location by Reuters photographer Rafiqur Rahman on Oct. 9. Reuters spokeswoman Felicia Cosby said the photos were authentic... Cosby said Rafiqur Rahman, a native Bangladeshi, did not know that he was photographing a Muppet when he covered a prayer demonstration for bin Laden's health Oct. 9. "The photographer is as bemused as we are," she said. "He didn't know what that furry creature was..." The creator of a parody Web site dedicated to "Evil Bert" said he had a theory about how an associate of Kermit the Frog, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus had been recruited into the Al Qaeda cause. For several years, Dino Ignacio, 27, a San Francisco 3-D animator, had been maintaining a humor Web site that purported to "prove" that the bad-tempered, banana-shaped Jim Henson creation was connected to evil causes from Hitler and the JFK assassination to the stolen Pamela Anderson sex tapes and Kevin Costner movies. But he stopped maintaining the site when he lost interest in 1988. A week after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, someone e-mailed him an altered picture of bin Laden standing next to Bert wearing a trenchcoat and looking very angry. Ignacio didn't post the picture on his site out of respect for victims of the terror attack, but the picture began showing up on Bert fan sites and in other odd corners of the Internet. "What I'm thinking is that [someone there] has access to the Internet, got this picture to pop up off of Alta Vista or Google and put together this collage," he said... Sesame Workshop issued a statement saying it was very unhappy with the sudden connection between a lovable character with a penchant for pigeons and bottlecaps and the most wanted man in the world. "Sesame Street has always stood for mutual respect and understanding," a spokeswoman said. "We're outraged that our characters would be used in this unfortunate and distasteful manner. This is not at all humorous. The people responsible for this should be ashamed of themselves. We are exploring all legal options to stop this abuse and any similar abuses in the future." When asked about Bert's current whereabouts, the spokeswoman replied: "No comment." Regardless of the explanation, Ignacio said he doesn't find his "Evil Bert" idea very funny right now. "It's weirding me out," he said. "It's like reality imitating the Web, but it's taking something that I did so much further. I don't want to get into this one because it's too real."
IS BERT EVIL? Or is it something in his eyebrows? TV Guide -- November 3, 2001 by Amy Kover
TV characters don't get more wholesome than Sesame Street's Bert... That's why it was so unsettling when, last month, anti-American protesters marched the streets of Bangladesh with posters of Bert nestled on the shoulder of Osama bin Laden. The bizarre pairing was the result of a cyber-joke gone awry. In 1996, Dino Ignacio launched a Bert Is Evil Web site, on which Bert was linked to such figures as O.J. Simpson, the Unabomber and even Adolf Hitler, in much the way Forrest Gump was slipped into historical moments. Then a Dutch site posted an image of Bert with bin Laden. Bangladeshi print-shop owner Mostafa Kamal told the Associate Press that he had downloaded the image without noticing Bert's presence and included it in a poster for sale in his shop. Now it seems the days of facetious Bert-bashing are over. Sesame Workshop has vowed to pursue legal action to "stop this abuse," and Ignacio, who has since shut down his site, has asked others to close theirs as well, saying the joke has gone too far. But why did he target innocent Bert in the first place? "It was easier to pick on Bert than Oscar or Ernie," says Ignacio. "His eyebrows freaked me out as a child, but I think I needed to talk to a therapist about that."
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