Your Turn: House Negro

This is the key image from al Qaeda’s Obama video circulated this week. It shows Al-Zawahiri centered between images of Obama wearing a yarmulke at the Western Wall and Malcolm X kneeling on a prayer rug in a mosque. The video characterizes Obama as the opposite of “honorable black Americans” like Malcolm X, in the model of “house slaves” such as Colin Powell and Condi Rice.

I’m interested how you read this composition, and how you see it playing, strictly on a visual level, in the Muslim world.

(image: Getty Images by AFP via IntelCenter. November 19, 2008)