In response to a billboard campaign launched this week linking Pres. Obama to terrorist jihad and the Fort Hood shootings, ProgressNow has issued an action alert today calling on consumers to boycott Wolf Auto, the dealership sponsoring the billboard campaign.
Dealership owner Phil Wolf is taking a second step into billboard controversy with the new sign. This September he donated two billboards at his dealership near Kipling and I70 to talk-radio host Peter Boyles and World Net Daily’s ‘birther’ campaign. Those boards asked “Where’s the birth certificate?” The new sign reads “President or Jihad? Prove It! Wake Up America! Remember Ft. Hood!” Obama is presented in caricature, wearing a turban.
“It is really an outrageous thing to compare the President to a Jihadist and invoke what happened at Fort Hood. It is just disgusting.” ProgressNow’s Bobby Clark told the Colorado Independent. He went on to say that his organization would be calling on their members and members of the community to boycott Wolf Automotive Group, which has four dealerships, including lots in Wyoming and Montana.
“We will defend anyone’s first amendment right to speak their minds but we also believe strongly that the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work unless we all participate. It is our right as citizens to respond to things like that,” Clark said.
The billboard campaign comes after a week where conservative talk show hosts such as KHOW’s Peter Boyles railed against Muslims and after a YouTube called “Obama Admits He Is A Muslim” went viral, landing on rightwing blogs and websites, including the website for Boyles radio show. The video simply mashes clips of Obama speaking forthrightly and positively about his experience of Islam and Muslim culture, as though that in itself were some sort of admission or a form of treason. Boyles played the audio from the video throughout his program this week and directed listeners to his webpage to watch the video, where it is still posted beneath a caricature of a Muslim man whose turban is a lighted cartoon bomb.
“It can be tempting for people just to dismiss [the billboard]. Saying, ‘Well, it is Peter Boyles, he is going to love the attention,'” Clark said. “But we really believe that if you allow ideas like that to go unanswered, you provide passive approval of them. The perception can be created that, that is OK, that, that idea is reasonable– and it is not. When we stop being outraged by things like that then we are really in trouble in this country.”
The viral right-wing YouTube popular since the Fort Hood shootings.
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