The Legend . . .
Sesame Street’s Bert can be seen peering over the shoulder of Osama Bin Laden in posters used by Al-Qaeda supporters, protesting against American-led attacks on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The Investigation . . .
Remarkably this is true: the familiar face of lovable Bert can be seen side by side with the world’s most notorious terrorist leader, Osama Bin Laden. So, how exactly did this happen?
It was all started by a man named Dino Ignacio, who set up his humorous website as part of a long-running joke claiming that Bert is evil. To prove this, Bert was inserted side by side with the world’s most notorious evil figures throughout history. The Bert Is Evil website reached cult status with many copycat sites being started up.
But how did this photo come to appear on protester posters that were printed in Bangladesh? Mostafa Kamal, the production manager of Azad Products who made the posters, reveals the answer. Apparently he found the image on the Internet and included it on the 2,000 posters he printed, not realising that Bert was there. Mostafa stated that he would not include the image on the next poster design.
Shortly after the Bert and Bin Laden image was used on the protesters’ posters, Dino Ignacio closed the official Bert Is Evil website. Dino claimed that the cult had grown too big and too close to reality. Bert Is Evil had become too commercialised and had achieved a much greater platform of awareness than Dino had wanted. In other words, it had become more than just a joke. Dino claims that Sesame Street played a major part in his childhood, and now that the Bert Is Evil cult had reached the mass media, he didn’t wish to have any part in damaging the image of Bert for the children. Dino has appealed to all the copycat sites to follow suit.
And Finally . . .
The photographs of the poster at anti-US rallies were printed in newspapers throughout the world, and many theories of why the Bert image was inserted on the posters were circulating. One theory was that the CIA had secretly sabotaged the poster’s design by inserting the image of Bert next to Osama Bin Laden. The aim of this propaganda coup was to mock the Taliban by using Bert as a symbol of Western commercialism and freedom.
Urban Legends Uncovered – Reloaded NOW on sale (Kindle) on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk
Urban Legends Uncovered -Reloaded 