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Hundreds protest newspaper's monkey cartoon
Hundreds of protesters shouted for The New York Post to close down over a political cartoon of a monkey that black civil rights leader Al Sharpton considers a racial reference to President Barack Obama.
Hundreds of protesters shouted for The
New York Post
to close down over a political cartoon of a monkey that black civil rights leader Al Sharpton considers a racial reference to President Barack Obama.
"Yes we can, shut it down," shouted the demonstrators outside News Corp headquarters.
"They thought we were chimpanzees. They will find out we are lions," Sharpton said.
"Americans went to the polls to elect a man of honor from its country, not a monkey, not a chimpanzee," state Senator Eric Adams, a Democrat representing the New York borough of Brooklyn, said.
"This is not funny, this is not a cartoon, this is disgusting," he added.
The cartoon showed a policeman killing a monkey, a reference to an incident in Connecticut on Monday in which an officer shot dead a chimpanzee that had seriously injured a woman.
In the drawing, another police officer comments: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill."
Sharpton on Wednesday called the cartoon "troubling" in view of the US' historic racist attacks comparing African-Americans to monkeys, and said the cartoon was directly linked to Obama's signing of an economic stimulus bill the day before.
