Bert Leaves Sesame Street for bin Laden?

Yesterday protesters in Bangladesh waved signs supporting Osama bin Laden, some bearing collages of photographs. In one of the pictures, bin Laden is seen standing next to the Sesame Street muppet Bert.

There was no mistake; the muppet is clearly visible in photos from both the Associated Press and Reuters.

Bert's journey to the Bangladesh protest sign began in 1997 with an unsuspecting young web developer named Dino Ignacio. He was simply a fan of the funny web sites that appeared in the "Weird Wide Web" section of Internet Underground magazine (which stopped publishing later that year.) Innocently enough, Ignacio had had an idea for a funny site of his own. "I collected pictures of Bert from the net and my neice's books and manipulated them and ended up with something that made my friends laugh," he says in an online biography. His site purported to expose the black-haired muppet's unsavory past, Photoshopping the innocent muppet into pictures with notorious figures of the twentieth century. (Bert with Hitler, Bert at Dealy Plaza, even one depicting Bert as Ted Kaczynski.) "I figured it just might make other people laugh," Ignacio wrote. He realized his goal of being mentioned in Internet Underground magazine before its demise in 1997 -- and the "Bert is Evil" page eventually also won a "Webby" award. "With all the recognition this site has gotten, we are still wondering when the Children's Television Workshop will sue us," he jokes.

At least twenty other web sites began mirroring Ignacio's efforts to keep the parody online -- which is how Bert ended up standing next to Osama bin Laden. A duplicate site run by Dennis Pozniak created additional images of the muppet. They depicted Bert outside the bombed U.S. embassy in Tanzania, one showing Bert with the Jon Benet Ramsey family -- and, yes, one where the puppet stands next to Osama bin Laden. ("U.S officials have not been able to talk to Bert about this possible connection cause of His Muppet Immunity," the webmaster quipped.) The photo -- credited to Jeroen Meeuwissen -- was created well in advance of the World Trade Center attacks, and it went largely unnoticed. A single newsgroup post in 1999 argued the photo proved Osama bin Laden was actually a Puerto Rican actor, who he claimed he remembered seeing in a PBS special titled "The Sesame Street Caper - Ernie's Missing." His theory was that the actor was a small-time religious charlatan -- "The guy pulls all kinds of scams" -- but his reputation as a terrorist was the fabrication of the CIA and an anti-Muslim media.

Two years later, the strange twist occurs. AP photos of protests in Bangladesh both Friday and Tuesday clearly capture the Bert-with-Osama image in one sign's collage of photos. San Francisco graphic designer Matthew Alexander theorizes that the propagandists found the picture through an interet search. (Users searching for "Osama bin Laden" with the image search engine at Google.com discover it's the twelfth picture on the page.) "I mean, seriously, how much PBS do people get to watch in Kabul?" the designer jokes -- and his explanation is echoed by others online. "[T]hese protesters obviously made their bin Laden sign from a bunch of pictures printed off the web," theorized the webmaster at Ernie's House of Whoopass, "which is a clever idea, except for the fact that they ****ing used a parody one with Sesame Street's Bert still in it. Duh."

It came as quite a shock to the author of the first Bert parody page. Yesterday on his site he added a copy of the image from the later pages -- and posted his response. "I just wanted to say I had nothing to do with this!" He'd been mailed copies of the image "countless" times since September 11 -- and Monday had been notified that it turned up on protest signs in Bangladesh. "I am honestly freaked out," he wrote. "Reality is imitating the Web!" He asked his readers to send him a copy of the poster if they find one -- and added the words "Muppets at War" to the image. On the mirror site where the image first appeared, the webmaster went even further. He replaced the picture with an announcement saying it was being removed "Out of respect for those who died on 9/11/2001 at the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon." It then includes a link for online contributions to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund.