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Tue, Oct 16, 2001 - Page 6 News List

From toilet paper to target practice, bin Laden is target of American angst

AP , PORTLAND, OREGON

His picture appears on toilet paper. Gun shops are selling his face for target practice. And in the border town of McAllen, Texas, a company is making and selling pinatas with his likeness.

More than a month after the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the demonization of the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden is well under way.

There are anti-bin Laden songs and a video game in which the player unloads a gun at a bobbing, weaving bin Laden behind a liquor store counter and is invited "to put bin Laden out like a cheap cigar."

With the touch of a button, barbs and black humor fly like shrapnel across the Internet.

E-mailed jokes also are hurtling through cyberspace. A sampling:

Q: How do you play bin Laden Bingo?

A: B-52 ... F-16 ... B-1 ... M-16.

All this reflects a need among Americans to vent their rage, scholars said.

"Terrorism is faceless. Every once in a while we have to put faces on it," said Edward Turzanski, a political scientist at La Salle University in Philadelphia.

But some researchers question whether centering the national ire on one man is a wise course.

Demonization can backfire, said Warren Haffar, director of the International Peace and Conflict Resolution Program at Arcadia University in Pennsylvania.

"Often times, these people stick around and we have to look at them, deal with them in a different capacity," he said, noting that the US spent years demonizing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. "Now we're trying to reconstruct his identity in a way that is positive."

Some also say demonizing bin Laden runs the risk of oversimplifying the turmoil that's troubled the Middle East for decades.

"He's the latest poster boy, but what if we lose our poster boy, what if he is captured or killed?" asked Clark McCauley, a professor of social psychology at Bryn Mawr College who is also with the Solomon Asch Center for Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania.

"A lot of Americans will say it was a success, let's stop messing around, go home, we win. But the problem is considerably deeper than one guy, and we're going to be in a lot of trouble."

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