The sepia picture depicts a supposed Iranian hanging from a tree surrounded by men in cowboy hats holding guns. One man’s shirt reads, “Iranians suck.” The caption at the bottom says: “Let’s play cowboys and Iranians.” The supposed Iranian hanging from the tree Texas-lynching-style wears an Arab headdress.
The posed picture actually dates from the 1979-81 hostage crisis. It was just noticed recently in Nonmacher’s Bar-B-Q restaurant in Katy, Texas, by a reporter for Houston TV station KHOU, who mentioned it on the air. Then someone wrote about it on Facebook.
Katy is a tiny town of 12,000 people about 32 miles from downtown Houston. Its name derives from the “K-T Railroad (Kansas-Texas Railroad) that once ran through the town.
Hundreds of people have joined the Facebook page and hundreds more have signed
apetition calling on this small restaurant to remove the poster deemed offensive and racist.
“It’s my choice to have it up. It’s your choice to go where you want to go. But I’m not going to take it down,” said the restau-rant’s owner, John Nonmacher, who has stiffly resisted all pressure to remove the aging poster.
The poster was made up in 1979 by Mark McGarr and has probably been hanging on the restaurant’s walls for years, perhaps decades, before it went viral on social media.
“This thing has spread like wildfire and we are getting phone calls from New York and everywhere else,” said Nonmacher.
Ayman Wafai, a Houston petrochemical engineer of Syrian heritage, called the poster racist and said its symbolism becomes strikingly clear if one imagined a black man hanging from the tree amid a group of white men with guns.
“You know, it’s 2011. Looking at it now, I see nothing really more than a display of racism and bigotry,” he said.
The picture has elicited a reaction from the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
“This is not an issue of freedom of speech, as Nonmacher claims, but rather an issue of hate speech. I’m confident a court of law would agree with that assessment,” said NIAC Community Outreach Director Nobar Elmi.
Part of Nonmacher’s justification for continuing to display the poster are the three young American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009 on charges of espionage but released over a month ago.
Speaking to NIAC, Sarah Shourd, one of the three hikers, said: “We are horrified that Mr. Nonmacher used our wrongful imprisonment in Iran to justify his own racism. This kind of hatred and ignorance fuels hostility between the US and Iran and benefits no one.”
But Nonmacher continues to dismiss all allegations, saying the poster is not racist and that he is the victim here, not Iranians. “This is just a smear campaign. All they want is to take the sign down,” he said.
“This is still America. If they are not happy here, then they should go back to Iran,” he advised his detractors, oblivious to the fact that he has been equating all Iranians with the Iranian state.
Websites, including Non-macher’s own, are filled with crisp comments, many denouncing Nonmacher as a racist, other defending his right to say anything he wants, however foolish. The dozens of comments reviewed by the Iran Times did not contain anything defending the sentiment of the poster that Iranians should be lynched and that all Iranians are by definition supporters of the Islamic Republic. The discussion is essentially the old debate of free speech versus hate speech.
Sarah Rufca, writing a commentary on the restaurant for a Houston cultural webpage, seemed to distill the opinions of many in Texas, when she wrote that her “selective outrage machine is broken.”
She said, “The image is crude, racist and not at all funny. So why can’t I seem to care?” She ran through a half dozen explanations and then concluded:
“Maybe because it’s his business and he can put whatever stupid, racist shit on the walls that he wants to, and there are plenty of other barbecue joints around town that will happily take your money if you don’t like it.
“Haven’t we gotten to the point where old people being (harmlessly) racist is kinda adorable? Can we make Bill Cosby host a show called Old Racists Say the Darndest Things and then laugh patronizingly when they talk about the Kenyan socialist president and the welfare queens and the godless feminazis ruining the country?
“You know, because they are all going to die out and their multi-ethnic grandkids will be toasting them at their gay weddings.”
