Genocide as Mascot: (wake up) SnoreStop's new billboards Promote White Supremacy

From [HERE] SnoreStop, a company who boasts the number one position in sales of throat spray that reduces snoring, has unveiled a billboard that "is part of a larger marketing campaign". The product may be number one for reducing snoring, but the company's newest form of advertising has blown up on the internet in a not-so-number-one way

The billboard features what appears to be a white US soldier and a Muslim woman covered in a niqab (a form of hijab that covers everything besides the eyes), who are happily married. She is wearing a wedding band and he is embracing her lovingly. "As a snoring solution company, we're in the business of keeping people together", said Melody Devemark, spokesperson for SnoreStop.

Ignoring the truth that the Gulf War & Operation Iraqi Freedom constitute a continuing genocide of non-white people. [MORE], the white media portrays Iraq either as 'necessary to protect freedom' or as 'just an oil grab.' Above, Iraq as a video game.

To many, seeing a US soldier and a Muslim woman who is almost completely covered as a happily married couple is odd and unfathomable. Never have Americans been faced with such a unique image of people who come from such apparently different worlds – one being "the Muslim world" – who can also be married. What's particularly frustrating is that according to SnoreStop, the average Muslim woman is covered in a niqab. Let's have a little reality check here, the niqab something that the majority of Muslim women in the world, let alone in America, do not even wear. It was as if SnoreStop couldn't think of any other way to identify this woman as Muslim is if she wore a full niqab.

SnoreStop did not stop at profiling and stereotyping what a Muslim woman looks like, they placed her in the arms of a US solider. As an Iraqi, when I see a man dressed in camouflage and matching hat with a Muslim woman in his arms, I think of the atrocities committed against not only men, but women and children, during the brutal years of "democracy and liberation" that ravaged my country on the whims of US and international armed forces. Women and girls – some as young as 15 – reportedly raped by soldiers between 2003 and 2004 may have something else to say about this billboard. To place a Muslim woman, who does not even represent the mainstream image of a Muslim in America, in the hands of a man who represents an institution responsible for the terror and agony of many Muslims in the world (not only in Iraq) is not simply insensitive, but disturbing.