Ellington

Lyndon LaRouche advocates set up a table on campus yesterday with posters bearing photographs of President Barack Obama with an edited-in, Adolf-Hitler-style moustache. While other students and staff browsed the Dawg Daze booths, some people were busy raising their voices because of the display.

“What do you think of Obama?” one LaRouche supporter asked people passing by the stand between Mary Gates Hall and Red Square. “He’s kissing too much booty. What do you think of the mustache?”

Santiago Vega, a passing community member, said the display angered him, but he said that it is tricky to define the group’s display as either hate speech or speech protected by the First Amendment.

“They push it up to the line, but they don’t go over it,” he said. “They’re on the precipice.”

The LaRouche group distributed pamphlets that drew a link between Obama’s policies and Hitler’s policies on euthanasia.

“Obviously, they have no sense of history,” Vega said. “It’s incredible, the abject stupidity.”

Henry Gasparian, an Armenian immigrant who lived through a Nazi occupation, was charged with assault after a fight with LaRouche supporters in Edmonds Sept. 5.

“I would almost say this is an incitement to violence,” said Jeff Ostrove, a UW sophomore who saw the display on campus yesterday.

LaRouche supporters have campaigned on campus for years, handing out pamphlets and engaging in political debates with passers-by. Members of the perennial presidential candidate’s national party do not talk to the press as a rule and declined to comment for this story.

LaRouche, who first ran for U.S. president in 1976, has a long political history. He has, at various times, been called the leader of a political cult, a communist, a racist and an anti-Semite. Although the majority of his presidential campaigns seek a Democratic nomination, the Democratic Party has never recognized LaRouche.

Reach reporter Andrew Doughman at news@dailyuw.com.