Peninsula Daily News
news sources
HOQUIAM — A community festival celebrating Grays Harbor’s timber heritage is attracting national attention with a T-shirt mocking Osama bin Laden.
The Loggers’ Playday festival celebrates that heritage every September — this year’s logging festival is schedule for Sept. 10 — and every year, a special shirt is made.
Known for being edgy, previous designs have mocked environmentalists and hippies.
This year’s black shirt features a heavily muscled logger with a USA hat and a flag tattoo pushing terrorist Osama bin Laden into the ocean.
Bin Laden is tied to a log and is looking up at the logger in desperation.
Underneath the picture, it states: “Osama Bin Loggin’.”
“The shirt in no way, shape or form was intended to be racist or bigotry and anything along those lines,” said Donny Bell, the festival T-shirt creator and Loggers Playday emcee.
Organizers say they got the idea because their Sept. 10 Playday is so close to the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and because bin Laden was killed by U.S. military forces in May.A Facebook page for the festival, linked from the city of Hoquiam website, lighted up with comments for and against the shirts — with accusations of racism, hatred and poor taste.
But by Monday afternoon, it was brought down.
A longer report appears in Wednesday’s editions of the Peninsula Daily News.
