"The Bible": Satan's Resemblance To Obama

I haven't had time to watch the History Channel's "The Bible" mini-series, but I'm aware of the controversy surrounding the character of Satan, who looks suspiciously like President Obama. 

I'm not alone in finding that offensive; the Internet is abuzz with outrage over the producers' decision to cast an Obama look-alike as the fallen angel tempting Christ in the desert.

The use of a dark-skinned man to portray an evil entity is just playing to old, hideous stereotypes.  Further, Christians believe that Satan is a fallen angel who, as an angel, is non-corporeal -- meaning, not having a body, and certainly not having a body that would look like ANYONE.  I think the Satan-looking-like-Obama issue is not an innocent mistake; I think the producers were, consciously or not, appealing to vicious stereotypes and the awareness that they could score points with that part of the Religious Right that believes Obama to be a sinister, dark, foreign, evil man. 

It's bad enough that Jesus, in the series, looks and sounds like a late-1960s British Invasion pop star -- kind of an odd choice for a Semitic Jew from Palestine who looked, most likely, just like the Palestinians living now.  Of course, Christians throughout the last two millennia have portrayed Christ as a non-Jewish, Anglo-featured man whose features bespeak, perhaps, the Savior Hans Jesus Nordquist from Oslo.  In 2013, I would have hoped that Jesus would have been represented as a man who looks like all of those Middle Eastern men we find so threatening.

Huh.  I think I've just discovered why this Jesus looks so . . . well, not like all of those Middle Eastern men we find so threatening.

All in all, I would call this "Biblical epic" and epic fail.