Barack Obama's election campaign team has decried a cartoon on the cover of a prominent magazine that depicts him in traditional Muslim garb and his wife as a terrorist.
The New Yorker magazine says the cartoon is intended as a satirical comment about some of the distorted right-wing attacks on the Democratic Party's president candidate.
An Obama campaign spokesman said the cartoon was "tasteless and offensive".
A spokesman for Republican Senator John McCain also criticised the cartoon.
The cover of this week's issue of The New Yorker depicts Mr Obama wearing traditional Muslim dress in the Oval Office. His wife, Michelle, is dressed in combat trousers and carrying a machine-gun.
They are shown greeting one another with a "fist bump", with an American flag burning in the fireplace and a portrait of Osama Bin Laden on the wall.
In a statement, the magazine said the cover, called "The Politics of Fear", was a critique of unfounded allegations that try to portray Mr Obama, a Christian, as a closet radical Muslim.
