Daily Mail Uses an Altered Photo to Make a Story Even More Islamophobic Than It Already Was

Today’s news is tomorrow’s trash, unless you’re The Daily Mail and you’re covering the “Muslims are evil” beat. Then you’re just trash all the time.

The news organization came under fire on Tuesday for altering a stock photo image of a Muslim woman to give her a more “extreme” look, presumably because it would better match the tenor of the corresponding Islamophobic article they published.

Social media users quickly noticed that the photo was a stock image (because, well, the caption said so) and that it had clearly been doctored. The original stock photo shows a Muslim woman in a black hijab holding a little girl’s hand. A second version added an additional flourish: A veil across the woman’s face, giving her the full burqa treatment.

The crimes listed against the Muslim caretakers in The Daily Mail article are laughable, but we’ll step aside and let them tell it:

A white five-year-old girl told her mother Christmas and Easter are ‘stupid’ and European women are alcoholics after being fostered to two Muslim families, it was claimed today.

The child, who is a native English speaker, also refused to take back her favourite meal – spaghetti carbonara – because it contained bacon – which Muslims do not eat.

The. horror. And a horror that can only be accurately captured, it seems, by photoshopping a massive black veil onto a photo of a Muslim family frolicking in a Dubai park.

In a bizarre turn, after being called out online for the clear Photoshop job, the Mail pixelated the image of the woman’s face.

It’s a particularly strange turn because the release info under the stock image clearly says the model allowed her face to be republished, so the pixelated image certainly isn’t to protect her privacy. It’s unclear what the Mail hopes to accomplish by pixelating the image—whether they want to imply that this is a real photo of a real Muslim woman en route to yanking crucifixes off of little white girls, or whether they CLEARLY KNOW IT’S NOT and have mustered some sense of shame and legal propriety about the whole thing.

I have reached out to the Mail for comment on this controversy, and will update this post if I hear back.

Anywho. Here are more shots of Muslim caretakers stealing crucifixes and lying to Christian kids about their alcoholic European moms.