Admission of Guilt

Admission of Guilt

April 15, 2019

I must admit to a horrible crime.  I accidentally posted a phony photo on Facebook.  It depicted a scene cropped from a larger photo that was intended to paint Islam in a negative light and suggested that the buried woman was about to be stoned to death by Islamists.  Can there be few greater moral transgressions and definitely cringe-worthy mistakes? 

OK, I should have recognized that the photo was phony.  I usually have a reasonably good eye for such stuff, but I missed this one.  I had no intention of posting fake stuff.  I have an abhorrence for all forms of fake information, so I take no pride in this accidental posting — but there it is, a crime against political correctness for which there can be little forgiveness.

The Photo I posted

The Original Photo

 

My failure causes me to reflect on why someone would post such a phony photo in the first place?  Obviously, it was someone who wishes to slander Islam.  Right?  Someone who found this photo of people buried up to their necks someplace in Latin America and pretended that it took place in some Muslim land.  Shame on this deceitful person.  Has this person no sense of decency?  And, obviously, he meant to taint the entire, peaceful religion of Islam with this concocted story about stoning people to death.  If such a barbaric event actually happened, you could be certain that the New York Times would make it front page news and CNN would run nonstop stories with videos showing the blood and torture.  Right?  It is certainly reassuring that such news stories are so rare that the entire stoning story suggested by this photo must be false.

Maybe, what is needed is to find the person who cropped this photo and performed this sham to bring him into public shame.  Is he not guilty of some hate crime?  Maybe the FBI should be brought in to track down this criminal behavior and bring him to justice.  Chopping off his right hand might be an entirely appropriate punishment.  And, we should lionize those who detected this sham.  Imagine how difficult it would be to track down this original photo from its Latin American source.  What wonderful detective work.  Wouldn’t it be great to find the individual or group that detected this sham and award them a Nobel Peace Prize — or something?  Too bad the author/authors of this work did not identify themselves so they could explain the reason they were willing to invest maybe weeks and or months searching for this truth — so they can receive the honor that they so richly deserve.  

Of course, we might expect some hateful person like Rush Limbaugh to invent some counter-narrative.  Yes, he might contend that there is an alternate “Rush hypothesis.”  Imagine that the person who cropped this photo was the same person who uncovered the scam.  I know, I know, it is difficult to imagine, but if we honest folks are going to rebut this argument, we must understand it.  Now we know that Muslims are mostly hard-working folks who just want to be left alone to earn an honest living — like you or me.  But, suppose (Rush would hint) somewhere on the outermost fringes of Islamic society, we could find a clever individual that actually hates the USA and all the racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, etc. that it stands for, would it not be possible that he might post the evil cropped photo on the net, hoping that some islamophobe would find it and repost it?  Then the original photo could be magically produced as evidence that the cropped photo was fake — to the eternal shame of the islamophobe.  Yes, then Rush might claim that this process constituted a form of entrapment and smear artistry.  Of course, such an endeavor would require the collusion of such highly reputable, unbiased sources as Snopes — which of course would be nearly impossible.

Of course, Rush would just be speculating with no real facts to back up his alternate hypothesis.  And, Rush would counter that the original purpose of cropping the photo by some Islamophobe is also speculative.  But, wouldn’t it be embarrassing if “Rush’s hypothesis” were confirmed as true?  What if some individual came clean and admitted that he had both cropped the one photo while also posting the original to Snopes?  That it was not an Islamaphobe or conservative who so maliciously cropped the photo.  What if we ultimately find that it was the Russian Mafia or Snopes itself who had something to gain from this misdeed.

Of course, we can be assured that those who perpetuated such an alternate scam would publicly admit their deceitful scheme on the front page of some truly objective source of information — like the New York Times.  Hmmm.

 

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