By Ila Ananya
After another horrible terror attack, this time in London, the photograph of a woman wearing a headscarf walking past an injured man has been circulating on social media.
https://twitter.com/SouthLoneStar/status/844644675415937024
It’s outrageous and obviously a case of racism, because the Twitter user, Texas Lone Star, posted the photo with the caption, “Muslim woman pays no mind to the terror attack, casually walks by a dying man while checking phone”. The hashtags the user used were not just #PrayforLondon, but also #BanIslam.
The tweet is clearly a case of someone taking a photograph out of context and simply using it to promote bigoted ideas. Of course this isn’t the first time we’ve seen it happening—remember when a Pakistani man was arrested for the terror attack in a Christmas market in Berlin in December last year, simply because he had been found a mile from where the attack happened? It’s all too convenient for someone to do, particularly when everyone around is already scared and worried.
Thankfully Texas Lone Star’s tweet was slammed for inciting hatred. This time another twitter user posted a photograph of a white man doing the same thing—of course, this tweet hasn’t even got a bit of the attention that the photo of the Muslim woman had. It’s hardly surprising that nobody thought it important to share this tweet as widely as the first, because, after all, apparently a white man “not doing anything” is not as outrageous as a Muslim woman “not doing anything”, since Muslims are believed to be the cause of all terror attacks in this world.
https://twitter.com/Impeach_D_Trump/status/844650370861338624
As some twitter users pointed out, a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf at that moment was probably worried for her safety, more than the white man. Also, she might have just been told to walk on, who knows. Some news sources even referred to a tweet by Australian lawyer and activist Mariam Veiszadeh, who said she had avoided public transport for the fear of being judged, and that the response to Texas Lone Star’s photo only validated those fears.