Middle East Eye
On 14 April, US President Donald Trump announced he was halting funding to the World Health Organisation (WHO) on account of the group’s “role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of coronavirus”. This, from a man who has severely mismanaged and covered up the spread of coronavirus himself.
For its coverage of this announcement, the BBC website used an image of a group of medical personnel - the majority of them Muslim women in niqabs - looking at a monitor. The logic behind the selection was not evident; it seems a photo of Trump would have worked just fine.
But for the average, moderately xenophobic western news consumer, the takeaway from the display was likely that coronavirus and/or the WHO are somehow inextricably linked to Muslims - who, thanks to dutiful political and media fear-mongering over the years, are already widely regarded as the enemy.
The BBC is not the only outlet guilty of deploying irrelevant Islam-related images in the context of coronavirus.
In March, the New York Times reported Trump’s suspension of travel from Europe to the US with the help of a photo of a mosque in Turkey, complete with a Turkish flag in the foreground. Given that Turkey was not included in the travel suspension - and is not generally permitted in the category “Europe” in the first place - it was anyone’s guess as to the rationale.
Again, though, the implication is that coronavirus is tied up with Islam, that perennial plague from the East.
Even more ludicrously, CNN ran a photograph of a worker disinfecting the interior of an Istanbul mosque to accompany news of the announcement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation that prisons in the American state were prohibiting visits due to coronavirus.
CNN subsequently amended the image on Twitter (although the incredulous responses to the original remain) to a photo of an airport scene with flight screens and passengers wearing face masks. It is not clear whether this was an intentional effort on the part of editors to say: “See? It’s not Islamophobia. We just don't care if the photo has anything to do with the article!” READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.
