When ISIS-affiliated terrorists struck Paris last Friday, killing 129 people and injuring another approximately 350, media outlets were scrambling to put names and faces to the attackers.
GamerGate, a group known by many for both its online harassment campaigns and its vehement denial that it's involved in online harassment campaigns, seized on this as an opportunity to attack one of its opponents: a Canadian journalist named Veerender Jubbal who's been a vocal opponent of GamerGate.
This is Veerender Jubbal in a photo he posted to his Twitter account on August 4, 2015:
And this is Veerender Jubbal in a photo tweeted by Twitter user @Bl4ptrep, with some pretty stark changes to Jubbal's appearance and what he's holding:
That image was tweeted at 4:21 p.m. on November 13, the day of the Paris attack. It's been removed from Twitter along with the user's account — but Vice and BuzzFeed spotted it on the Internet Archive where, along with other tweets from GamerGate supporters, there is damning evidence of the photo's origin: GamerGate supporters.
In a Twitter exchange on August 11, GamerGate supporter @Bl4ptrep tweeted the following:
One user, @charizardboy99, suggested, "Photoshop a bomb where the tablet is." And that's exactly what another user, named @turd_wartsniff, then did:
The Photoshopper in question still has an active Twitter account, though all the posts have been scrapped and replaced with a single tweet (warning that it contains offensive language):
Worse than any of this: several international media outlets picked up on the Photoshop as a real photo of a Paris terrorism suspect.
Spanish-language newspaper La Razon ("The Reason") featured Veerender on its front page days after the attacks:
An Italian outpost of Sky News tweeted an image of its front page featuring the Photoshop of Jubbal:
Veerender Jubbal is a Sikh man. Sikhism is a religion from Southeast Asia that has about 25 million followers worldwide, according to The World Religion Database.
That he's wearing a dastar — a Sikh turban — should have been a giveaway that this was a doctored photo. Or the fact that there are North American plugs in the mirror. Or the sex toy that's been obviously Photoshoppsed into the background.
Unfortunately, the damage has been done, and Veerender Jubbal is dealing with the fallout of being labeled a terrorist in the wake of a major terrorist attack. Jubbal issued a statement through the The Sikh Coalition:
While the past 48 hours have been deeply disturbing on a personal level, the broader impact of this image going viral for the Sikh community is what upsets me the most. Sikh articles of faith, such as our turbans and beards, represent a commitment to universal justice, equality, and helping others (seva), yet Sikhs continue to be mistakenly and offensively associated with terrorist networks abroad. The Sikh community has faced significant violence and discrimination following major terrorist attacks because of our religious appearance. We must be better than this.
