No! It is fake news that the Hungarian police protects the border with pigs!

International press agency AFP published a fact check article on the issue because the original photo somebody modified was theirs. They revealed that it was taken on the Philippines after a deadly typhoon.

In fact, the photoshopped picture stating that Hungarian police officers are trying to deter migrants with a breastfeeding sow

has been circulating on the internet for years.

Since 2015, the doctored image has popped up many times on Twitter, Facebook and Reddit, mostly in islamophobic, racist contexts. According to AFP, somebody put a Hungarian police officer in the place of a Philippine man and a lot of migrants into the background of the image which was originally a highway somewhere in the Philippines, suggesting that Hungarian police try to keep away Muslim migrants this way – Index reported.

According to AFP, the doctored image was shared more than 800 times since it was first published on March 10, 2016. Furthermore, a reverse image search on Google revealed that the picture had been photoshopped from an AFP photo published on October 19, 2015, on the website of French newspaper Le Dauphine Libere.

The original description of the photo was:

“A resident stands with his rescued sow and suckling piglets

as people wade through a flooded highway in Santa Rosa town, Nueva Ecija province, north of Manila on October 19, 2015, a day after the typhoon Koppu hit Aurora province. Residents of flooded farming villages in the Philippines were trapped on their rooftops and animals floated down fast-rising rivers, as deadly Typhoon Koppu dumped more intense rain.”

In fact, this is not the first time that somebody would like to deter migrants with pigs. In 2016, György Schöpflin, an MEP of Fidesz, tweeted that pig heads would deter migrants more effectively than human images (the latter is “haram”, forbidden for religious Muslims). Afterwards, Schöpflin said that he had done nothing for which he would have to apologise. Zoltán Bolek, leader of the Hungarian Islamic Community,

called Schöpflin’s assertion shameful.

As we reported before, the Hungarian government believes that immigration will remain the most important issue for Europe, and since the European Union leadership in Brussels is not prepared to stop the trend, nation-states must be entrusted to do that. In this regard, Antal Rogán, head of the Prime Minister’s Cabinet Office, said that the United Kingdom left the EU because the European Commission could not find a solution for the migrant crisis. He added that Hungarian voters have the chance to influence European decision-making if the programme of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán gets the most support in the European Parliament elections and if the candidates of the

governing Fidesz win a strong mandate in the EP.

In fact, most of the Hungarian opposition parties reject immigration, too. For example, the biggest opposition party, Jobbik, called the government’s migration policy deceitful and insolent because, according to them, the government settles tens of thousands of economic migrants in the country to replace those that have been forced out of the country because of the humiliating wages.

Featured image: facebook.com/audrey.brown.9406

Source: index.hu, factcheck.afp.com