THIS photo came up on my Facebook feed a couple of days ago.

It follows a common theme, which anyone who regularly uses social media is probably familiar with. Anti-Muslim rhetoric accompanied by a picture of a random Muslim. This is one of the most abjectly racist I’ve seen. Usually a scary photo of Abu “Hook-Hand” Hamza, or some other person equally as objectionable for their beliefs, is used. But this example uses a photo of an unknown, happy looking family. The message is unquestionable: all Muslims are invaders to be feared, even when smiling – a burden on society.

I’ve seen the meme more than once before in recent years – it’s been shared thousands of times on Facebook—but I couldn’t find any reference to it on Snopes or similar websites.

As well as rumours, urban myths and fake news, Snopes typically investigates pictures which contain falsifiable facts – so it’s not very surprising that they haven’t covered this meme, which doesn’t even attempt to justify itself with dodgy statistics.

The only occurrences of the meme yielded by a reverse image search are on websites which shared it uncritically, but without any further information on who the family are or where they’re from, or how they have forced the men in the first picture to work until they are 70.

It was surprisingly difficult to find the origin of the family’s photo by reverse image searching a crop of the meme.

Although it was a cropped and misshapen copy of the family portrait which I used as my basis for a reverse search, I am astonished that the original took so long to find. It’s no wonder people get away with uploading whole films and TV shows to YouTube by simply flipping the video on its y axis. I eventually tracked down the origin of the family’s picture through perseverance and a guess at their ethnicity.

It turns out they’re Tatars from Crimea.

They were photographed by a freelance reporter for Al Jazeera after they had fled to Borinya, a village in West Ukraine, in 2014. They fled their homes, jobs, houses and belongings in Crimea due to increasing anti-Muslim sentiment in Crimea after it rejoined Russia. So it was that they became part of the 473,000 displaced people in Ukraine that year.

(Pic: John Wendle, johnwendle.com)

Not wanting the big city buzz and benefits lifestyle in London (or whichever major city you believe is victim to “the Muslim invasion”), they asked the charity which helped them to leave Crimea to settle them in a quiet village somewhere in Ukraine.

So they moved to Borinya, where the local Catholic community gave them accommodation in an school house, and jobs in an orchard. According to the village librarian: “They came here in the spring and they didn’t have any money for food, so we helped them out as best we could. You can’t just have people come here and not help them out.”

I got in touch with the reporter, John Wendle, who hadn’t been aware of the repurposing of his photo. He was shocked to find out about it, but no longer has a contact for the family, so couldn’t tell me if they’ve moved since 2014, or if they’re still in the same village.

The provenance of the miners’ photo was even more mystifying, even after I had determined that they must be British, going by their uniform and, in my girlfriend’s unequivocal words, “well, they’re just British, aren’t they?”

They turned out to be workers at a coal mine in Cwmgrach – needless to say in Wales – which reopened in 2008 after several decades of closure. The BBC reported in August 2013 that half the jobs at the site could be cut (around 100 people) due to investors pulling out. Six weeks later, the mine went into administration,  with a “skeleton staff remaining to ensure the safety of the site” as of September 2017, according to the administrators.

Based on the £80,000 paid in wages over a two month period and an average wage of £30,000, I would estimate about 16 staff remain. A total job loss of 92 per cent. The photo was taken in 2007, when the miners pictured were preparing the mine to be reopened.

The racist meme was created by an Australian Facebook page called Freedom of Speech Productions. The meme was uploaded to its Facebook page in November last year, although I suspect it had been made earlier and posted on its previous Facebook page, which was shut down in the same month.

Either way, the meme was made after the sweeping job cuts at the mine in Cwmgrach, where the pictured miners worked, had already begun. They are most probably among those who lost their jobs.

And it wasn’t the fault of Muslims or migrants; it was the shareholders of their mine who care only about making an extra cent on every dollar who deprived them of their jobs. It certainly wasn’t the fault of a family in Ukraine who live several thousand miles away from Wales. The only things which connect the people in the picture above and the people in the picture below are the unfortunate reasons why their pictures trended in Google images at the same time, somewhere around November 2014.

Of course, the people who made the meme are Australian, and so the miners are, in their mind, representative of good, hard-working, white Australians. Abdullah, a geography teacher and one of the displaced Tatars who moved to Borinya with the pictured family, could point out these Australians’ warped understanding of the proximity of Borinya to any Australian city. Others among the thousands who shared the meme will consider the miners to be representative of good, hard-working white people in their own country.

Regardless of the family’s location, they are living proof of Islamophobia. Despite the fact that the blame for job losses must always be placed with the extraordinarily wealthy, such as the investors in Wales’s coal mines, who can choose to make thousands of people jobless in a single move, there are people who would rather apportion blame to a Ukrainian family who doubtlessly do not have the economic power to effect job losses in Britain. Why? Because the father has a beard and the mother wears a headscarf.

Jack Pepin is an IWGB union activist, and writes at www.jackpeps.wordpress.com.