Ok, I admit it, I was on bangedup.com looking at scary/gross pictures. On the website they have an arabic-looking guy holding up a sign saying “We want porn in Iraq!” now the first thing I was thinking of was, hoax/photoshop, but can anybody confirm if this is in fact real? I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some Iraqis out there with these kinds of demands 
Just for the sake of fighting ignorance, and all that
A little googling for the picture. This one?
If so, it’s obvious at a glance that it’s been Photoshopped.
The shadows where the paper is bent don’t darken the printed parts at all, and the print is flat where the paper is uneven.
Of course it’s real! Those poor fellas have been starvin’ for some Jenna Jameson tapes. Didn’t a famous statesman once say that a nation’s freedom is defined by its access to hard core porn? Abe Lincoln, I think. 
Did they have porn under Saddam? I was under the impression that he kept things quite secular, I hadn’t really thought of this question before but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that porn was easy enough to come by (pun may or may not be intentional- I’m not sure).
There isn’t enough of an angle difference to really see that, and also the edges of the letters do alter in colour and pick up the light.
But this is the clincher for me that makes it real: He started colouring it in very carefully at first, then got bored when he reached the A and the rest are just loosely scribbled in. In colouring pencil. Very very hard to photoshop.
But very very easy to do by hand oneself and then scan/take a digital photo and combine the image with that of a protestor.
It’s the bubble-style letters that make it look fake to me, though. People who learned to write Roman letters as part of their foreign language instruction (rather than as their everyday written language) don’t write that way. They tend to write very carefully and neatly, not get creative with the letters. The writing looks to me like the work of someone who spent a lot of time in middle school practicing “cool” writing. An Iraqi boy might do that in Arabic, but he’d have no reason to do so with Roman letters.
I guess we could speculate that this guy grew up outside Iraq, but I think it’s more likely that the photo is just a fake.
Looking specifically at the O and R in “porn” they clearly do not bend where the rest of the paper does. However, the “P” does, which makes me think the sign originally said “We Want Peace in Iraq” or something similar.
Forgot to point out that the spacing between “porn” and “in” suggests that there was initially a longer word after before “in”
What about the clincher that makes it fake?
The “R” in “Porn” and “Iraq” are exactly the same. The “N” in “Porn” and “In” are exactly the same. And the “O” in “Porn” and the round portion of the “Q” in “Iraq” are exactly the same. Can’t do that with quick handwriting.
For comparison, check out the “W” in “We” and “Want.” Different. The “A” in “Want” and “Iraq.” Different.
No question.
Agreed. Look at the lettering in “Porn”. The “O” has the same shading and heavy outline at the top of the letter as does the “Q” in “Iraq”. Similarly, the “R” also came from “Iraq”, and the “N” is identical to the “N” in the word “In”.
It’s an altered photo. KeithT beat me to the observation that the R and N in “porn” was repeated. I did, however, make a graphical proof of that – copied & pasted the letters on top of the other ones, and changed the transparency so that we can see how perfectly they overlap.
Sure there is. If the “ORN” was actually on the bent paper, the perfect verticals of the R and N would be go off about three degrees at the fold, and the top parts of the letters would be shaded. That’s obvious at a glance.
Which is exactly why the photoshopper copy-and-pasted some of the letters. If you check the image closely (with a program like Photoshop) you’ll notice that some of the letters are the same. I mean exactly the same (ignoring slight compression artifacts). For instance, the ‘R’ in ‘porn’ and the ‘R’ in ‘Iraq’ are exactly identical. The sign is made to look like it was drawn freehand (the ‘W’ in ‘we’ and the ‘W’ in ‘want’ are obviously quite different), but there’s no way someone is going to freehand two separate letters such that their outlines are exactly identical. And it’s not just the 'R’s. The 'N’s in ‘porn’ and ‘in’ are the same, and the ‘O’ in ‘porn’ is identical to the main body of the ‘Q’ in ‘Iraq’.
Conclusion, it’s a Photoshopped image.
Doggone. You’re right. I was looking at it as overall real, and not as a slightly altered existing sign.
The other conclusion is that I’m an idiot. I had this thread open in a window from earlier today, and when I came back to my computer I forgot that I handn’t just opened it, and so neglected to look for new replies before posting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have posted something that amounted to “yeah, what all those people who posted before me said”.
Wow. If you can deduce that from the penmanship, how about his face as a better reason? If he’s Iraqi, I’m an Eskimo. I’d guess Bangladesh/Indian subcontinent.
There are no eskimos (so no cap).
The sign is obviously genuine, just as the man holding it is the Six Flags dancing guy. Without the make-up.
Was that question ever answered?
Peace,
mangeorge
I can’t peg down someone’s ethnicity by just looking at their face. However, if the man is from a country like India where English is the primary language of instruction in many schools, he’d likely have had ample opportunity to develop a casual handwriting style. So that would explain that.
As I said, my first guess would have been that the photo manipulator just wrote out the message his/herself, but what others have worked out above with the cutting and pasting of letters is inconsistent with that.
I have no opinion on the veracity of the photo, but my friend’s stepbrother asked us to send him porn where he is stationed in North Korea.
Why was your friend’s stepbrother stationed in North Korea? Was he a dirty dirty commie?
