TWO FEMALE POLITICAL leaders – including the most powerful woman in Europe – have been photoshopped out of an historic image of world leaders showing solidarity after the Charlie Hebdo terror attacks.
The ultra-Orthodox Israeli daily newspaper HaMevaser, or The Announcer, ran a front-page image of Sunday’s rally through Paris – minus German chancellor Angela Merkel and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.
In the original photo, Merkel was positioned between French President Francois Hollande and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas.
But in the version which went to print, the head of the EU’s biggest economy and most populous nation was wiped from the record.
Hollande and Abbas, who was labelled a hypocrite by Hamas for attending the rally, were instead left standing shoulder-to-shoulder.
Similarly Hidalgo, behind a decision to grant Charlie Hebdo honorary citizenship of the capital following the massacre, was magically disappeared from her spot next to European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker.
The image also featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – who got to keep his place.
But Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt was cropped out of the picture’s far left with only her hand remaining in shot.
Orthodox Jewish title have previously been criticised for editing female leaders out of photographs on the grounds of “modesty”.
In 2011, Brooklyn paper Di Tzeitung’s apologised for its decision to remove then-US secretary of state Hillary Clinton from an image of US officials monitoring the mission to kill Osama bin Laden.
It said it had a “long-standing editorial policy” of not publishing womens’ images because its readers believed “women should be appreciated for who they are and what they do, not for what they look like”.
An estimated 1.6 million people took to the streets of Paris on Sunday to protest against the actions of the Islamic extremists who killed 17 people in attacks on the offices of the satirical paper and a kosher grocery store.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny and British Prime Minister David Cameron were among the world leaders who marched in the rally.
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