Did the U.K. newspaper The Guardian publish an opinion column withe the headline "The next Pope must be Muslim or there will be violence on the streets of Europe" by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, in April 2025? No, that's not true: A screenshot that appeared to show such an article was originally published by an account on X that says it publishes "satire and parody". It also misspelled "Guardian" as "Grauniad", a long-standing joke about typos and slips at the paper.
An example of the screenshot could be found in this post on X (archived here) published on April 22, 2025 with a comment that read:
If we don't hand things over to mad Muslims like the Guardian and BBC favourite Alibaba Brown here then they will kill us all is basically what she's saying.
Same old message from Islam for the last 1400 years
The post took the screenshot of the article seriously and used it as part of a political argument. Alongside the headline "The next Pope must be Muslim or there will be violence in the streets of Europe", the fake article also contained a subheader that read "By refusing to acknowledge the European demographic, Catholics are sending a message of hate by electing a Bishop".
This was the screenshot in question:
(Image source: @grauniadmeme on X)
It was first published on April 21, 2025 by an account named @grauniadmeme on X (archived here). That account has a bio (archived here) that read:
Wrongthink, Newspeak, Thoughtcrime from the Fiction Department at the Ministry of Truth. ʙᴏᴛʜ sᴀᴛɪʀᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴘᴀʀᴏᴅʏ #PeakGuardian
The name of the paper in the screenshot was also not "The Guardian" but "The Grauniad", a long-standing joke about the paper's penchant for publishing "typos and other slips" as it acknowledged here in 2021 (archived here).
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has published opinion articles in The Guardian (archived here) but her latest at the time of writing dated back to November 2016, five years before the death of Pope Francis and any concerns about the election of a new pontiff.
