A long-standing journalistic tradition ends when Muslim brings down “Man bites dog”

In Warrington, the English town whose haute couture gave the world the t-shirt stretched over undersized bra and spillover bosom, the local rag, Warrington Guardian, has just set off a veritable journalistic revolution by replacing the long-standing demeaning headline slander, “Man bites dog,” with one of its own.

Given the raging transatlantic controversy of claims and counter-claims surrounding the origin of the “Man bites dog” aphorism that threatened to tear late-19th-century journalism apart, Warrington Guardian’s Tom Bedworth, a keen student of media history, was taking no chances. Under the headline, “Latchford Pizza Hut delivered pork to Muslim family,” on 30 January 2023 —breaking news, obviously; “The incident took place on Thursday, January 19”— Bedworth, in the thick of the action, reports that a Muslim family got ensnared in the pizza-delivery mix-ups that so bedevil the cut-throat world of early-evening pizza home delivery. Apart from 3 (three) full-colour photos: a premises front; a street scene for context; and a close-up detail of a partially-eaten pizza still in its box and clearly showing bits of pork, this third photo taken by the VICTIM, Mr Mahtab Alam himself, duly acknowledged. Allah alone knows what the poor VICTIM must have suffered. "We have no space for forgiveness, and now we feel violated," sobbed the entire family.

But Bedworth is nothing if not a forensic recorder of heinous crimes. “The pizzas arrived after more than an hour of waiting, [Mahtab] having placed the order at around 6.30pm, and receiving the delivery at 7.40pm,” reports the sleuth, “despite living barely 10 minutes away.” That a hectic pizza joint might not see a 30-quid delivery “barely 10 minutes away” as exactly a drop-everything-right-now priority did not cross the astute new journalist’s mind. What matters is that the customer was Muslim, had to wait for over an hour while everybody else, kufaar, got their 50-quid orders delivered much further away and on top of all that, was made to chomp into haram flesh for his troubles, like a kafir in the act of paying jizya. It is not known whether Mahtab Alam said “Bismillah” before tucking in. It was perhaps too sensitive a question for the culturally-aware Bedworth to ask. But the evidence is incontrovertible. Let the record show that “Muslim bites pork” is the new “Man bites dog.” It’s official and you read it here first.