Does image show Obama meeting Iranian president Hassan Rouhani? Fact Check

An image claims to show President Obama shaking hands with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.

FALSE

The image is fake, and has been digitally altered.

In 2015, a Republican advert supporting Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson and criticising Barack Obama’s links to the Iranian government accidentally included a digitally manipulated image of the president and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani shaking hands. The advert – created by a group called Restoration PAC – ran in the Madison, Milwaukee and Green Bay areas of Wisconsin. During the 60 second video appeared a photo (above) of what appears to be president Barack Obama shaking hands with the Iranian leader Hassan Rouhani, along with the implication that the US president has not been dealing with the terrorism and Iran in the correct way.

In 2020, the photo was tweeted by Paul Gosar, the congressman for Arizona’s fourth district, giving it another lease of life on social media. Gosar also wrote “the world is a better place without either of them in power” in his tweet, despite Rouhani at the time still being the President of Iran. (Gosar later rebutted rather bizarrely by claiming “No one said this wasn’t photoshopped” and “No one said the president of Iran was dead.”)

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As for the 2015 advert, at the time the photo of Obama and Rouhani appears, the narrator say…

Others, like President Obama, insist on signing a toothless agreement that makes us less safe.

However, as we stated above, the image has been digitally altered. The image of Rouhani has been super-imposed onto then Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh during a meeting with Obama in 2011. The real image can be seen below.

Other photos can be seen of the pair during their meeting.

In fact there is no record of Obama and Rouhani ever meeting in person. Such a meet would likely have garnered plenty of mainstream media attention. In fact even near-meets have been reported on in the media, since the US president and Iranian president have not met since 1979.

Buzzfeed alerted Restoration PAC of their error, and the image has since been replaced with a side-by-side comparison of Obama and Rouhani.

Images that have been digitally altered flood the Internet and those who create these types of politically motivated adverts need to be careful that the photos they choose to use in such adverts are genuine, or risk facing a potential political backlash.