This isn’t intended to be a fully fledged post – more of a resource. It will never be exhaustive, but I want to keep a record of some of the most spectacular examples of fake news and or/twisted facts circulated by far right and so-called libertarian websites.
I’ll just make the one observation for now: if your cause is really so just, why do you need to make so much shit up?
The deception: Self-styled alt-right “counterculture” guru Paul Joseph Watson posted this tweet on 16th January 2017. The wording is unambiguous: anti-fascist protesters were plotting an acid attack at an event to celebrate Trump’s inauguration.
The truth: The “acid” in question was butyric acid. The protesters were planning to let off a stink bomb.
The deception: A group of Muslim immigrants in Berlin kidnapped a teenage girl and raped her repeatedly for 30 hours.
The truth: The girl, a 13-year-old Russian-German, later admitted making up the story. None of the far-right websites bothered updating their articles or taking them down.
The deception: Paul Golding, leader of the confederacy of cunts that is Britain First, posted a video on his Twitter account purportedly showing British Muslims celebrating the terror attack in the Champs-Elysees in Paris in April 2017.
The truth: The video, filmed in 2009, showed Pakistani cricket fans celebrating victory over Sri Lanka, as anyone who watched the video to the end – and saw them shouting “Pakistan” and hugging passing white people – could have worked out.
The deception: Hillary Clinton supporters staged violent riots after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election.
The truth: There was some trouble. But a number of far-right websites and Twitter accounts used pictures from the 2011 London riots as “proof” of the violence. (The picture above was used, inter alia, in a Guardian article in June 2016, five months before the supposed riots.)
The deception: Schools in the US are forcing non-Muslim primary school children to pray to Mecca.
The truth: It was a tornado drill.
The deception: A four-year-old boy was beaten by a gang of Muslim immigrants in Sweden.
The truth: The picture the far-right pricks used showed a four-year-old girl savaged by her family’s rottweiler in Cardiff in 2008.
The deception: When news broke of an explosion near the team bus of the Borussia Dortmund football team in April 2017, a rumour circulated that Islamic jihadists were responsible. Paul Joseph Watson was quick to point this out to his 573,000 followers on Twitter.
The truth: A few days later, police arrested a German-Russian market trader over the incident. He had carried out the attack in order to drive down Borussia Dortmund’s share price. Did Paul Joseph Watson hasten to convey this rather significant development to his 573,000 followers? Did he fuck.
The deception: A few weeks back, a lot of Islamophobes on Twitter circulated the above photo, claiming that it showed a mass execution of gay men in Saudi Arabia (or sometimes Iran). The tweets were all deleted when the con was pointed out, but I saved the photo.
The truth: It was an Icelandic dance troupe rehearsing a performance for the Rekjavik arts festival.
The deception: Muslims never speak out against jihadist terror.
The truth:
If you find any particularly egregious examples of equivocation, misrepresentation, or outright mendacity designed to fuel hatred like this, let me know and I’ll add them to the list. But please make sure it’s all properly sourced.