The Arabic term ‘Ummah’ refers to ‘nation’ which basically is the whole of Muslim world or the community of ‘believers’. The one which unites all Muslims. In what appears like an example of ‘Ummah’, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of ‘fact-checking’ website AltNews, on Thursday ‘fact-checked’ a viral video where a Muslim man can be seen beating up a woman. The video had gone viral with claims that the family was based out of America and that the Muslim girl was being beaten up by her family members for dating a non-Muslim man.
In 🇺🇸 Muslim girl gets beaten by brother for wanting to date non-Muslim guy. pic.twitter.com/CPN68zYRLq
— Tin Man 🇮🇳 (@NumbKhopdi) May 11, 2022
On seeing allegations put on an alleged American Muslim family, Zubair took it upon himself to ‘fact-check’ the claims in the viral video.
Mohammed Zubair, AltNews cofounder, claimed that the video is not from America but from Russia. he claimed that since he was tagged by many people on social media to verify this viral video with claims that a Muslim girl was being beaten up by her family members, he took it upon himself to verify.
Zubair then described an elaborate procedure on how he ‘fact-checked’ the viral claim. Zubair, it seems almost instinctively, carried out a reverse image search on Yandex, a search engine for Russian language often pegged as ‘Google’ for Russian. Zubair, it seems, didn’t look anywhere else but went directly on Yandex.
So, Zubair went on Yandex, found some article from 2021 which had embedded an Instagram video, he reached out to the Instagram user who was the girl’s friend and informed that the girl as well as the guy she was in love with (because of whom she was beaten up) were both Muslims. Girl’s family from Russia while guy’s from Ukraine and the families had a long time feud going on, he claimed. Almost like a Bollywood potboiler.
At the end of his thread explaining how it was just some people of Muslim family beating up the girl for falling in love with another Muslim man the family was enemies with. The claim in the video is false, he added. What claim? That the girl was in love with a non-Muslim. And perhaps that the family was Russian and not American. OpIndia cannot independently verify these claims by Zubair. But the fact that a Muslim girl was indeed being beaten up by her own family members for falling in love with a man they did not approve of was true.
But see how the ‘fact-check’ was selective? This is also how AltNews has regularly ‘fact-checked’ irrelevant videos in middle of violence against Hindus as ‘old’ and tried to create a narrative that even the current videos are ‘fake’. During the Delhi anti-Hindu riots, the ‘factcheckers’ launched a staunch defence of Tahir Hussain, the AAP Councillor, who played a prominent part in the violence in North East Delhi and is an accused in the murder case of Ankit Sharma. Few days back, while framing charges of conspiracy, arson, rioting against Hussain, a Delhi Court observed that he ‘instigated a mob to teach kafirs a lesson’.
You can read how AltNews doubles up as Islamic propaganda website in detail here.
