There is an absolutely shocking article being passed around at the moment. The article appears to be on the BBC website and dated 22nd January:
Are Jews and ‘Jewish Interests’ overrepresented in government?
BBC Religious Correspondent Caroline Wyatt investigates a question on the mind of a nation too afraid to ask it.
In rational, post-Enlightenment Europe, religion has long since been relegated to a safe space, with Judaism and Christianity the safe targets of satire in secular western societies.
Not so Islam. It is commonly held and agreed that the primary motive behind the Charlie Hebdo attack was to harm the cartoonists of the Paris based publication. 5 of the total number of victims killed were cartoonists. Only one cartoonist was listed as being Jewish.
The political spin given to the whole affair was one of ‘anti semitism’.
The shooting at the French Kosher Market was linked to the Charlie Hebdo atrocity solely on the grounds that the demands made by the hostage takers related to the perpetrators. And suddenly ‘Je Suis Juif’ placards materialise.
The problem is that it rests on a site called NEWS.BBC.UK.TO . The TO at the end stands for Tonga and so this site is utterly fake. Almost every link on the page does legitimately go back to the valid BBC.CO.UK site, but this one page has been created for nefarious means. I’m putting the URL here but I’m not linking to it. I took sensible precautions before visiting this page as I have no idea what malicious stuff may be running there.
The article itself peddles absolutely classic “over powerful Jews” controlling the world type stuff.
http://news.bbc.uk.to/are-jews-and-jewish-interests-overrepresented-in-government/
It looks like this article might be an attempt to twist the following (legitimate) BBC story on its head by replacing Islam with Judaism. As a piece of satire it doesn’t work.
Paris attack highlights Europe’s struggle with Islamism
By Caroline Wyatt Religious affairs correspondent, BBC News
In the heart of Europe in 2015, the killing of cartoonists and journalists for allegedly insulting God still comes as a shock, despite the rising number of such attacks in recent years.
In rational, post-Enlightenment Europe, religion has long since been relegated to a safe space, with Judaism and Christianity the safe targets of satire in secular western societies.
Not so Islam. The battle within Islam itself between Sunni and Shia, so evident in the wars of the Middle East, and the fight between extremist interpretations of Islam such as those of Islamic State and Muslims who wish to practice their religion in peace, is now being played out on the streets of Europe with potentially devastating consequences for social cohesion.
It will be interesting to see where this crops up, if you see it being passed around, leave a comment and let us know and please link people to this post so they can understand what’s going on here. If you have any information about who set this up and what they were planning to achieve, we’d love to hear from you.
Update 29 Jan: The following article in the well respected site World Trademark Review has been brought to my attention and it’s well worth reading if you want more details on this.
A number of news reports appeared last week about a hoax BBC News article, hosted at ‘bbc-news.co.uk’, that went viral after claiming that video footage of the Charlie Hebdoattack in Paris was fake (screenshot here). For a time the article was modified to redirect to the Twitter account of Anonymous, the global hacker and activist network, but the hoax BBC site subsequently re-emerged this week, alongside another hoax site mimicking the Reuters UK website (at time of writing, a second fake BBC News site has just gone live at ‘news.bbc.uk.to’, illustrating the fast moving nature of these activities).
The first fake BBC News website (‘bbc-news.co.uk’) has been posting original content which mocks the BBCas well as content taken from other news sources (eg, this post is taken word-for-word from The Guardian?). The bottom of the site has an altered BBC logo reading ‘Bread & Beer Circus’ and there is also an associated Twitter account (@BBCNews_couk) with the same name. The second fake BBC News site (‘news.bbc.uk.to’) was registered this week and more closely resembles the authentic site (comparison). Worryingly, it appears to be posting original (and controversial) content and falsely attributing actual BBC correspondents.
The fake Reuters UK website (‘reuters-news.net’) was registered this week, and also contains content taken from other sites and fake news stories (this post merges misinformation about cannibals in Greece with word-for-word content from a NY Times article). Furthermore, it uses elements from the legitimate Reuters UK website to closely mirror the original (comparison). These three hoax news websites appear to be linked due to a ‘Bread & Beer Circus’ account on content collating platform Scoop.it posting links from the websites within minutes of them going online.
