Great Britain. “British police allow Muslims to attack British man”? Fake by MP Berkowicz

As a wave of riots sweeps across the UK murder of three girls in Southportthe web is flooded with footage of events on the streets of British cities. They are eagerly shared by anti-migrant internet users, anti-migration groups, and politicians – including Polish ones.

Let us recall: on July 29, in Southport, near Liverpool, England, a knife-wielding perpetrator attacked a group of children during a dance class. He injured 13 people – two adults and 11 children. Three girls died. According to the police, the attacker had been living in Banks near Southport since 2013, his parents are from Rwanda, but he was born in Cardiff, Wales. He was charged with murder and attempted murder. Because he is a minor, his identity could not be revealed until he was charged. And by that time, immediately after the attack, false information about the alleged nationality of the perpetrator began to circulate on the internet: that his name was Ali Al-Shakati and that he was a Muslim asylum seeker who arrived in the UK on a boat in 2023. Reports of the alleged origin and religion of the attacker spread quickly on social media, with posts with this message reaching millions of views – fueling anti-migrant sentiment in society. “Some of these posts were accompanied by Islamophobic and racist hatred” – She described in an analysis for BBC News by Marianna Spring, BBC journalist and disinformation expert.

The first riots in Southport broke out the day after the attack, near the local mosque. 53 police officers were injured. The demonstrations spread to other parts of the country. People took to the streets in Liverpool, Bristol, Nottingham, Leeds, Blackpool, Hull, Stoke-on-Trent, Manchester, Belfast. Footage of these events was posted online. But old videos unrelated to current events, sometimes not even from the UK, are also being circulated on social media to increase anti-migrant and anti-Muslim sentiment. For example, verified in Concrete24 material about “Muslim immigrants showing their weapons on the street.”

READ MORE IN KONKRET24: “Muslim knife dances in Birmingham”. What movie is that?

In turn, on August 11, Konfederacja MP Konrad Berkowicz, vice-president of New Hope, he published on the X website, a recording showing the police trying to lead a man to a police car, but they are attacked by a group of men, including those with darker skin tones, some wearing balaclavas. The policeman is unable to cope with these attacks, is hit, and the man he was leading is beaten and then kicked. MP Berkowicz commented on the film: “A beautiful attitude of the British police, who, as part of cultural enrichment, hold a British man by the arms and allow Muslims to attack him.” On August 12, the entry had over 200 thousand views, on August 13 – over 335 thousand.

Polish internet users who did not hide their dislike of migrants wrote in the comments under the post. “I wonder when they will open their eyes”; “Because this is the Islamic police of the British Caliphate. There is no more Great Britain”; “Inflatable savages versus the effeminate, leftist pseudo-police”; “soon the same here” – they commented (original spelling of posts).

However, many pointed out to Berkowicz that he was repeating fake news. “It's a bit embarrassing that the MP is repeating a fake. How can we believe that you can check the laws if you can't check the source of the recording,” one of them noted. Another wrote: “You're spreading fakes. The recording is from 2022 and shows a demonstration in London against the situation in Iran.” He also responded Jakup Krupaa Polish journalist working in the UK: “A lie. This is an old recording from 2022, recorded in a completely different context of protests regarding the situation in Iran.”

Because in fact the Confederation MP published fake news.

The footage shown by Berkowicz had already been circulated as fake news earlier, in 2023 – but then as allegedly showing scenes of violence at a pro-Palestinian rally in London. As BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh explained in November last year, the film comes from September 2022 and was made during clashes between opponents of the Iranian regime at a protest in London.

September 26, 2022 Al-Jazeera AFP reported that in Paris and London, police clashed with protesters trying to reach the Iranian embassies in those cities. Photos posted on social media showed protesters trying to break through police security barriers in front of the Iranian embassy. In London the police reportedthat she made 12 arrests and five officers were seriously injured. The service Independent described the crowd chanting “Death to the Islamic Republic” and waving the national flag of Iran before the 1979 revolution. The embassy was doused with red paint.

The protests were a show of protest against Iranian government policies. In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, was arrested by Iranian morality police for allegedly failing to adhere to the Islamic dress code. Three days later, Amini died in custody. Iranian officials denied that she had been beaten by police and claimed that she died of natural causes. However, her death sparked widespread protests across the country that lasted for more than 100 days. It was in solidarity with the protesters in Iran that demonstrations were held outside Iranian embassies in European cities.

On September 28, 2022, the Australian service news.com.au published a piece entitled: “Nasty footage shows Mahsa Amini protest spiralling out of control in London” – illustrated with stills from a video now released by MP Berkowicz. The images were captioned: “A man was dragged into a police van with a bloody face after being pelted with objects. On-site investigations have shown the incident took place near Kilburn in north-west London”. The source of the images was “footage taken by bystanders” which “showed protesters with Iranian flags clashing with Territorial Police officers outside the embassy”.

There are many videos of the event online. They were recorded from different perspectives by witnesses and posted en masse on social media in September 2022. The earliest we could find appeared on Facebook September 25, 2022: it is recorded from a different perspective than the version published by MP Berkowicz, but it shows the same man in a Boston Celtics sweatshirt and a police car. “A supporter of the Islamic Republic (of Iran – ed.) was beaten by protesters in a London Muslim center,” the author described the recording, adding the hashtag #MahsaAmini.

IN Polish network a recording of this event was published a year ago, among others, on the jbzd.com blog – but also with the incorrect description that these were supposedly riots in London before the England-Iran match. Both this information and the content of MP Berkowicz's post are false.

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