A couple of websites from Croatia have recently actualised the fake news asserting that migrants from the Middle East got beaten-up after they attacked a group of girls in a nightclub in Murmansk (Russia). The news has been circulating the websites for almost two years now, despite the fact that the police has confuted the whole story as soon as it was published.
The news was first published a few moments after midnight, on January 30, 2016, on Flash Nord agency website where it was written that five Arab men got beaten in the nightclub called “Gandwick”, located in a town of Poljarnie Zori, after they have been harassing the girls in the club. It was also stated that the agency lacks official confirmation of this event which did not prevent a series of Russian media and blogs to share the news the very next day. All of a sudden, five participants of the incident ended up being fifty – “18 migrants hospitalised after the fight” and “33 Russians arrested”. Moreover, in further sharing, the place of the incident “was moved” to the city of Murmansk (which is the centre of Murmanskaya region where the town of Poljarnie Zori is also situated).
The police of the Murmanskaya region denied all of the allegations the very first day. This is still available on the website of TASS news agency.
There was no fight between migrants and local residents, migrants are behaving themselves properly and they spend most of their time in hotels.
The news was denied by a local website Komsomolskaya Pravda as well. This website investigated the story the same day and found that the story was framed around a false police report which had been filed on the night of January 30, 2016. After receiving the report, the police visited the site but did not encounter any fight, and no one at the nightclub witnessed anything similar that night. The text indicates that surveillance cameras installed in the club and around it, did not record any incident – in fact, the footage confirmed that Arab migrants were not even present at the club that night. The report is concluded with the following words:
The news about the fight started spreading via internet media and social networks, including the websites from Ukraine as well. Also, a photo emerged, but it was determined that the photo shows a snapshot from a video of a fight in Hakasija from three years ago.
Even though a plethora of websites redistributed “the news” accompanied with standard clickbait headlines promising “video clip” of the incident in “Gandwick” nightclub (tactics utilized by many websites in our region as well), neither one out of hundreds of articles that had been shared, was illustrated with a photo or the footage of the incident. The fact that today even the banalest events are caught on smartphones’ cameras should have been indicative enough to suspect in the authenticity of this “exclusive news”.
Despite the dementi, a couple of days later, the story appeared on right-oriented American website Daily Caller, where it received almost 140,000 reactions on Facebook and over 4,000 on Twitter. The news soon became popular on websites of far-right media and groups around the world. For instance, news got redistributed by New Zealand’s party National Front, whose political activities are linked to racist ideas about “white supremacy” and it is directed against migrants and refugees, especially against those coming from Asia and Africa.
Translation in English probably made it easier for the news to get published in our languages as well, since the same day the news was published by the Daily Caller it had made it to the Dnevno.rs website, followed by Kurir, Nezavisne novine and Max portal. From these websites, the news started to get redistributed on various other websites. Throughout 2016, the news was published by the Sarajevo grad, Zvornik danas, BH index, Vijesti, and Pravda, while in 2017 websites Web tribune, Informer, Srpski dnevnik and Beograd 365 have done the same. While doing the research we were not able to find a single dementi of this confirmed fake news in our language. Moreover, regional websites spiced this news up by adding even more fabrications to it:
Migrants coming from the Middle East that went out in a popular club a Norwegian border, in Murmanskaya region, started to harass young Russian girls and they realised, though late, that they are not in Europe (…) The problem escalated when Norway deported 50 Middle Eastern men because of “bad conduct” back to Russia, through which they passed to reach “the country of milk and honey”. When they found themselves in Russia again, men decided to get some fun in a local disco club “Gandvik”, they forgot where they are, and began to annoy Russian girls.
(…)
Even though the police released obscure statements, comments on social networks are buzzing about the incident. Russian men are different from those in Europe, but the police are different as well.
(…)
To make things even worse for migrants, police officers who were at the scene did not show great tolerance toward the migrants. Although they advised the local Russians not to lynch rude guys, they silently joined them.
(…)
-Welcome to Russia. We are thrilled to have visitors, but you should not forget – you are guests here – said one of the incident participants.
Although two years have passed since this fake news was initially published and distributed, several websites from Croatia “dug it out” and actualised it again. The fake story
fitted perfectly in a lunatic essay by Alexander Maistrovoy on “degenerated genetic ethic code of men in Europe”, who unlike the men from Russia did not “defend their women from migrants”.
How did a false police report grow into “beating up the refugees”?
Ten days prior to the publishing of the fake news, deportation of asylees had begun from Norway to Russia – including the refugees from Syria as well. Despite the criticism that Norway received from the United Nations among many others, this country deported refugees who were seeking the asylum in this country back to Russia – specifically, to Russian cities Nikel and Murmansk, which are in the close proximity of Russian-Norwegian border.
A day prior to the fake news publishing, the website World Tribune published the Alexander Maistrovoy’s essay, which could be easily used as an inspiration for an “upgrade” to a story about the incident in Murmansk, and it is certainly very illustrative for the motives behind the story.
On January 29, 2016, the World Tribune published his (Alexander Maistrovoy’s) text. The motives behind the essay that has been published by the World Tribune on January 29, 2016, included a series of group attacks that were recorded in Germany in the New Year’s Eve, in 2016. In police reports, the victims of the attack (which included sexual harassment and robbery) described the offenders as young men who did not speak German, and they looked like someone coming from Arab or North-African countries. Therefore, Maistrovoy wrote that this would have never happened in Russia, since such attacks would be prevented by the local men, whose “genetic ethic code” (whatever it means) did not get degenerated, as European men’s did.
This racist-sexist essay which even mentions Siberian stoats and rabbits, was especially favoured by a website Croative. The website t translated the essay and published it as an integral part of the repeated story about “Russians who protect their women” (with the note that the text was “written very intelligently”). The same combination of fake news and the inciting essay was subsequently published by Max portal, describing the article as a “new story about Russians who had beaten up the migrants”; as well as the website Priznajem, whose headline suggests that Russian men “have taught migrants a lesson”.
THE MOMENT OF THE HYPNOTIC DANCE IS COMING
This is an astonishing and thoughtful essay by Alexander Maistrovoy, Russian Jew, an emigrant, who questions the details of the news published on Saturday: Refugees attacked women in a Russian nightclub. They got beaten up were sent to prison. The news has evoked many comments. The text is written very intelligently and it is suggested for reading.
(…)
In my correspondence regarding the events in the city of Cologne, the editor of one Russian newspaper had sent me both a confusing and a discouraging inquiry: Where were the German men? Indeed, for us who grew up in Soviet Russia, it is inconceivable that a drunk guy can come to a public place and harras girls on New Year’s Eve, in the centre of Moscow or Saint Petersburg. If he just dared to do so, he would hardly live to see the next day, and he would probably become a “martyr” in some other world…
The ethic code that is innate to our genetic level would urge us to get involved and help the women out, especially in the situation where normal grown-up men can outnumber the villains; and villains are not terrorists or aliens, but rather ordinary street punkers.
Based on the events that happened in Germany, Sweden, Austria … this code is fatally endangered. Many men who were both healthy and strong did not come to help the victims, even though they witnessed what was happening, and heard the victims screaming and calling for help.
(…)
There is a small carnivore in Siberia, called stoat. It hunts rabbits and chases animals that are all heavier, faster and stronger. It does not crawl, nor does it wait in the ambush, instead it hunts its prey while running. It performs a hypnotic acrobatic death dance in front of the prey. Stoat hypnotises and bewitches its victim while getting closer to it, preparing to grab it by the neck. Rabbit dies in shock. Why does the prey allow stoat to get it bewitched and killed with no resistance? Biologists were not able to solve the riddle of the stoat’s hypnotic dance.
All these articles we rank as fake news. Their “reactivation” with the inciting essay we rank as biased reporting.
(Raskrinkavanje.ba)
