Verdict: Information disseminated by the Antiliberal Club is FAKE NEWS.
Resume: The Antiliberal Club’s video,
which shows how a Muslim man destroys bottles of alcohol in a shop and screams that no alcohol should be sold during Ramadan, is a show staged by a comedian. The so-called YouTuber, Hasnaoui, uses this video to mock the campaign against Muslim migrants. The video and description promoted by the Antiliberal Club belongs to the category of fake news when a fraudster seeks to portray a joke as a real fact.
Analysis The Antiliberal Club’s Facebook page posted a video with the following description: “Muslim screams in a shop in France that during Ramadan (a month of fasting practiced by Muslims) no alcohol should be sold and breaks bottles of alcohol.” The video has garnered 2,800 views. Posted comments are mostly negative. Apparently, the video has created both irritation and hatred among some Georgian Facebook users. The video has subtitles in English which read that the “aggressor” protests selling alcohol during Ramadan whilst breaking bottles and then demands to talk with the manager. FactCheck
took interest in the accuracy of the video and verified its true origins.
We have found out that in fact the Antiliberal Club video does not really show a Muslim ravaging a shop. In reality, the person in the video is a so-called YouTuber, a comedian named Hasnaoui. He manages a very popular YouTube channel, Hasnaoui Officiel, which has 177,552 subscribers whilst his Facebook page, Hasnaoui حسناوي, boasts almost 380,000 subscribers and his Instagram page, hasnaoui.officiel, has 105,000 subscribers. The user, with his humorous and frequently bizarre videos, joined the online community in May 2015. It is written in his manifested mission that he is a comedian and plans to amuse Parisians with his pranks (a prank is a YouTuber term which refers to funny jokes of different forms. This could be a simulation, a skit, sarcastic videos, etc.). A variety of problems and public discourses have been mocked and criticized in his videos posted since 2015. The jokes address the religious and political attitudes of different ethnicities and groups. Hasnaoui visits different places in the city and shoots some humorous videos. Those filmed in shops are quite frequent. For instance, in one video he offers a Muslim some pork sausage and tries to persuade the target that eating it is a good idea. In another case, he mocks McDonalds staff and so on. In our specific video highlighted in this article and which was later reposted by the Antiliberal Club, Hasnaoui responds to the campaign against Muslim migrants launched by specific circles. The whole of France was in the news in 2015-2016 when Muslims were protesting the selling of alcohol in bars during Ramadan (the name of the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and a holy month for Muslims where every Muslim is supposed to keep lent from dawn until sunset). The dissemination of this unconfirmed information was mostly aimed at discrediting migrant Muslims. In July 2015, the comedian’s video was posted as a real story by the online website, Liveleak. Since then, the video has been circulating through the internet in a variety of forms and at different times. On 28 January 2018, the Antiliberal Club posted the video as a real and recent fact.
