Post misleadingly claims stage collapsed after Pakistani imam made anti-Semitic comments

The Israel-Hamas war has led to a surge in anti-Semitic comments on social media. A recent Facebook post suggested a video showed a Pakistani imam making an anti-Semitic comment before the platform beneath him collapsed in “divine timing”. But the claim is misleading; the video shows an overcrowded stage caving in at a rally held by a Pakistani opposition party back in 2018. The man was welcoming people to the stage when it happened.

“The timing is Divine! An imam in Pakistan preaches that he had a dream in which it said that all Jews must be exterminated. He goes on to say, ‘If this is not true, may the ground sink beneath me.’ Look what happens…(sic),” reads a post shared on Facebook on December 21, 2023.

The post includes a 24-second clip showing several men in Islamic dress standing on an elevated platform. A speaker standing behind a lectern adorned with posters addresses the crowd.

Published in a pro-Israel Facebook group, the post has been shared more than 210 times. Comments under it suggested that many people believed the imam was divinely punished when the stage collapsed just moments after he purportedly called for the “extermination of Jews”.

Also shared on X, the claim has been circulating on Facebook (including here and here) and YouTube since 2018. However, it has resurfaced amid rising anti-Semitism linked to the bloodiest ever Gaza war.

The war was triggered by Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel that resulted in the deaths of around 1,140 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official figures. The militants also took around 250 people hostage that day, more than half of whom remain in Gaza according to Israeli officials.

Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas and launched a punishing offensive that has reduced vast areas of Gaza to a ruined wasteland and killed around 22,000 people, mostly women and children, according to the territory’s health ministry.

“Antisemitic incidents rose dramatically after the (October 7) attack, in the US and around the globe,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO of the US-based Anti-Defamation League in a statement on December 28, 2023 (archived here).

However, the claim that the video showed a stage collapsing under a Pakistani imam after he made anti-Semitic comments is misleading.

Political rally

Using the InVID-WeVerify video verification tool, AFP Fact Check found that the video has been online since July 2018.

Indian journalist Aditya Raj Kaul published a longer version of the clip on X on July 18, 2018 (archived here).

A Pakistani YouTube channel called “Public News” also shared a segment of the footage on the same day (archived here).

Kaul and Public News said in their posts that the videos showed a stage collapsing at a rally organised by a Pakistani political party Jamaat el-Islami in Mohmand, Peshawar in Pakistan.

Voice of America published another version of the video on Facebook showing more of the aftermath (archived here).

The party’s leader, Siraj ul-Haq, was on the stage when it collapsed, according to a report published on the same day by a Karachi-based news outlet, Geo News (archived here).

A screenshot of the Geo News report, taken on December 28, 2023

Another Pakistani news outlet, Ary News, reported that the stage, made of planks, gave way “after failing to withstand the heavy burden” of “party leaders and workers” (archived here).

An AFP correspondent in Pakistan said the man in the video spoke Pashto, which is spoken in parts of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, and was welcoming leaders of the political party to the rally.