2024-07-10 09:58:05
Russia is apparently aiming to incite Muslims in Germany against Ukraine. A current case concerns a Berlin mosque. It involves a pig’s head and a Palestinian flag.
Until Thursday, no one had ever heard of the “Berliner Wochenzeitung”. Now an article on a website with the same name is being passed around the world and used as a source to stir up outrage, especially among Muslims. The site is presumably part of a new global Russian disinformation campaign with supposedly local news sites. And the target is Ukraine.
The “Berliner Wochenzeitung”, which is not a newspaper at all, published a report on Thursday, which coincided with the Friday prayers that are important for Muslims. The Berlin police only found out about it through a press inquiry and there is little evidence of its veracity: a pig’s head was thrown through a closed window into Germany’s oldest mosque. “That case did not happen,” a police spokesman told t-online on Friday.
In fact, such an incident would be a major provocation because the pig is considered an unclean animal in Islam. The report also claims that Ukrainians committed the alleged act in support of Israel. The pig’s head was wrapped in a Palestinian flag.
The mosque, built 100 years ago according to plans by a German architect, is located in a middle-class area in Wilmersdorf. The assembly room can accommodate 400 people. However, so many people are rarely there: The mosque is the German headquarters of the Lahore Ahmadiyya movement, whose community in Germany has fewer than 100 members. It does not belong to the well-known religious community of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat with 55,000 members. The fact that the community is so small and has little networking with other Muslims in Germany made it difficult to obtain information. Its imam, Amir Aziz, is currently in hospital, but contacted t-online in the afternoon: “The news is ‘fake’! Such an incident never took place.”*
Photos in the report suggest that there was indeed a pig’s head in the building and that the situation there could at least have been staged. The ground is very similar to the floor of the mosque, and there is even a shard of glass in the photo. One photo shows a Palestinian flag wrapped around an object. In the second photo, the flag is unfurled, a pig’s head is lying on it and the phrase “Ukraine stands for Israel” is written on the flag. The phrase sounds as if it had been translated into German from another language, as have other parts of the text.
The fake “Berliner Wochenzeitung” also claimed that the police should now investigate “whether Ukrainian nationals were involved in the heinous act [sic]”. However, there was no report, and she only found out about the alleged incident through a press inquiry. However, on Friday the state security service began investigations and drove to the mosque. It is about faking a crime – with a possible major political dimension behind it. Contact with members of the mosque revealed that the incident described did not happen, according to a police spokesman. No windows are broken either.
The article has a clear thrust: Ukrainians are said to be hostile to Muslims and to be one-sidedly on Israel’s side in the Gaza war. The supposed news page was probably created specifically for the story. There are a few other current texts there. On June 18, the page was still completely empty; on June 23, there was only a picture of a defecating dog and otherwise dummy text. There is no imprint.
Some of the articles now available were apparently created by artificial intelligence from texts from other news sites. They are easy to read. The article about the pig’s head, on the other hand, stands out for its awkward wording.
The site fits a pattern of current Russian disinformation: websites of supposed local newspapers have also recently been set up in the USA, Great Britain and France. The sites are hosted on servers of large providers in the USA. The trail leads to John Mark Dougan, an American in Moscow who has built up a network of 160 websites of supposed news media. He denied involvement to the New York Times and BBC, although he has boasted about it in the past. He was fired from the police force in the USA on various charges, was granted asylum in Moscow and apparently sees himself as being on a kind of vendetta.