Big Ben was stolen from Palestine. So claimed an elderly woman, in Arabic, in a
retweeted clip I received recently.
Yes, that
Big Ben: the great bell in the iconic clock tower of London’s Palace of Westminster. The British took it, she said, from a tower they demolished at
Hebron Gate in Jerusalem in 1922.
I discovered (well, duh!) that the bell was cast at Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London and installed in the Palace of Westminster, with much pomp and circumstance, in 1858.
Next, I checked the Wikipedia entry on
the clock tower at Hebron Gate in Jerusalem and discovered that it was not built until 1908 – a full half-century after Big Ben’s installation in London.
Next, I tracked down the Twitter account from which the clip had been forwarded. It belonged to a pro-Israel satirical site,
TheMossadIL, which
masquerades as the official Twitter feed of Israel’s secret service.
But the clip hadn’t originated there – it had been reposted by that account as an object of ridicule. I noticed that the clip had a TikTok “watermark” – a stamp that appears automatically at the top and bottom of every downloaded TikTok video, comprising the TikTok logo and video creator’s username – which identified the clip’s author as
@aliarisheq. So, that’s where I went next.
The feed, seemingly curated by a young Arabic-speaking woman, contained additional clips featuring the woman in the Big Ben clip and advertisements for jewelry.
Using the View Page Source (Ctrl + U) function in my Chrome browser, I learned that the clip in question was uploaded at 17:12 on Dec. 19, 2019. The woman claiming that “Big Ben” was stolen in 1922 looked like she was in her 70s. To have witnessed the alleged theft, she would have to be a centenarian. So she wasn’t a witness: What we had here was an oral tradition, of which she was, at best, a second- or third-hand bearer.
Protecting from pollution
All of which means that unless the many corroborating sources cited in Wikipedia’s Big Ben entry are an elaborate hoax of QAnon proportions, her claim doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
Big Ben was not stolen from Palestine and has no place on
lists of controversial cultural artifacts like the
Parthenon Marbles that former colonial powers are being asked to return to their countries of origin.
(full article online)
A tweet led a scholar to consider how misinformation is changing the ways we evaluate information and trust others.
theconversation.com
www.latimes.com
www.amnesty.org
www.algemeiner.com
www.jpost.com
www.israelnationalnews.com
elderofziyon.blogspot.com
palwatch.org
hamodia.com
