An internet user managed to trap the weekly Valeurs contemporaine by pretending to be a ZEP professor in Strasbourg. In this false testimony, he claimed to be threatened by Muslim students after addressing issues of secularism and the Holocaust. The newspaper admitted its mistake and apologized.
Weekly Current values trapped by a surfer on his journalistic methods. To denounce the supposed lack of verification of information from this media, this man, named Malik on Twitter, pretended to be a teacher from Alsace supposedly threatened by his students on questions of secularism and Islam.
“In Strasbourg, the warning cry of a teacher in the face of community pressure raging in his school”, headlined this Tuesday evening March 30 the website of Current values. Except that the story was put together from scratch by the person concerned. “With all this fake news on Muslims, I said to myself that something had to be done to show that by telling anything, we could have a platform,” he explains on Twitter.
A very elaborate hoax by telephone
To get to trap the newspaper, he started by posting a tweet in which he pretended to be Morad, a French professor of Algerian origin who teaches in ZEP in Strasbourg (Bas-Rhin). To give himself credit, he even changed his twitter bio. Within hours, he was contacted by a reporter from Current values who offered him an interview.
Okay guys, do you want to know how I tricked Current Values into pretending to be a threatened teacher, all with Cheb Khaled and Cheb Hasni? With a small extract from my “interview”? Expand u2b07 ufe0f pic.twitter.com/sUG3Ubs5FV
– Malik Milka (@ abdelmalik92) March 30, 2021
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Malik then explained to the journalist that his students “refuse to talk about secularism and the Shoah” in class and that he receives “death threats”. Invented “facts”, but which would echo certain elements of the Samuel Paty affair. Malik then continues his fictitious scenario by explaining having tried to alert “without success” the administration of his school. He pushes the line by asserting that some of his students “refuse hydroalcoholic gel because it makes impure”. He even invents a false reason for having broken the silence: the controversy surrounding a mosque construction project in Strasbourg, very real this one.
The newspaper apologizes on Twitter for this “false testimony”
The journalist of Current values asks him for proof of threat he would have received. To pay even more for his head, Malik scribbles on a piece of paper a few words in Arabic: “We are shab Al baroud Wa l’carabina” (“We are the men of gunpowder and the rifle”), who are in is the words of a song by Cheb Khaled, singer of Algerian raï, much appreciated by Malik. Without any prior verification with the school or the academy, the newspaper publishes the article this Tuesday at the end of the morning.
Malik will wait until 8:30 p.m., until the article has lived well all day, to denounce the deception on his Twitter account. One hour later, Current values chooses to remove this paper from its website and splits a tweet on its official account. “Rather than fight against Islamism, some prefer to try to trap the media, answers the newspaper. To those who chuckle: do they realize the correspondence with many existing cases? To our readers: our apologies for this false relayed testimony. “
Rather than fighting against Islamism, some prefer to try to trap the media. To those who sneer: Do they realize the correspondence with many existing cases? To our readers: our apologies for this relayed false testimony. https://t.co/8EdvdTKQFC
– Current values ن (@Values) March 30, 2021
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