Mário Cruz / Lusa
André Ventura, president of Chega
Video republished by Chega’s leader and candidate for president is, in fact, from a Christmas party that took place in the same city where the attack took place, on Sunday.
AND false that the Muslim community of Sydney celebrated Sunday on the Australian beach of Bondi with fireworks.
Among the torrent of videos of the armed attack on the Jewish festival, images circulate of alleged celebrations by the Muslim community, namely the video in question, which already has millions of views and is, in fact, from a Christmas party at a Rotary club in the city.
National and international accounts claim that the video shows “celebrations held by Muslims in Sydney after the Islamic terrorist attack that murdered 10 people” on Bondi beach.
One of the main disseminators of this information was the Polish account Visegrád24, on the social network Although this post was later deleted, several accounts equally known for spreading misinformation reproduced the same claim in posts that already have or exceed one million views.
Early this Monday morning, Chega leader André Ventura shared the same video on several social networkswith the caption “Islamists celebrate the attack in Australia with fireworks” and he himself wrote the phrases “Continue to let them enter Europe as they please and then don’t complain!” and “A shame! a shame! a shame!”
Continue to let them enter Europe as they please and then don’t complain!
— André Ventura (@AndreCVentura)
André Ventura’s misleading publications have more than 700,000 views.
How do you know that the video was decontextualized?
Reverse and keyword searches made it possible to identify the first rumors starting at 9pm local time (10am in Lisbon), with reports of “celebratory fireworks being launched in Bankstown”, a town in the suburbs of Sydney. Subsequently, another account placed in private mode shared several videos of the alleged celebrations, one of which received more than 500,000 views.
Some of these publications immediately received several comments and proposals for notes from the community on
In fact, the Canterbury Bankstown city page announced the ‘Carols by Candlelight’ initiative for the late afternoon of the 14th, an event promoted 57 years ago by the Rotary Club of Padstow, one of the city’s neighborhoods, which would culminate in “a spectacular fireworks display”.
A Lusa Check has not yet received a response from the Rotary club, but compared the 12 seconds of the video of the alleged Islamic celebrations with one of the videos of the fireworks from the Christmas party at the venue in Playford Park, in Padstow, more than 20 kilometers from Bondi, and found that the images correspond to an excerpt from that Christmas display, namely the fireworks launched from 1:33 minutes into this video shared on TikTok:
@su_men_de_silva♬ original sound – Sumen’ D’
