Muslim World Reacts to President Obama’s Latest Speech-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
A viral video claims to show Muslim talk show hosts react to a speech that President Obama gave on the dangers of climate change.
The Truth:
This eRumor is false.
The video that claims to show the “Muslim world’s reaction” to President Obama’s climate change speech is a parody.
The video was posted on the IphoneConservative’s YouTube channel. It showed portions of a commencement address that President Obama gave at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy in May 2015 spliced with excerpts from a foreign talk show that were incorrectly subtitled.
Link to embeded YouTube video: https://youtu.be/UXodRLLkth4
In the commencement address, President Obama told Coast Guard graduates that climate change posed an imminent threat to national security and that it would “cut to the very core of (the Coast Guard’s) service.”
In the viral video, false subtitles made it appear as though foreign-langauge speaking commentators were commenting on the president’s address with statements like:
“Is he insane?? Climate change is their number one security threat?”
“Is he on drugs?”
“It doesn’t make any sense.”
“What did you expect from an affirmative action president? This guy has never served in the military, never worked a day in his life.”
Within days, the video had nearly 200,000 views. Many of those viewers were duped into believing that foreign commentators had actually said those things about President Obama.
But the caption under the video states, “For those that understand ‘Poe’s Law,’ no further disclaimer is required.” And the definition of Poe’s Law is all that’s needed to dispel this eRumor as fiction:
“Not to be confused with the law of poetry enshrined by Edgar Allan Poe, the internet Poe’s Law states: ‘Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.’ It was originally formulated by Nathan Poe in 2005 during a debate on christianforums.com about evolution, and referred to creationism rather than all fundamentalism, but has since been expanded.”