Last week a video purporting to show a young Syrian boy braving bullets being fired at him by the Assad regime, in order to rescue a girl younger than him. It went viral. On one hand, here was a young Syrian boy displaying tremendous courage. On the other hand, the Assad regime was seen as willing to gun down young children who were just trying to get out of the crossfire.
Pallywood hits Syria, via Malta.
As it turns out, it was all faked. Perhaps worse is the fact that the U.S. State Department tweeted out a photo of the incident and praising they boy while blaming the Assad regime. It should be noted that the standard for the U.S. State Department when presenting such information should be very high:
There was a problem with the video, however. The BBC reported:
Millions of YouTube viewers have been captivated by the ‘Syrian hero boy’ who manages to rescue a little girl while under gunfire. Now a group of Norwegian filmmakers have told BBC Trending they are behind it. They say it was filmed on location in Malta this summer with the intention of being presented as real.
Lars Klevberg, a 34-year-old film director based in Oslo, wrote a script after watching news coverage of the conflict in Syria. He says he deliberately presented the film as reality in order to generate a discussion about children in conflict zones.
“If I could make a film and pretend it was real, people would share it and react with hope,” he said. “We shot it in Malta in May this year on a set that was used for other famous movies like Troy and Gladiator,” Klevberg said. “The little boy and girl are professional actors from Malta. The voices in the background are Syrian refugees living in Malta.”
Here is the original video that was actually filmed in Malta and passed off as pro-Syrian rebel propaganda:
This is certainly not the first time that the U.S and the Obama administration has pushed lies about what’s going on in Syria. Most notably is the issue of the chemical attack in August of 2013. This latest incident – and especially the State Department’s willingness to push it as real – only serves to bolster the claims of those who say the chemical attack was perpetrated not by Assad but by the rebels, with the help of Turkey.
If you want to see the inspiration for what happened in Malta, just watch Pallywood: