Tag: United States

Former President Donald Trump made the egregious claim that the perpetrators of the violent attacks on Israel, are entering the U.S. through the southern border. 

“The same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our totally open southern border, at record numbers,” Trump said Oct. 9 on Truth Social. “Are they planning an attack within our country? Crooked Joe Biden and his boss Barack Hussein Obama did this to us!”

Trump’s statement leaves the impression that Hamas militants — the terrorist group in Gaza that attacked Israel — are crossing the border in Mexico into the United States.

Trump provided no evidence to back up his claim, and didn’t elaborate when he made similar remarks in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and  West Palm Beach, Florida. We asked his campaign for evidence and received no reply.

Terrorism experts told us that there is no proof to back up that claim. And a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said there is no intelligence to signal a threat to the U.S. from Hamas.

“There is no credible evidence of Hamas on the southern border of the United States,” said Jason M. Blazakis, director of the Middlebury College’s Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism. 

Hamas is an Islamic militant group that formed in Gaza in the 1980s. The U.S. State Department designated it as a terrorist group in 1997. Hamas in 2006 won elections in the Palestinian territories and in 2007 took over Gaza. Hamas’ charter calls for the destruction of Israel. Hamas’ attack on multiple sites in Israel in October was the deadliest attack on Israel in decades.

Trump’s comments echo what he said as president, when he linked immigrants to terrorism.

No evidence that Hamas militants crossing southern border

Despite historically high numbers of migrant encounters at the border, it is not “open” for everyone to come in, as Trump claimed. Physical barriers, surveillance technology and about 20,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents help limit who and what enters the country. 

“There is no truth” to Trump’s claim about Hamas militants “pouring” across the U.S. southern border, said David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute’s vice president for economic and social policy studies, studied attacks or planned attacks in the U.S. from 1975 through 2022 by 219 foreign-born terrorists. During the nearly five-decade span, four were from Palestine, and the most recent attempted attack was in 1997. Nowrasteh told PolitiFact that as far as he knew, none of the attackers were part of Hamas. The largest group executing an attack on U.S. soil came from Saudi Arabia — the 9/11 terrorists. 

Experts said there is some evidence of Middle East terrorist groups operating in Latin America. But the experts added that they had not seen evidence that Hamas had crossed the U.S. southern border.

Arie Perliger, a security studies professor at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, said that “there was some evidence for coordination or collaboration between Hezbollah and Mexican cartels” in the past decade, but he had never heard of Hamas’s involvement. (Hezbollah is a militant group from Lebanon and a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.)

Republicans misleadingly pivot to U.S. border security  

Some of Trump’s rivals for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination have also stoked fears about a threat in the U.S. following the Hamas attack.

But experts said that Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel cannot be looked at through the lens of U.S. border security. 

“They both involve borders, but the comparison ends there,” Bier said. “People aren’t crossing the border to conduct terrorist attacks or take over parts of the United States. A very small percentage may come to commit ordinary crimes, like selling drugs, but overwhelmingly, they are coming for economic opportunity and freedom.”

There is not a terrorist movement in Mexico, Central America or South America that targets the U.S. or in any way compares with Hamas targeting Israel, Nowrasteh said. 

“It’s just a radically different security environment,” Nowrasteh said.

Blazakis, of Middlebury College, said the comparison was a “false analogy.”

“The vast majority of people who are at the southern border are trying to escape criminal gangs and drug trafficking organization violence,” he said.

Terrorist watch list isn’t an indicator of a threat

The number of times immigration officials have encountered people on the terrorist watchlist at the U.S. southern border has risen in the past two years. U.S. Customs and Border Protection reports this data annually but doesn’t include the  nationality of people on the list. 

Experts say imprecise and sometimes flawed data make these numbers a bad gauge of the threat of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil. For example, many of the people on the list are neither suspected terrorists nor affiliated with foreign terrorist organizations that pose a threat to the U.S., said Nowrasteh. 

Instead, people could be on the list because they have some affiliation with members of a terrorist organization, according to CBP. Or they could belong to domestic guerilla groups, sometimes inactive, that are not international terrorist organizations. 

Additionally, CBP data can include false positives, or people who were added to the watchlist because they share the same name or birth date as someone listed.

Our ruling 

Trump said, “the same people that raided Israel are pouring into our once beautiful USA, through our TOTALLY OPEN SOUTHERN BORDER, at Record Numbers.”

The onus is on Trump to prove his claim, and he provided no evidence to support it.

Terrorism experts told us that there is no evidence that Hamas, a terrorist group in Gaza, has militants crossing the Mexico-U.S. border, much less in record numbers. And a DHS spokesperson said there is no credible intelligence to signal a threat to the U.S. from Hamas. 

The southern border is not open for everyone to come in. Barriers, detection technology and immigration agents limit who and what can enter the country.  

We rate Trump’s statement Pants on Fire!

RELATED: Fact-check: What Trump said about ‘$6 billion to Iran,’ immigration, economy at New Hampshire rally

RELATED: Donald Trump wrong that US tax dollars went to Iran, Hamas

As founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab doesn’t have the power to end private car ownership anywhere, let alone around the world. 

But a recent Instagram post suggests Schwab has that clout, claiming that he has announced “the end of car ownership.” 

A video clip shows Schwab saying: “You will use an app like Uber, but not anymore to call some driver but an automatically guided car, a self-driven car, will come to your hotel or wherever you are and will bring you to the airport. Los Angeles is one of the cities with the heaviest traffic who told me in 2030 Los Angeles will be private car driven free. And this will allow to transform highways into parks and other public spheres.”

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The clip is authentic, from a speech Schwab gave at the 2015 World Governments Summit, an event aimed at inspiring and shaping future generations of governments. 

Schwab’s address was titled,”The New Global Context and Its Impact on the Role of Government.”

But it doesn’t amount to an announcement about the end of car ownership. 

We rate that claim False.

 

Social media is flooded with out-of-context videos and images users claim are coming from Israel or Gaza. Finding the original source is key.

The war between Hamas and Israel is playing out on social media through graphic images and videos shared on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.

But, like any conflict we’ve watched from our phone screens in the last decade, misinformation is rampant — including videos claiming to show Israeli children being held in cages and a fake BBC reporter fanning the flames of war. Fortunately, as with any breaking news event, like the ongoing war in Ukraine, some journalistic thinking and media literacy techniques can help you avoid sharing misinformation.

As director of the Poynter Institute’s digital media literacy initiative MediaWise, I recommend first asking three questions developed by the Stanford History Education Group in its study of how fact-checkers navigate the internet:

• Who’s behind the information?
• What’s the evidence?
• What do other sources say?

To answer the first question, leave the page you’re on, open a few tabs, and use keywords to find out more about a user or news outlet from a post. This is called lateral reading.

There are a lot of self-proclaimed experts in Middle Eastern geopolitics on social media right now. To sift through the noise, search for their name, the organization with which they’re affiliated, the university on their LinkedIn page and their username and scan results to gauge their expertise. Don’t click the first result you see — look for a link from a familiar source or fact-checking outlet — this technique is called click restraint.

Most of the falsehoods stemming from the conflict are in the form of old videos or photos, or visuals with misleading captions. Your best tool against these fakes: reverse image search.

Download the photo, or grab a screenshot of a notable section of the video you’re checking out, and drop it into Google Lens or TinEye to find the original source. Consider this false post claiming to show a high-ranking Israeli general detained by Hamas. With a screenshot, I tracked down a Russian news site that posted the same video — about an arrest in Azerbaijan from a week ago.

While I remain concerned about generative artificial intelligence supercharging the creation of disinformation, I’ve yet to see any significant AI images or videos. Still, it’s worth remaining on guard, and checking images for watermarks, warped features, too many fingers or other inconsistencies.

Of course, the best advice for avoiding misinformation is to simply avoid social media. If you, like me, are addicted to X, then the second-best advice is to follow a curated list of experts about what’s happening. David Clinch, a veteran journalist and media expert, created a useful list here, which includes journalists from Al-Jazeera English to Haaretz.

The war between Israel and Hamas has accelerated the spread of misinformation and broadened its reach due to graphic and emotional visuals, a deeply political conflict whose repercussions are felt around the world and a wealth of unreliable sources. It’s important to remember that you don’t have to share anything about the conflict on social media.

After Hamas launched attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, social media users circulated a document they said showed the U.S. immediately coming to Israel’s aid.

“The U.S. is sending $8B worth of military aid to Israel,” read the text in an Oct. 7 TikTok video. 

The video showed a screenshot of a supposed White House memorandum dated Oct. 7, titled, “Memorandum on the Delegation of Authority Under Section 506(a)(1) of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961.” 

The screenshot read:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including section 621 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 (FAA), I hereby delegate to the Secretary of State the authority under section 506(a)(1) of the FAA to direct the drawdown of up to $8 billion in defense articles and services of the Department of Defense, and military education and training, to provide assistance to Israel and to make the determinations required under such section to direct such a drawdown.

(Screengrab from TikTok)

This claim was amplified in other social media posts, including an Oct. 8 Instagram post that misspelled Israel and read,  “US reportedly plans to give Isarel 8 billion dollars in military aid.” 

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

This is an altered photo. A memo with the same title and nearly identical text was published on the White House website, but it was dated July 25, and it authorized the drawdown of up to $400 million to aid Ukraine, not $8 billion to aid Israel.

The White House did not immediately respond to PolitiFact’s query about the social media claims. 

President Joe Biden issued a statement Oct. 7 condemning Hamas’ attacks in Israel, saying he made clear to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “We stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the Government and people of Israel.”

An Oct. 8 readout of a call between Biden and Netanyahu says that Biden told Netanyahu that additional assistance for the Israeli Defense Forces is “now on its way to Israel with more to follow over the coming days.” 

The U.S. is sending multiple military ships and aircraft closer to Israel and will supply the Israel Defense Forces with munitions, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said. An Oct. 10 readout of another call between Biden and Netanyahu showed Biden said U.S. support is being sent in “ammunition, Iron Dome interceptors, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, and other defense materiel.”

Additional U.S. aid requires congressional approval, which could hit obstacles as the House seeks to replace Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker.

But the memorandum authorizing the drawdown of $8 billion to Israel is fake. We rate this claim False.

RELATED: Fact-checking Tim Scott on Biden administration’s early response to Hamas attacks in Israel

Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have starred in many Hollywood movies and television shows over the years, and now social media posts are claiming the couple’s latest venture is hawking free spending cards from the government.

An Oct. 10 Facebook video opens with a clip of Pinkett Smith sitting on a couch and addressing the camera.

“Guys, is everyone ready for another round of stimulus checks? All right then, pay attention before Will starts crying again about me filling you in on this secret. Right now, the gov is paying out Americans by the thousands with these $5,600 health spending cards that get reloaded each and every month,” Pinkett Smith supposedly says in the video, abbreviating government as “gov.”

The video urges people to act now by “clicking the link below,” claiming this offer is only available “until the end of the week.”

(Screengrab from Facebook)

This post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

Don’t get too excited — this is a scam.

It’s not Pinkett Smith’s voice in the video. The audio has been edited to make it look as if she is promoting this health spending card. The video clip of Pinkett Smith was taken from her TikTok account.

The video also includes clips of Will Smith crying during the 2020 “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reunion and slapping comedian Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony.

Another video made a similar claim about health spending cards and used clips of Smith with edited audio.

Flexible spending accounts are a legitimate benefit offered by some health insurance plans that consumers can use to cover health care expenses. But the government doesn’t give out free cash for these accounts; the money is typically contributed from someone’s paycheck before taxes.

The website linked in the post does not mention this offer of a “$5,600 health spending card.” Rather, it advertises free or low-cost health insurance and “premium tax credits” through the Affordable Care Act.

The website is not affiliated with the federal government. The official government website for the Affordable Care Act is HealthCare.gov.

The Federal Trade Commission warns people to beware of health insurance scams. Don’t provide personal information online or over the phone to unverified sources.

We rate the claim that a video shows Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith advertising “$5,600 health spending cards” False.