Czech-language internet users, Roma included, fall for debunked hoax about mass wedding of adults and children
A long-debunked hoax about an alleged wedding between 450 little girls and adult men has been spreading online once more in the Czech Republic. This particular hoax was first spread in 2009.
Those sharing the images are attempting to frame them as “evidence” that Muslims allegedly engage in pedophilia. On the Czech-language internet this particular hoax has also fooled Romani internet users.
Members of the Romani community now sharing the hoax first received it from Jiří Hanzl, chair of the Lampa association. “These aren’t pedophiles, that’s just a cultural difference,” reads the caption on the photo shared by Hanzl.
Some members of the Romani community have responded to the image. “This is too much!” one such outraged internet user, Hana Janová, responds to Hanzl’s post.
The hoax has been reported on by the Czech Government’s Hate Free Culture project and by the weekly RESPEKT. The English-language internet portal Hoax-slayer has also refuted it.
The photo comes from video footage of little girls dressed up for a mass wedding between legally adult men and women that was held under the auspices of the Hamas organization in July 2009. What the photos actually show are little girls who are family members of either the bride or the groom accompanying the grooms as bridesmaids, as is the local custom.
Hamas has already refuted all of the internet rumors about the photos by explaining that the actual brides at this event were not little girls and that the youngest person to marry during the mass ceremony was 16 years old. Wnd.com also reported that it researched the images and translated what was captured on the video footage of the wedding.
According to those findings, the little girls speak in the video about marriages of their family members, not about getting married themselves. The hoax has been previously disseminated by the anti-Islamic hate group called “We Don’t Want Islam in the Czech Republic”.
