Waking up this morning, I noticed a friend sharing a story from a news blog called “The Daily Patriot.” It claimed that a security guard, a Muslim man by the name of Zouheir, was the one who stopped a suicide bomber outside of the Stade de France on Friday. Here’s the lede:
The site makes this claim based on an unlinked Wall Street Journal article (presumably this one), which aroused my suspicions.
The Journal, for its part, makes it pretty clear Zouheir was only their source for the story, not the object of the story itself, nor even an eyewitness to the story.
Naturally, that hasn’t stopped the Internet from making Zouheir into a hero, rather than a media source.
French daily Libération already has a piece debunking it.
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Read the rest here.
But that hasn’t stopped the Internet and even professional writers and journalists from advancing this plainly false claim.
On CNN this morning, the Financial Times‘s Simon Kuper repeated it:
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Whether Kuper made this claim based on viewing a viral meme or a poorly sourced news article isn’t known.
What is known is that the guard who turned away a suicide bomber at the Stade de France was not a Muslim man named Zouheir.
Unless, of course, there are two security guards there with that name.
UPDATE: Kuper has tweeted that he misspoke.
UPDATE 2: The Daily Mail’s Piers Morgan has repeated the claim in a column.
UPDATE 3: The Daily Patriot blog has changed the link on its blog without a correction, now linking to the British Metro, which cites the Journal as its source.
UPDATE 4: Piers Morgan’s post has disappeared from the Daily Mail webpage. (Screengrabs here and here.) As have tweets promoting the story.
UPDATE 5: Internet debunking site Snopes has posted about Zouheir.
UPDATE 6: Morgan’s story is back up at the Daily Mail with earlier references removed, and no correction.
