Meta.mk, under the cooperation agreement with fact-checking service Truthmeter.mk republishes its latest assessment about a viral media manipulation affecting the US and North Macedonia:
Conservative US commentator and a long time media figure, owner of The Blaze media network Glenn Beck published a tweet containing a snippet of his interview with the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton.
Here is the tweet (Source: @glenbeck on Twitter, date: 26. August, 2021):
I’ve heard reports that OUR State Department told Macedonia to stop taking Afghan refugees. @SenTomCotton tells me he’s heard similar reports. If our govt won’t save these people, WE WILL. But the State Dept. must stop standing in the way. pic.twitter.com/gYzYBzR8N4
— Glenn Beck (@glennbeck) August 26, 2021
In the video Beck says that they (it is unclear who the “they” are) “were looking for places to fly people in just to hold them and Macedonia was one of them and our ambassador … or the ambassador of Macedonia was called by the State Department and told not to take any of these people”.
Truthmeter contacted the Government of the North Macedonia asking for additional information, first and foremost, if it is true that they received this kind of request from the US authorities and we were told that the claims in the tweet and the video excerpt are untrue:
This is not true. The government has approved accepting 780 Afghan citizens in order to save their lives. The complete humanitarian mission by the Government is implemented in complete cooperation with the United States.
The fact-checking service received a similar response from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Republic of North Macedonia.
Contrary to Beck’s claims, the Prime Minister Zoran Zaev, the same day (the 26th August 2021), just a couple of hours before the publication of this tweet, reiterated his policy of accepting Afghan refugees:
If we save only one person, I think we are saving the world. We are providing solidarity, we called and offered together with our strategic partners as a country, in accordance to our capabilities and capacities, to share this responsibility, promote principles and values with the democratic world, when it comes to accepting people from Afghanistan under threat of losing their lives.
Glen Beck, during his career as commentator and media personality promoted various conspiracy theories mainly about his liberal opponents like Barack Obama, but also against the philanthropist George Soros.
He stated that Obama was building FEMA concentration camps to put opponents in, and falsely claimed that the John Holdren who led the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Obama administration “proposed forcing abortions and putting sterilants in the drinking water to control population.” Beck is a prominent proponent of conspiracy theories about George Soros, a Jewish philanthropist. Beck falsely claimed that Soros as a boy helped “send the Jews to the death camps” and repeated the unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that Soros caused the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Later he apologized for these statements, but some considered it was too little, too late.
First Afghan refugees had already arrived in Tirana, the capital of the neighboring Albania and the arrival of the refugees in North Macedonia is also expected soon. This has been a subject of public debate for more than a week now and issues such as the expenses for their stay are also being discussed, but those will be pretty minor. In any case, there are no indications whatsoever about any cancelation of the Afghan refugees arrival. The profile of the persons arriving is also known, with PM Zaev stating that there will be “peacemakers, human rights activists, women, children, persons working on democracy issues and assisting our armed forces”, since the Army of the Republic of North Macedonia was also part of the coalition forces in Afghanistan.
Taking all of these arguments into consideration, we are rating this claim of the conservative commentator Glenn Beck, stated on his media network The Blaze, as untrue, Truthmeter.mk writes.
