A VIDEO OF children bowing and prostrating themselves in a mosque has been shared by an Irish anti-migrant internet personality along with the false claim that the footage is evidence of what children are being taught in schools nowadays. 

The video is from the Belgian city of Antwerp and is almost seven years old. The children were there as part of a trip by a non-profit that aims to raise awareness of other religions, including Islam and Judaism. 

In a Facebook post, seen more than 171,000 times since being posted on 1 August, footage of a group of about twenty children shows them bowing before placing their foreheads to the ground in what appears to be a mosque.

On the other side of a split screen, an Irish man speaks to camera saying, “So this is what they’re teaching kids now in school [...] indoctrination of Europe’s children continues without objection. It’s crazy isn’t it?”

A still from the video, reposted to the YouTube channel of Joods Actueel.

The man, who goes by Michael McCarthy, frequently posts misleading arguments that migrants are bad or dangerous. The Journal has previously factchecked claims by him that footage of a woman being attacked in a church was from Europe, or that the majority of Irish people disagree with the EU, among other misleading statements.

McCarthy appears to have taken the footage from the X account of David Atherton, who is quoted in McCarthy’s video. Atherton writes for The European Conservative, a reactionary right-wing publication that receives funding from the Victor Orbán-led Hungarian government.

Atherton’s X post has been viewed more than 87,400 times, according to X’s statistics.

McCarthy’s video says that the footage is of something that is going on in schools ‘now’ (the video is seven years old) and that there has been no objection to it (there was). He says that what the video shows is being taught in schools, which is not the case either. 

Reading the comments under the video, it is also clear that some people believe that the footage is from Ireland (it’s not) or perhaps the UK (which is also wrong).

The footage has been online since at least November 2018, around the same time Belgian sources indicate that it was filmed.

Reports from the time give conflicting locations of the mosque but agree that it is in the Antwerp region. Publicly available images indicate that it was in fact filmed at a mosque in the Seefhoek district.

The trip to the mosque was organised by a non-profit group that seeks to connect people from diverse backgrounds. 

A local Jewish newspaper interviewed one of the organisers of the event, an imam, who said that a teacher had suggested that students could join in for a prayer and that none of the children were made to participate if they didn’t want to. It is not part of a curriculum.

The group that organised the trip had also visited a synagogue in Antwerp to promote mutual respect, the imam said.

And rather than there being no objection to the video, it appears to have stirred considerable controversy (the man who initially posted the footage said he took it down after receiving death threats).

Vlaams Belang, one of the largest political parties in the region, was, at the time the footage was filmed, objecting to Muslim events that it considered to be a form of indoctrination. The party would go on to campaign for stopping visits to mosques by schoolchildren.

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