Would Pakistan have really launched a nuclear attack on Israel over a fake news story? Well Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif made just such a threat on Twitter because of a completely fabricated report.
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Man this fake news things has really gotten out of hand, hasn’t it? First people complained that it affected the results of the 2016 Presidential election. Then people started to go after Facebook and Google over the proliferation of fake news, blaming them for their own gullibility. Now the man in charge of a nuclear power’s military almost started World War III because of it.
Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif tweeted a nuclear threat to Israel, believing that it was planning to use nuclear weapons against supposed Pakistani troops serving in Syria.
https://twitter.com/KhawajaMAsif/status/812370140507545600
How did it come to this? Well apparently the Pakistani Defense Minister is so dumb that he fell for a story published in a fake news site whose name we will not even mention here. This website cannot even use proper grammar as evidenced by the headline which caused this mess: “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops into Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack.”
And the story was so absurd it did not even cite anyone who currently serves in the Israeli government or defense establishment. It did, however, offer a fake quote attributed to former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon who is now out of politics.
reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false
— Ministry of Defense (@Israel_MOD) December 24, 2016
Israel’s Defense Ministry responded with tweets of its own saying, “The statement attributed to fmr Def Min Yaalon re Pakistan was never said. Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false.”
While Pakistani Defense Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif has not apologized nor retracted his nuclear threats, he did tweet the following statement this morning: “Our nuclear prgrm is only a deterrence to protect our freedom.We desire to coexist in peace , both in our region & beyond.”
Well that must have made everyone feel a lot better now.
A note to all of those people who think that it is somehow cool and refreshing to have an American President speak his mind all the time on social media and is not interested in getting daily national security briefings: do not forget this incident. At some point soon out right lies and provocative comments by world leaders could lead to an actual war. The people on the ground who die in the bombings will die for nothing.
