In response to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas militants in Gaza, social media users have adopted the hashtag #blockout2024 to encourage celebrities to take more action to support Palestinians.
By blocking content from celebrities, people online are hoping they would take a stance on the humanitarian crisis.
One video of actress Angelina Jolie, who has also served as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and special envoy , has amassed millions of views in recent days on X and TikTok with the #blockout2024 hashtag.
In the video, Jolie appears to be providing a message of hope and support.
“But all genocides begin with a failure to challenge these behaviors. Your generation can resist this. It already is. And that gives me hope. You do not need to be prisoners of the past. You can resist attempts to divide you from anybody else on the basis of their nationality, or ethnicity or religion or the color of their skin. You can reject discrimination, and hate speech and propaganda and lies. You can share a vision for a world built on equal rights, equal laws, respect for difference, could not exist, would not succeed. That is the best way we can honor the families we remember today. And the victims of persecution everywhere with whom we can be proud to stand. I'm thinking today of the other survivors whose husbands brothers and sons were murdered in the genocide. I think two of the victims in particular the children who were denied the chance to live and love and have families of their own. It is a loss beyond words. I send you my sympathy and my respect, and I grieve with you,” she appears to say.
People in the comments of the video said Jolie wasn’t talking about the war between Israel and Hamas, or about the pro-Palestine movement at all.
THE QUESTION
Does this video show Angelina Jolie supporting pro-Palestine protesters?
THE SOURCES
- Original video published on YouTube in July 2020 by Remembering Srebrenica, an organization that raises awareness for victims of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide
- Transcript of Angelina Jolie’s keynote speech on the 25th anniversary of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide
- InVid and RevEye, video and photo forensics tools
THE ANSWER
No, this video doesn’t show Angelina Jolie supporting pro-Palestine protesters.
WHAT WE FOUND
Angelina Jolie wasn’t showing support for pro-Palestine protesters in the viral video. The video, which was filmed in 2020, shows Jolie delivering a keynote speech on the 25th anniversary of the Bosnian Srebrenica genocide.
Using InVid, a video forensics tool, VERIFY analyzed the keyframes of the viral video and conducted a reverse image search of the frames. That led us to these videos posted to YouTube in July 2020.
The viral video is spliced together using several clips from Jolie’s keynote address, but all references to the Bosnian genocide were removed, giving the appearance Jolie could be speaking about the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas.
For example, in the viral video Jolie says, “You can share a vision for a world built on equal rights, equal laws, respect for difference, could not exist, would not succeed. That is the best way we can honor the families we remember today.”
At the 46-second mark, there is a jump to a different framed shot of Jolie, indicating an edit in the footage.
The Bosnian war lasted for three years, from 1992 to 1995. The most infamous event of the war was the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995, when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serbs. This event popularized the term “ethnic cleansing.”
Jolie has been an outspoken advocate for the victims of the Bosnian genocide for years. She made her directorial debut in 2011 with the film “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” a film about the events in Bosnia leading up to the massacre.
VERIFY has found no record of public statements made by Jolie about the events ongoing between Israel and Hamas.
VERIFY reached out to Jolie’s representatives and did not hear back at the time of publication.
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