Iran’s State TV Switches Ronaldo’s Words With Hateful Comments About Israel
Iran’s state broadcaster has put a false voiceover on a video of Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo, attributing hate speech about Israeli fans to him.
Iran’s state broadcaster has put a false voiceover on a video of Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo, attributing hate speech about Israeli fans to him.
In the video, originally published in 2016 in support of the Syrian children suffering in the country’s civil war, what Ronaldo really says is calling on the kids not to lose hope. “I am a very famous player but you are the true heroes.”
In the version the IRIB broadcast, Ronaldo’s voice is dubbed in Persian as saying that he cannot tolerate the Israeli spectators as they are the most hated for him, adding that he does not exchange his jersey with assassins. The Islamic Republic’s state channel also referred to a hoax back in 2013 as true, that falsely claimed Ronaldo refused to exchange his t-shirt with an Israeli player after a match with its national football team.
In Reality, the video showed a Portuguese player who had swapped his shirt with an Israeli player walking past Ronaldo, but some anti-Israeli media reported it as if Ronaldo refused to exchange his shirt. The Portuguese player is easily recognized from the dark colored shorts he is wearing.
The state broadcaster aired the fake video about a month after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei criticized Ronaldo’s fame among students in Iranian schools. Khamenei compared Ronaldo with an Iranian scientist, Saeed Kazemi Ashtiani, the head of Iran’s Royan Infertility Research Center who died in 2006, saying that students know Ronaldo but not Ashtiani.
