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  • 2015-12-27 (xsd:date)
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  • Does This Video Show Muslims Destroying British WWII Graves in Libya? (en)
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  • A video that had been circulating for a few years, touted as showing a group of Muslims destroying a cemetery in Libya where British World War II dead are interred, experienced a renewed viral spread in January 2015. The video is indeed real, but the story behind what it depicts is not as clear cut as the accompanying explanations make it out to be. First of all, the incident portrayed in the video did not occur in January 2015: it took place nearly three years earlier, and the video record of it had been widely available online ever since. There is also no foreseeable threat of the video's being removed from YouTube. The video was taken in March 2012, when a group of vandals attacked two World War II cemeteries in Benghazi, Libya. A BBC report noted the group seen in the video, who targeted Muslim shrines as well as the headstones of Christian and Jewish soldiers, were militant Islamists known as Salafists: More than 200 headstones were damaged at the Benghazi British Military Cemetery, and dozens more were damaged at the Benghazi War Cemetery. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission said after the attack the headstones would be restored to a standard befitting the sacrifice of those commemorated at Benghazi. However, the Salafist vandals did not target burial plots at that cemetery because of the nationality (i.e., British) or religion (i.e., non-Muslim) of those who are interred there. Rather, the incident was part of a wave of Salafists attacking graves and shrines in Libya — including mosques and Muslim burial sites — because they hold that worshipping at graves and shrines is un-Islamic and idolatrous: A January 2015 article described Salafists as a fundamentalists who believe in a return to the original ways of Islam: It should also be noted hundreds of thousands of Muslims fought alongside British troops during the First and Second World Wars. While the exact number of Muslim soldiers who participated in those wars is not known, a 2009 Reuters article reported more than one-third of the 2.5 million soldiers serving in the Indian Army at the end of World War II were Muslims. Historian Major Gordon Corrigan also wrote Muslim soldiers were instrumental in defeating the Central Powers during World War I: (en)
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