Fake news impact: Pak minister issues threat against Israel
NEW YORK : Pakistan’s defence minister has threatened Israel his country could use nuclear weapons, while reacting to a fake news report that his Israeli counterpart had warned of “nuclear retaliation” to Islamabad’s role in Syria.
“Israeli def min threatens nuclear retaliation presuming pak role in Syria against Daesh. Israel forgets Pakistan is a Nuclear state too,” Khawaja Muhammad Asif tweeted.
New York Times reported that Asif went ballistic apparently reacting to an article published on awdnews.com, titled “Israeli Defense Minister: If Pakistan send ground troops to Syria on any pretext, we will destroy this country with a nuclear attack”.
The fake story about Israel even misidentified the country’s defence minister, attributing quotations to a former minister, Moshe Yaalon.
Israel’s current minister of defence is Avigdor Lieberman. The Israeli defence ministry responded on Twitter to say the report was fictitious.
“The statement attributed to fmr Def Min Yaalon re Pakistan was never said,” the ministry wrote in Twitter post directed at Asif. The Israeli ministry added in a second post: “Reports referred to by the Pakistani Def Min are entirely false.”
The NYT report said the proliferation of fake news stories, spread on social networks and produced by a variety of sources including pranksters, foreign governments and enterprising individuals who hope to receive advertising revenue by driving traffic to their websites, has become an increasingly serious problem.