10/4/2020, 11:29 am
Snopes looks at the People's Cube quote that some fools attributed to Nelson Mandela - and credits it to a guy named Mohamad. Because on closer inspection, the world is also divided into those who create content and those who steal it and take all the credit.
Our "Divided Meme" saga, which began here and here, has got a new life recently, when our quote began to make rounds on the Internet with Nelson Mandela's name attached to it. The authoritative hoax debunker Snopes.com first contacted the Nelson Mandela Foundation, then conducted some further research, and determined that the quote belongs to a UN representative named Mohamad Safa.
An African fact-checking site followed Snopes's lead to the same effect: 'Our world divided' quote not by Nelson Mandela – but leader expressed similar sentiment.
I am not making this up.
I searched for the quote online and made a collage of what I had discovered.
Here's what happened. In the beginning of summer I saw a clever anonymous Russian meme about the foolishness of Russian political scene. The idea stuck in my head, and some days later I made a creative interpretation of it into English for the People's Cube, as a comment on the foolishness of identity politics in the U.S.
The Russian original said, "People are not divided into ethnicities, parties, fractions, and religions. People are divided into smart ones and morons. And morons divide themselves into ethnicities, parties, fractions, and religions."
At first my translation said, "good people and assholes," but then a reader suggested that "fools" would be more appropriate, so I changed it to "wise people and fools." The latter went viral on Facebook and Twitter. That was still July 3rd.
Then someone copied my meme, cropped out the People's Cube signature, and in that anonymous form it was posted on Twitter by the popular black sports commentator, Marcellus Wiley, followed by the actor James Woods, Donald Trump Jr., and many others. Without the signature, the tens of thousands of shares and retweets didn't bring us any traffic, but at least people were sharing the wisdom, and that made me happy.
Just in case, I redesigned the meme by moving the signature inside the vignette and adding the picture of the People's Cube. And then I forgot about it until a reader alerted me about a Snopes investigation into the origin of this quote.
Is This a Real Quote by Nelson Mandela?
… In order to determine this, we reached out to the Nelson Mandela Foundation, founded by Mandela in 1999, and which hosts archives featuring his speeches and letters. The foundation is considered a definitive resource on the life of the man who led the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.
Razia Saleh, director of the research and archives department at the foundation, confirmed to us that this was not a Mandela quote, as she could not locate it anywhere in their collection of his speeches, and in the book, “Nelson Mandela by Himself: The Authorized Book of Quotations.”
An internet search connects the quote to Mohamad Safa, who describes himself as a human rights advocate and climate activist, as well as a permanent representative to the United Nations. Saleh also directed us to one of Safa's posts from Aug. 6, 2020, suggesting that he was the source...
On Sept. 6, Safa claimed that the quote was his:
But our meme was posted on July 3rd, then it was shared by Marcellus Wiley on July 14th, James Woods on July 29th, and Donald Trump Jr. on July 30th.
The earliest Russian version I could find today was a 2016 tweet quoting a now defunct Facebook post by a prominent Latvia-based Russian philanthropist Boris Teterev, who may be the original source, or he was quoting someone else, but we can't ask him now because he died in 2019.
Why couldn't Snopes, who is being paid to be the ultimate arbiter, see such a low-hanging fruit? Is it because Snopes has been "debunking" the People's Cube satires for years with extreme prejudice? They even have a policy not to give us any links and not to name the People's Cube by name, but only slanderously refer to it as "a click-bait site known for spreading malware." Our love affair with Snopes goes way back.
Instead, all credit goes to Mohamad Safa, who is much better suited for this trophy as a promising United Nations bureaucrat, an ardent advocate of socialism and of the resettlement of Middle-Easterners in the West, and who is now very politically-correctly gloating over Donald Trump getting sick with the Coronavirus.
It must be also the reason why he has a blue checkmark on Twitter and why he will never be censored there like we often are, and why he has so many Twitter followers while our number of followers is being constantly decimated. All the easier for him to steal other people's quotes and pass them as his own, while saying "my goal isn't fame or anything like that" - as a true socialist redistributionist that he is.
Notice our stolen quote pinned to the top of Safa's profile on Twitter, and right underneath it is an anti-Trump tweet, "Looks like covid voted early." The latter has now been deleted, but will live forever in this screenshot. Stay classy, Mohamad.
Indeed, the world is divided into wise people and fools. And then there's Mohamad Safa of the UN.
Mystery item No. 1
Hide it back 
