A photo purporting to show a Jewish and Muslim soldier in the Israeli army praying together was questioned after it went viral on Monday.
The image was posted by Dr. Eli David, a pro-Israel influencer who’s also a researcher and cybersecurity entrepreneur.
“Israeli 🇮🇱 Jewish and Muslim soldiers praying side by side. And they’re coming for you, Hamas terrorists,” David captioned the photo.
“Praying Salah while wearing sun glasses and shoes,” replied @LeBaronRougee. “Where did you hire these no good actors? And who was the director? I wanna ask him since when is the direction of the Kaaba and the western wall the same?”
Salah is the prayer that Muslims are required to recite five specific times a day as a testament to their faith. One provision of the prayer is to face the Kaaba, a stone building at the center of Mecca, one of Islam’s holiest sites. According to some posters, wearing sunglasses and boots like the Muslim man in the photo is prohibited.
The photo also isn’t even from the current conflict.
The image appears in a post from February on the website the Judean, an Israeli magazine that describes its mission as to “show the glory of Israel, so that all can better understand the Jewish connection to it, and the capital where Zion can be found, Jerusalem.”
That post, which is titled The Palestinian Cause is Giving Islam a Bad Name, claims that the Palestinian resistance movement is “inherently anti-Islam” because of the deaths of Muslim soldiers in the Israeli army. It also points to the fact that the Israeli army recruited over a thousand Arabs in 2021 and that the Israeli police force has plans to recruit more Muslims as evidence for the fact that Jews and Muslims live in harmony in Israel.
The image in the viral post is meant to illustrate that fact and push back on ideas that Arab and Muslim citizens in Israel have second-class citizenship.
Other posters edited the original image to try to make the case that the soldiers couldn’t possibly be praying together by pointing out the various discrepancies, including the fact that in the image the Muslim soldier isn’t facing down yet.
“i swear their propaganda gets worse every time,” commented one poster.
However, not every doubted the authenticity of the image.
“Although many Muslims may take off their shoes and glasses while praying, many others may keep both on. Praying with shoes on is actually common among some Muslims when outdoors,” Mohammad Hassan Khalil, the director of the Muslim Studies Program at Michigan State University told the Daily Dot
