Did Queen Elizabeth II say "Muslim Refugees Are Dividing Nationality, I Fully Agree With Donald Trump We Should Deport Them To Avoid Bloody Terrorist Attacks."? No, that's not true: the quote was made up in 2018 and was later spread by various unreliable websites, several of which have Macedonian ties.
The fake quote recently popped up again in an article (archived here) where it was published by Politics Daily Update on August 7, 2019 under the title 'Queen Elizabeth Says: "Muslim Refugees Are Dividing Nationality, I Fully Agree With Donald Trump We Should..."'. It opened:
Queen Elizabeth Says: "Muslim Refugees Are Dividing Nationality, I Fully Agree With Donald Trump We Should Deport Them To Avoid Bloody Terrorist Attacks." Do you Agree Her?
This weekend the BBC is broadcasting a journalistic rarity: A full, sit-down conversation with Queen Elizabeth II.
The project, a retrospective on her coronation ceremony in 1953, was 22 years in the making, and a media coup given the Queen's historic reluctance to engage directly with the press in any way.
The documentary "The Coronation" actually aired in May of 2018 and the queen did not make the comment attributed to her:
BBC One - The Coronation
Marking the 65th anniversary of Her Majesty the Queen's coronation, the Queen shares her memories of the ceremony, as well as that of her father, King George VI, in 1937. On 2 June 1953, on one of the coldest June days of the century, after 16 months of planning, Her Majesty the Queen set out to be crowned at Westminster Abbey, watched by millions of people throughout the world.
If she ever made comments if such nature it would be quite unlikely she would do so using the sort of mangled English phrasing which seems to be common among Macedonians running fake news websites.
According to BuzzSumo several sites have copied the story verbatim over the past two years, although it is unclear which site originated it:
The oldest copy seems to be from the now defunct "dailytrumerpnews.com" (which even managed to spell "Trump" wrong in the URL) on February 26, 2018 (archived here). Several of the sites on the list (crazyifonews.com, butam.net, usapatriotsvoice.com, derven.net...) were part of a Macedonian network of fake news sites that was shut down earlier this year after a joint investigation of Lead Stories and Nieuwscheckers:
Macedonian Fake News Network Shuts Down Dozens Of Websites After Joint Investigation By Lead Stories & Nieuwscheckers | Lead Stories
Back in November of 2018 fact checking sites Lead Stories and Nieuwscheckers collaborated to map a network of Macedonian fake news websites that had published thousands and thousands of articles since 2016, mostly stolen from other places, many of them fake and often promoting hate, racism or conspiracy theories.
We wrote about politicsdailyupdate.blogspot.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
