Does real CCTV footage capture schoolchildren kneeling on prayer mats and repeating the Muslim declaration of faith, "Allahu Akbar", as viral social media posts claim? No, that's not true: The low-quality clip seemed to have been distorted to conceal the evidence it was AI-generated video. For example, the clip showed the instructor rising from her knees to sit on a nonexistent chair, a girl's hair-tie changing from enormous to normal size and two children springing from a rug only big enough for one.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here and here) published on X on November 7, 2025. It opened:
Young, white children are being indoctrinated into Islam. They raise their hands in the air and chant Allah Akbar. This has to stop.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/DaveAtherton20)
The entry included a 15-second low-quality vertically stretched clip of what resembled a scene in an elementary or middle school classroom, with the kind of time and date code seen in CCTV footage. It shows 12 children wearing school uniforms practicing a Muslim prayer, kneeling and repeating "Allahu Akbar" after a female teacher whose hair is covered by what appears to be a hijab.
The post, featuring British-sounding speech, implied that the video was real footage of British schoolchildren.
An earlier version of the video, published on November 6, 2025, on Facebook, included more explicit references to the UK, such as the name of the group where it appeared ("British Scope - UK") and a caption that opened with the U.K.'s flag:
🇬🇧 #unitedkingdom #london #UK #UKVibes #british #england #BritishPride #uktravel #britains_talent
That post depicted the supposed scene in a slightly better quality, which made it more obvious that as the teacher gets up from her knees, she sits down on an invisible chair that wasn't seen in the frame at the beginning of the clip and wasn't moved behind the instructor, either:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/reel/1377618124071251)
Here is the same moment from the copy of the video published on X:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at x.com/DaveAtherton20 marked by Lead Stories to indicate empty space where teacher later seems to sit in a chair.)
As the clip opens, the long hair of the student at the left end of the front row is somehow held in a pony tail by a pink band wider than her head. As she rises from the prayer position five seconds later, the hair band suddenly shrinks to the normal, much smaller, proportion of a hair band, a loop one small fraction of the width of her head:
(Image source: Lead Stories screenshots of video, arranged in order to show pink hair band's sudden change in size.)
The back row reveals another discrepancy. We see six children and six rugs, but somehow two children in the middle seem to get up from the same spot:
(Source: Lead Stories screenshot of post at facebook.com/reel/1377618124071251)
