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.




And so did an Arab website Misbar.

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.
 

P.S. After i wrote this, I found another meme credited to Mohamad Safa, picturing a bridge. From where to where?

So I fixed it.



 

Next thing you know Joe Biden is going to say it first.
 

Margaret

Next thing you know Joe Biden is going to say it first.

 

Talent must be redistributed from those who have plenty to those who need it most!

Once mr Safa's bosses at the UN realise he stole the quote... they'll surely promote him; after all, what else is the UN for?
 

If only Komrade JosephStalinthe3rd had some time to do extra shoveling...

I'm sure, with his stunning proficiency in Arabic (which he, inter alia, amply demonstrated here and here), he would certainly track down the origin of the meme to Kholly Khorran, al-kharakka!
 

I believe it was Beria who said this first, and I think it was something along the lines that wise and the dumb, they separate themselves into those who support the party and those who don't. I'll look for the source material.And on second thought, I believe it can perhaps be traced back to a biblical citation. Ecclesiastes 10:2The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left
The herder's maxim was that sheep were divided to the righteous way, goats to the left, astray. The sheep would flock together, the goats would separate and pursue random paths. The sheep had an integral sense of togetherness, the goats did not and became fools for it.
 

UPDATE#1:

A comrade emailed me a link that exposes Moahamd Safa as a habitual plagiarist, always posting other people's old tweets as if they were his own.

Mohamad Safa may well be the biggest tweet thief EVER on Twitter

That a first-class sociopath works with the UN in New York and Geneva as a human rights activist is not big news. But that he could so easily fool Snopes - "The definitive Internet reference source for researching misinformation" - may have some legs.

UPDATE#1:

I wrote Snopes a measured letter explaining the situation. I'm mildly curius what their response will be, if any. To save electronic trees, I'm hiding it here as Mystery Item #1.


 

Red Square

... exposes Moahamd Safa as a habitual plagiarist, always posting other people's old tweets as if they were his own ...
Chances are that Mistah/Sayed Mohamad Safa is a Muzulman.
But then The Book (PBUH) says.. well, our Perfesserette RedD transmitted:

RedDiaperette

... It is written in the Sharia-based Pact of Umar that when a Muslim wishes to be seated, dhimmis must stand up and yield their seats. (I assume the seats of the chairs, although there have been times when they have been required to yield their nether parts as well.) ...
Whereupon Perfesser GD, continuing that train of thought, cited a more recent (and priceless!) document re "kuffar to yield this-or-that", by MEMRI.

So, by now the Kollektive is convinced, that whatever tweet, meme, or opera omnia a kafir had the temerity to produce, and Mistah/Sayed S now wishes to position his fat ass upon, said kafir has to immediately yield it (and shuffle away, bowing himself out of the scene while happy for not being commanded to yield his/her/xympz private parts, too).


(... what? not convinced? careful, comrad|zyx|ett|e - you may get "dragged in a Sibirian camel caravan to Thalaj Sahra' Al-Kolyma"!)
 

No wonder Mohamad Safa is supporting Joe Biden - critters of blather stick together.

Biden's BUILD BACK BETTER was stolen from Boris Johnson.


 

Remember Comrade Red Square,

Only the truly inspirational are copied and in this decadent world copyright is thrown out with the beet water.

Yours faithfully "onward thru the beet juice"

-me
 

Good artists borrow. Great artists steal.
 

Plagarism isn't just another "ism."


 

I just got my new autographed copy of Shakedown Socialism.

Sure enough, it was signed:



To Jok Biþen—
Mohamad Safa
9/30/2020
 

Mohamad Safa has been around - Red State covered his plagiarism, too.

CEO Claims He Blocked His Parents From Watching Fox News With Parental Controls, Then It Gets Worse
 

The People's Cube has written the entire Democratic™ Party's™ platform for years but no credit is ever given to the policy innovations expressed by the great minds on this website. Which is, of course, standard operating procedure: from each according to their ability (The People's Cube), to each according to their need (The Democratic™ Party™). Comrades, feel proud of your contribution to the Glorious™ world of Next Tuesday™.
 

Instantly reSafaed: