Category World News

A “young, attractive guy.” US President Donald Trump responded to press questions about his meeting with the Syrian leader Ahmed al-Sharaa as he flew on board Air Force One between Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Trump also referenced al-Sharaa’s past membership of Al Qaeda, saying he had “a tough past.”

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones seized on a May 9 video of a train car meeting among three European leaders to claim they had used drugs and were trying to hide it.

The video showed French President Emmanuel Macron sitting at a table with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer. On the table before them were two blue folders, two drinking glasses and a small white object. The three men smiled for photographers who had gathered. Just as the shutter clicks started, Macron removed the crumpled white object from the tabletop and held it in his fist.

“DEVELOPING SCANDAL: Macron, Starmer, and Merz caught on video on their return from Kiev. A bag of white powder on the table. Macron quickly pockets it, Merz hides the spoon,” Jones said in a May 11 X post. “No explanation given. (Ukrainian President Volodymyr) Zelensky, known cocaine enthusiast, had just hosted them. All three of the ‘leaders’ look completely cracked out.”

Jones’s post had been viewed more than 29.5 million times as of May 13 and he promoted the drug-use narrative in several more posts. “BREAKING: It’s Coke,” he said in another May 11 post later that day. A few hours later, he shared another photo that he said “clearly” showed “a bag of Blow”. Similar posts spread in Spanish.

Jones did not respond to PolitiFact’s request for comment. But original videos of the meeting by the AFP news agency and The Associated Press and high-resolution photos captured by AP showed the white object Macron removed from the table was not a bag of white powder – it was a tissue.

Elysee, the official X account of the French presidency and the Elysse Palace presidential residence, posted pictures that also showed what appeared to be a tissue on the table. It said on X that the white object was a tissue “for blowing your nose”, adding that “this fake news is being spread by France’s enemies, both abroad and at home. We must remain vigilant against manipulation.”

In an email to PolitiFact, a German government spokesperson described Jones’s allegation as “absurd”.

Jones’s post also got another detail wrong. He said Zelenskyy “had just hosted” Macron, Starmer and Merz. However, the news reports said the leaders were on their way to meet Zelenskyy when the photos and videos were captured; they had not already met with him.

We asked digital forensic experts to analyse the close-up photo Jones posted that he alleged “clearly” showed a bag. Experts said they were unconvinced it was authentic.

V.S. Subrahmanian, a Northwestern University computer science professor, and Hany Farid, a University of California digital forensic expert, told PolitiFact that the image could have been modified using artificial intelligence, producing an image that may make the object look less like a tissue.

How did the cocaine narrative spread?

Darren Linvill, a Clemson University communication professor who studies Russian disinformation campaigns, said he saw the earliest mentions of this narrative in French on May 10.

At about 7:34 ET on May 11, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova posted images of the meeting on the messaging app Telegram; she’d added red circles around the white object on the table. Her caption said Macron, Starmer and Merz had forgotten “to put away their paraphernalia” before journalists arrived to take photos, according to a Guardian report and a Google Translate translation of her post from Russian to English. Her post also described Zelenskyy as an “unbalanced drug addict” who used cocaine in 2022.

Linvill said the false narrative proliferated across English social media – including X, Facebook and Reddit – on the morning of May 11. It was amplified and popularised by “accounts known to be part of the Russian Storm-1516 campaign distribution network”, he said.

Russian disinformation experts told PolitiFact it’s not uncommon for Russian influence campaigns to falsely accuse foreign leaders of illicit drug use, specifically involving cocaine.

“Anything that makes the leaders of rival nations appear debauched and corrupt works to their advantage,” Linvill said. “Russia wants to undercut the legitimacy of Western democracy to make their own system appear better by comparison.”

Scott Radnitz, a University of Washington professor at the Jackson School of International Studies, said the cocaine claim tapped into “a long-running Kremlin narrative” that Zelenskyy uses drugs.

A senior Russian official in 2024 called Zelenskyy an “illegitimate drug addict” and accused him of trying to continue the Ukrainian war to preserve his power.

In 2022, PolitiFact also fact-checked a deceptively edited video that said it showed Zelenskyy saying he does cocaine. In the original video, Zelenskyy said he likes coffee and denied he uses cocaine. Such rumours date back to the 2019 Ukrainian presidential campaign, when Zelenskyy’s political rival challenged him to a drug test, which Zelenskyy took without any narcotics being detected. We found no credible news reports supporting claims that Zelenskyy uses drugs.

Radnitz said far-right online influencers like Jones often disseminate pro-Kremlin conspiracy theories. Some reports have said Jones’s website Infowars has republished more than 1,000 articles from a Russian state-sponsored outlet.

“In this instance, the cocaine connection was broadened to also include world leaders in order to discredit an otherwise successful diplomatic engagement for Ukraine,” Radnitz said.

On a cold December day during the Christmas holidays, Dalia Sarig’s 80-year-old father arrived at her home in Vienna after she had returned from a skiing trip.

He was there to pick up her stepsister, who had joined Sarig’s family on vacation.

She was convinced it would be her last meeting with her father, as their political differences were about to come to a head.

“I said goodbye. I hugged him,” she told Al Jazeera. “When I said goodbye, I said goodbye knowing that maybe I will not see him any more.”

Tensions with her Jewish family had been building for years. At 56, Sarig, a pro-Palestine activist, is at odds with most of her relatives.

Her parents adhere to Zionism, the nationalist political ideology that called for the creation of a Jewish state and is seen by Palestinians and their supporters as the system that underpins their suffering.

Sarig knew during that December meeting with her father that she intended to stage a pro-Palestine demonstration outside parliament in January that would be filmed by a local television station. The activist group she was a part of had put her forward for a broadcast interview. Appalled by Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza and determined to speak up, she went ahead with it.

“The interview was broadcast and it immediately went to my family.”

She later heard that her father, who also lives in the Austrian capital, had told friends that “to him, I died”.

“But he never talked about it with me, he never reached out to me to tell me something like this. [He] just cut the relation.”

Her 77-year-old mother, who lives in Germany, messaged her a week later.

“I still have it here in my phone, saying, you know, ‘I will not accept your political activism. You’re a traitor, you are dirtying the nest … and should you change your political views, we can return to normal. Stay healthy.’”

She has not spoken with her parents since.

Family divides are not uncommon among Jewish families from the United States to Israel, but have become more entrenched since October 7, 2023.

On that day, Hamas, the group that governs the Gaza Strip, led an incursion into southern Israel during which 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 were taken captive. Since then, Israeli bombardments have killed more than 61,700 people in the enclave.

“I think one of the most interesting phenomena among the liberal Zionists is the fact, while the majority moved to the right because of October 7, a minority became even more disenchanted with Israel and Zionism,” the author and academic Ilan Pappe, a prominent critic of Zionism, told Al Jazeera.

Sarig’s ancestors fled Austria in 1938, the year of annexation by Nazi Germany, for Serbia. They later settled in Palestine under the British Mandate in what is now present-day Israel. But by the 1950s, most of her relatives had returned to Austria, where she was born.

As a child, she celebrated Jewish holidays while learning about Zionism from elders.

She was also told that Palestinians “are the enemies, they want to kill all the Jews … that the Jews living there [in Israel] wanted peace, but the Arabs did not”.

At 18, she moved to Israel, where, at her parents’ encouragement, she joined a leftist Zionist youth movement.

Over 13 years in Israel, she joined a kibbutz, served in the Israeli army in an office role, and married. But it was as she studied politics and Middle East history at Haifa University that her worldview began to change.

That’s where she met a Palestinian professor and later became an activist for Palestinian rights.

“It began on a lawn in an evening together with my Palestinian teacher, when he told me the story of his family that was displaced from a small village.

“I understood that what I have been told, the Zionist narrative, is wrong,” she said. “I started to think how he might feel, how he’s feeling, or how I might feel as a Palestinian living in a Jewish state where my ancestors were expelled.”

Back in Austria, her family would argue with her at gatherings, agree never to speak again on Palestine and Israeli politics, break their promises, and clash once again.

In 2015, she renounced her Israeli citizenship as a gesture against Zionism.

“It makes my activism easier,” Sarig said, on being disowned by some of her family. “I lost my Jewish community because I was considered at best, strange and weird, and at worst, a traitor.”

But being cut off from one’s family can take a toll on mental health, say experts.

‘My outlook hasn’t significantly changed since October 7’

According to Faissal Sharif, a neuroscientist and doctoral student at the University of Oxford, brain imaging studies have shown that “the experience of social isolation triggers activity in areas that would otherwise light up in response to physical pain”.

“In other words, social pain is not metaphorical – it is biologically real,” he told Al Jazeera.

Families, he said, often form “microcultures” with their own rules and positions on political issues.

“The betrayal felt when love and acceptance are made conditional upon silence or complicity in the genocide can be deeply wounding. In the context of Gaza, it adds an additional layer of trauma: not only is one bearing witness to mass suffering, but also paying a personal price for refusing to look away,” he said. “This leads to long-lasting stress and anxiety, which can reach clinical levels.”

To preserve relationships, he said families need to lead with “curiosity, not confrontation”.

“Especially when the topic is something as painful as war or genocide, facts alone won’t move people – naming the emotions underneath, like fear, guilt, or grief, often opens more space for real dialogue.”

Having such conversations isn’t easy.

Jonathan Ofir, a musician who was born in an Israeli kibbutz and emigrated to Denmark in the late 1990s, said that it was in 2009 that he realised he had “actually been indoctrinated into a propaganda that omitted a whole Palestinian viewpoint”. He read Pappe’s book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, describing that experience as a “turning point” for him.

Around the same time, he read other Jewish and Palestinian writers who “challenged the Zionist narrative”.

“[But] I didn’t share this publicly and I didn’t share it with my family either.”

In 2014, though, during Israel’s war on Gaza – the third within seven years – he said he felt confident enough to express his critical views “outwards and publicly”.

More than 2,000 Palestinians – including 551 children – were killed during the 50-day conflict.

He took to Facebook to post an image of Israelis gathered on a hilltop near Sderot watching on as Gaza burned, a photograph that was featured in The New York Times.

A relative soon wrote him an email that concluded by recommending that Ofir “stop posting on the internet”.

“It became this heated debate, but it very, very quickly stopped.”

Years later, he learned that his family in Israel had decided to avoid talking about politics around him “so as to not legitimise my political views”, he said.

After the October 7 attack, he checked on his extended family who lived near the site of the assault. But the incursion did not alter his position.

“My outlook hasn’t significantly changed. But something changed in the Israeli society. And in that sense, you could say we might be more distant politically.”

‘This is really the only issue nowadays’

Netherlands-based Daniel Friedman, 44, was raised in South Africa by his father, Steven, an academic and vocal critic of Zionism, and his mother, who was part of a circle of anti-Apartheid activists.

While his father remains an anti-Zionist, Friedman said that he and his mother have increasingly been clashing over Israel’s genocide in Gaza since late 2023.

“This is really the only issue nowadays” affecting the conversations and bonds within some Jewish communities, he said.

One of their earlier arguments regarded the debunked claims that Palestinian fighters raped women during the October 7 incursion. After several uneasy disputes, often battled out by ping-ponging various newspaper links to support their arguments on WhatsApp, they have agreed to stop talking about politics.

“I love her, but what I struggle with is that I’ve lost a lot of trust for her,” said Friedman.

During a previous Israeli war on Gaza, his mother had signed a petition calling for a ceasefire, a move which saw her rejected by some family members. “I think that had quite a big effect,” he said. “She kind of went to the right.”

He said that he understands that for some, taking a stand means risking losing the support of a close community. He, however, chose to “cut a lot of people out of my life on purpose” after October 7, he said.

Back in Vienna, Sarig is busy organising a conference of Jewish anti-Zionists in June, featuring speakers such as Stephen Kapos, a UK-based Holocaust survivor, the American podcaster and commentator Katie Halper and Ronnie Barkan, a Jewish Israeli activist. Pappe too is expected to attend.

As the killings in Gaza continue, her focus, she said, is on the Palestinians trying to survive Israeli fire.

Syrians celebrated throughout the night after US President Donald Trump announced he would lift US sanctions on Syria during his visit to Saudi Arabia. Imran Khan breaks down what this means for the Syrian people.