SOCIAL MEDIA POSTS have falsely claimed a video shows actor Cillian Murphy carrying a Palestinian flag while on set for an upcoming Peaky Blinders movie.

Instead, the footage simply shows a fan dressed up like a character in the Peaky Blinders TV show, based on a criminal gang in Birmingham in the wake of World War 1. 

The footage, which shows the man running down a British street waving a Palestinian flag, was actually taken at a fan meetup.

“What happens when a protest for Palestine goes past the set filming for the new film of Peaky Blinders?” reads 14 November posts of the clips on Facebook and X. “Cillian Murphy does this….” 

Murphy recently won the Oscar for Best Actor in the title role of the 2023 blockbuster Oppenheimer last March, an award he dedicated to “peacemakers everywhere”.

Murphy is set to star as gangster Tommy Shelby in the film version of Peaky Blinders, currently being made by the BBC and Netflix. 

A screenshot from the footage

Initial social media posts featuring the video suggest that it was filmed on 13 October and that the man featured was an organiser of Peaky Blinder fan meetups, Derek Liam Brennan, and not Cillian Murphy as later posts suggest. 

Images from Google Street View, in which a pub called the Big Bull’s Head can be seen, confirm the location as being filmed in the Digbeth district of Birmingham. 

Brennan and other fans gathered there in costume on 13 October, the same day that a pro-Palestine march, attended by hundreds, was held in the same area. 

Both Brennan and the original uploader of the footage confirmed that it was Brennan who was recorded running with the flag, according to AFP. 

AFP also reported that Brennan had said that waving the flag was part of a “joke” and he wasn’t involved in the protest or politics. 

The conflict in Gaza has been the subject of many false claims since Israel invaded last year, including videos accompanied by misleading descriptions. 

The Journal has previously debunked false claims that images were being staged of killed or injured Palestinian children; that old videos actually from Syria and Egypt were taken during the conflict; as well as false claims that Irish soldiers in the area had been fired upon or had their base destroyed by Israeli forces. 

The Journal has also examined claims and counter-claims about an explosion at a Gaza hospital that killed hundreds, as well as the Occupied Territories Bill and its misrepresentations. 

A UN Special Committee said last week that Israeli’s methods in Gaza were “consistent with genocide”.

The invasion was launched more than a year ago, in retaliation of an attack on Israel by Palestinian militants that left about 1,200 dead, according to a UN report also released last week.

That report said that 39,445 Palestinians had been killed in Israel’s invasion by the end of July, though this tally did not include unretrieved bodies, which had been estimated to number about 10,000.

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