In early November 2025, reports appeared on social networks about an incident that allegedly recently occurred in a concert hall in the Netherlands. We have verified the accuracy of this news.
“In Amsterdam, before the concert, the conductor began a speech glorifying Hamas and condemning Israel. All the orchestra musicians immediately stood up and left. Then the stewards also escorted out the amateur Hamas conductor. Everything happened in the presence of the Queen of the Netherlands,” says a post on the Telegram channel “Sheikh Tamir"(106,000 views at the time of writing this analysis). Similar publications also appeared in the channel Vobla (92,000) and in social networks X (103,000), as well as on Facebook (1, 2, 3, 4). In all cases, the posts were accompanied by a video whose author allegedly captured the incident.
The video that became viral was indeed filmed in Amsterdam, but back on September 3, 2011, at a concert in honor of the 100th anniversary of the Society of Dutch Composers. What happened then in detail described local media. According to them, before the start of the concert, a man suddenly stood up on stage and declared that he was a servant of Allah. When the musicians rose from their seats in fright and began to leave the stage, he added that he did not have a bomb on him. Only after this did the guards take the man away - at first they, like many spectators, thought it was part of the performance. By data police, the troublemaker had previously been detained more than once for disrupting public events.
The original is also preserved on YouTube video, a fragment of which subsequently went viral. It was published the day after the incident.
What happened then attracted the attention of the Dutch media, but almost nothing was written about it in the foreign press. Only a few years later, a video - already with distorted information that the conductor gave a speech to the audience - began to spread on blogs and social networks in different languages.
In 2017, in the blog of violinist David Peralta, who took part in a concert as part of the National Orchestra of the Netherlands, appeared a post refuting a fake that had already spread widely by that time. In it, the musician talked about how everything that happened looked from the stage:
“The Queen was present at this concert, several officials spoke - the mayor of Amsterdam, the honorary president of the Society [of Dutch Composers] ... and a man whom no one expected to see, but who misled everyone. A very decently dressed man who took the microphone instead of the honorary president. This was a person with mental disorders who accidentally ended up in the program. Everything looked as if his speech was required by protocol. The entire orchestra was already seated on the stage of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. I was right behind him when he started talking - you can see it in the video. For the first seconds everything seemed normal. Then he started talking about Islam. He said that he is the incarnation of Jesus Christ. At that moment we all stood up from our seats, acting more instinctively, not as a sign of protest, but for reasons of safety. My colleague Hermann Draaisma walked up and took the microphone from him - just before security intervened.
The National Orchestra of the Netherlands did not rise from its seats in protest against the “conductor’s speech in the presence of the Queen.” We stood up because a mentally unstable person broke onto the stage during an official event, and everyone realized that the situation was abnormal. That's all."
Thus, the viral video was filmed 14 years ago. The man on stage is not the orchestra conductor who performed in support of Hamas, but a resident of Amsterdam who tried to disrupt the concert.
Cover photo: Pixabay
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