The Local summed it up perfectly, saying the reporter “didn’t know his Jedi from his jihad” when he confused the two symbols live on national TV in Spain.
TVE was broadcasting news about the Paris terror attacks that killed 129 people and injured many more on Friday.
The news service then gave details of the strikes launched by France against the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa in Syria.
While Abril was giving viewers a history of the city, saying it was one of the first cities taken by terrorist groups in 2013 and referring to al-Qaeda, he pointed at a black symbol on a screen with writing beneath it that appears to refer to al-Qaeda. Except it didn’t.
The problem was that the black symbol the reporter was pointing at is a fictional symbol of Luke Skywalker’s Rebel Alliance, those heroes who combat Darth Vader’s forces in the popular Star Wars films, included below:
Matthew Bennett of The Spain Report spotted his grave error and immediately headed to Twitter, saying “Spanish state broadcaster TVE used Star Wars Rebel Alliance logo for Al Qaeda this morning.” He linked to the video showing Abril’s mistake on the RTVE website.
Naturally the content of the news report was serious and Abril immediately apologized via Twitter for his error, saying, “This morning I confused a logo in an explanation during the program. My own fault. I am sorry if it offended anyone.”
Of course, it was already far too late, as, people being people, the jokes had already started flying around on the social media.
One Twitter user, Riot Madrid, said, “Thank you to TVE for teaching us that Al Qaeda is in reality the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars. I always suspected it.”
One image was posted, showing George W. Bush dressed up as the Emperor, and Twitter user Jedi Keating responded saying, “On TVE yesterday, the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars were terrorists and today it appears that George Bush is the Emperor. Everything adds up.”
Another quite simply said, “I sense a disturbance in the Force…”
The moment the logo appears can be seen at 1:39 in the video on the RTVE website.
Turns out it was probably a simple mix up caused by a very poorly executed online search as a record label had used the Star Wars emblem in their own logo. A later tweet by Bennett reads: “But it gets worse because the logo TVE used for Al Qaeda is a ‘record label’ on Facebook called “Alqaeda’Inc“.
To use Yoda terminology: “A huge mistake, using that logo was.”
