Original article (in Slovenian) was published on 13/8/2025; Author: Žan Premrov
A fake X post by Janez Janša in which he appeared to claim that Israel is the light of the West and that it needs all our support in its fight against barbarism originated from the satirical account Vladozlom.
On August 2, Luka Goršek, vice president of the coalition Social Democrats, commented on TikTok about an alleged post that Janez Janša, president of the opposition Democratic Party, published on X. Janša supposedly claimed that the next government would overturn the ban on the import, export, and transit of arms to and from Israel, which had been introduced at the end of July by the current government, and that Israel is “the light of the West and needs all our support in its fight against barbarism.”
From July 31, when the government put in place the ban, until Goršek’s TikTok post, Janša had not published such a tweet. He did comment on the government’s decision, but not this way. For example, he wrote that: “The measure itself has no material consequences for Israel, politically it harms Slovenia, and Golob’s @vladaRS is still collecting the promised parachutes anyway.”
Using online archives such as webarchive and archive.is, we tried to determine whether Janša may have posted the “light of the West” tweet and later deleted it. However, this was not possible because his X account was not archived in the period between the alleged post and Goršek’s TikTok comment.
But by running a reverse image search of the alleged tweet via Google Images and TinEye, we found three Slovenian users who posted the supposed Janša tweet. Collectively, their posts were viewed by just under 12,000 users and shared 40 times. The first one to post the image was the satirical account Vladozlom.
The alleged Janša post had also been criticized on his blog by Boris Vezjak, a political commentator and professor at the Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor, but he later deleted the article, explaining that he had received sufficiently reliable information that the alleged Janša post was fake.
Razkrinkavanje.si likewise obtained unofficial confirmation that the post was fake.
In his response, Goršek said he had not known that the tweet was fake and did not recall on which account he had seen it posted. He explained that he used it because the position it expressed did not differ from the stance of Janša or his party toward Palestine. He said he would remove the post from TikTok, but by the time of publication, it was still not deleted.
The claim that Janša expressed on X a wish for Slovenia to actively participate in the genocide in Gaza is false, since Goršek was reacting to satirical content. Because the author acknowledged the mistake as unintentional and announced that he would delete the post, we have labelled the claim, in accordance with the Razkrinkavanje.si methodology, as sloppy.
