You may have heard some noise on social media about Captain America himself, Chris Evans, signing a supposed artillery shell that the IDF uses to bomb civilians in Palestine.
It wasn’t true, and Evans was forced to release a statement saying that was the case. Here’s how it all went down.
Back in February, someone posted a link to a TikTok video on Facebook showing Evans on a military base. The post said that sometimes “in the moment pics come back to haunt us.”
“Here is [an] American actor putting his signature on a bomb that then is dropped on Palestinian civilians.” The poster claims they “never heard” of Evans “until now,” and then dropped some cancel culture rhetoric: “Let’s see how his career goes after this ‘in the moment’ pic goes viral.”
Reuters fact-checked the post and found it to be completely false. The photo is actually from Incirlik Air Base in Adana, Turkey, and it was taken on Dec. 5, 2016. Evans was there as part of a United Service Organization (USO) trip as part of USO’s tradition to provide troops and their families with visits from famous entertainers.
That should’ve been the end of it, but alas things are never that simple. Fast forward to May 2024. Former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley traveled to Israel on a “diplomatic and humanitarian” visit, and she decided to sign an artillery shell and write a little message on there as well (via AP News).
Her message, with a heart in place of the word “loves,” said this:
Finish Them!
America [Loves] Israel
Always,
Nikki Haley
Former Israeli U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon was with Haley on the trip and also signed a bomb. He posted a picture of Haley’s message on his Instagram story and wrote the following in Hebrew:
“Finish them! This is what my friend, the former ambassador, Nikki Haley wrote today about a shell during a visit to an artillery post on the northern border. The time has come to change the equation – the residents of Tire and Sidon will evacuate, the residents of the north will return. The IDF can win!”
Suffice it to say, signing a bomb that will potentially murder people is going to piss off and disgust a lot of people. As of this writing, Haley has yet to respond to anyone about the incident, and she probably won’t unless she has to.
This brings us back to Evans. With the Haley signing happening only a few days before and fresh in everyone’s mind, the infamous Evans photo resurfaced, and no one remembered it was from 2016 and in Turkey.
As the outrage grew, Evans took to his Instagram story to clear up the confusion, saying there was “a lot of misinformation” going around about the photo. He said what we already knew about where and when the photo was taken. “The object I was asked to sign is not a bomb, or a missile, or a weapon of any kind.” So what was it?
“It’s an inert object used for training or display purposes only. You can read the quote from the Air Force in the next story.” Evans shared a screenshot from an Agence France-Presse article to corroborate his claims. The Air Force told the news agency the “object Chris Evans is signing in the USO tour photo from 2016 is an explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) inert training aid.”
In a world, where those who deserve to be held accountable evade facing the consequences, Evans had to come forward to clarify the doubts before he became a target of misdirected ire. Hopefully, that clears things up and we won’t see that photo used incorrectly again. Even if it does, people will judge it this time armed with the knowledge of what truly happened.