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      Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Thursday, 29 December, 2022 - 17:41 · 6 minutes

    Denmark’s leading chronicler of the war in Ukraine, Matilde Kimer, who has reported for Danish television from the front lines of the conflict since the Russian aggression began in 2014, revealed last week that Ukraine’s intelligence service had canceled her work permit and would only return it if she agreed to let the spy agency direct her reporting.


    Scenes from the front line near Sievierodonetsk in eastern Ukraine in June.

    According to Kimer, an award-winning Moscow correspondent for Denmark’s public service broadcaster, DR, the proposal was presented to her by an officer from the Security Service of Ukraine, the intelligence agency known as the SBU, during a meeting this month in Kyiv that was also attended by two diplomats from the Danish Embassy.

    The diplomats had brokered the meeting as part of an effort to help Kimer find out why Ukraine had suddenly canceled her accreditation in August, shortly after she made a reporting trip to the front lines around Mykolaiv, a strategically important Black Sea port where a Ukrainian counteroffensive had been playing out.

    An interpreter who worked with Kimer in Mykolaiv told the Ukrainian news site Zaborona that after a misunderstanding at a checkpoint near the front line, which led to them being briefly detained for traveling without a military press officer, local officials had scoured the Danish journalist’s social media accounts.

    Since Kimer had been based in Moscow for over a decade, her Instagram and Facebook pages are filled with images and video clips that show her reporting on everything from official addresses by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the 2018 World Cup in Russia to daily life in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, including Donetsk and Crimea . That, apparently, was enough for some Ukrainian soldiers to suspect that Kimer might be a Russian sympathizer.

    Still, Kimer was eventually assured by a senior military press officer that she was free to continue reporting and returned to Mykolaiv, where she filed two short dispatches from the front line.

    On August 1, she traveled back to Moscow but was denied entry at the airport by Russian authorities, who informed her that she would be deported — in apparent retaliation for her reporting on the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine — and told her not to even try to enter Russia again for the next 10 years.

    Three weeks later, Kimer received an email from the Ukrainian military that her press credential allowing her to work there had been canceled, without explanation, at “the request of the Security Service of Ukraine.”

    Kimer, who had reported on the Russian aggression in Ukraine from its first days , and continued to bring Danish television viewers visceral scenes from the front lines year after year, spent the next three months trying to get an explanation for why she was suddenly barred from reporting.

    Part of a 2017 Matilde Kimer report for Danish television on the 72nd Brigade of the Ukrainian army fighting north of Donetsk.

    Eventually, her boss, Niels Kvale, the foreign editor of DR, enlisted help from Denmark’s foreign ministry, and Kimer was invited to the SBU headquarters in Kyiv.

    Before the meeting, Kimer said in a Facebook post on Saturday, she had heard from three sources that “the security service considers me pro-Russian — and perhaps even a Russian agent.”

    At the meeting, Kvale told me by phone from Copenhagen, “lots of different accusations were made against Matilde — a lot of talk of random photos from her social media profile, Facebook, primarily, photos that were taken by a photojournalist, her colleague, who went with her to Donetsk back in 2017.”

    According to Kimer’s own account on Facebook, an intelligence officer named Oleg told her that photographs she posted on the social network from a May 9 Victory Day parade in occupied Donetsk was suspicious because it showed people and vehicles adorned in what the Ukrainians consider “illegal Soviet propaganda,” in the form of the orange and black Saint George ribbons that the Russians use to commemorate the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, which have transformed into a show of support for Russian troops in Ukraine today. He also said that the fact that Kimer had been allowed to report from occupied Donetsk more than once suggested that her reporting must not have angered the separatist officials, which was also suspicious.

    The intelligence officer also made it clear to Kimer that he believed her deportation from Russia in August was simply a “cover” to allow her to continue promoting “Russian narratives.”

    Kvale told me that when Kimer and the Danish diplomats asked how she could convince the intelligence service that she was not a Russian propagandist, the official suggested that Kimer would have to agree to produce a series of “good stories” about the war, based entirely on video and photographs provided to her by the SBU, and post them on her Facebook page to prove that she was not pro-Russian. “She was quite shocked about the suggestion,” Kvale told me. “I mean, for us of course, it’s outrageous to even — we would never do a thing like this.”

    When Kimer told the intelligence officer that she couldn’t base her reports on someone else’s material and needed to meet with her sources in person, the meeting ended abruptly.

    “That was the understanding she came out of the meeting with,” Kvale told me, “that if she showed that she was not a Russian propagandist — that she could use this material for it — then they might reconsider whether she could be accredited.”

    That left Kimer in the awkward position of feeling compelled to report that the Ukrainian intelligence service had tried to coerce her into joining its propaganda effort even if that might make it impossible for her to ever get her accreditation back.

    “One of the reasons that we decided to tell this story is that we feel that this is an attack on our independence and the freedom of the press,” Kvale told me. “We didn’t really feel like we had any choice but to say publicly that this situation arose and this happened at this meeting.”

    Ukraine’s intelligence service and the office of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy have not replied to requests for comment since Kimer went public last week, and described the effort to coerce her into working as a propagandist to outraged Danish journalists.


    Kimer, who has produced more than 230 television and radio reports on the Russian invasion of Ukraine this year alone, is also the author of a book, “ The War Inside ,” based on her reporting from Ukraine, starting with the protest movement in Kyiv’s main square that toppled the country’s pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014 and the first years of fierce, covert war in eastern Ukraine directed by Putin.

    Last month, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark presented Kimer with the prestigious Ebbe Munck Prize.


    Kimer is also a finalist for the 2022 Cavling Prize, Danish journalism’s equivalent of a Pulitzer, for her coverage of the Russian war on Ukraine. The nomination cites , in particular, a 24-minute documentary she produced in the city of Kharkiv in April about a young Ukrainian woman who was coordinating emergency relief for civilians, while simultaneously organizing her own wedding despite the Russian bombardment.

    A trailer for Matilde Kimer’s documentary, “Wedding in a Warzone: A Glimmer of Hope in Kharkiv.”

    The post Danish Reporter Says Ukrainian Intelligence Tried to Coerce Her Into Working as a Propagandist appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Emboldened Right-Wing Activists Spread Lies About Katie Porter on Twitter

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Saturday, 17 December, 2022 - 01:01 · 4 minutes

    Lies about Rep. Katie Porter reached millions of Twitter users this week, as the California Democrat’s remarks about how the platform has been used to falsely label LGBTQ+ people as pedophiles were misleadingly edited and captioned in tweets by influential right-wing activists.

    The deceptive clips of Porter’s remarks, accompanied by false claims that she had condoned pedophilia, were viewed more than 2.2 million times on Twitter after being shared by right-wing activist accounts, including Chaya Raichik’s LibsofTikTok and Jaimee Michell’s GaysAgainstGroomers .

    Those video clips were created by Porter’s political enemies, who made it seem as if Porter, at a Congressional oversight hearing on Wednesday, had argued that pedophilia was not a crime but an identity.

    Transcripts and video of Porter’s complete remarks make it clear that she was saying something entirely different — namely, that right-wing activists have inspired hatred of LGBTQ+ Americans in tweets falsely accusing them of being pedophiles, or so-called “groomers.”

    A spokesperson for Porter also told the fact-checking service VERIFY , which works with local news stations in 29 states, that the representative “did not say that pedophilia is not a crime.”

    In an irony that perfectly encapsulates the impossibility of reasoned discourse with far-right activists willing to lie, the video used to smear Porter was taken from her discussion of a report documenting how activist accounts like LibsofTikTok and GaysAgainstGroomers use Twitter to falsely accuse LGBTQ+ liberals of pedophilia. The report was produced by the LGBTQ+ civil rights organization the Human Rights Campaign.

    At the hearing, Porter prefaced a question for Kelley Robinson, the HRC president, by saying: “Your organization recently released a report analyzing the 500 most viewed, most influential tweets that identified LGBTQ+ people as so-called ‘groomers.’ The ‘groomer’ narrative is an age-old lie to position LGBTQ+ people as a threat to kids. And what it does is deny them access to public spaces, it stokes fear, and can even stoke violence.”

    Porter then asked Robinson if Twitter’s hateful conduct policy allows users to call LGBTQ+ people “groomers” on the platform.

    After Robinson explained that those slurs are used in violation of Twitter’s poorly enforced community guidelines, she added that when people baselessly use words like “groomers” and “pedophiles” to describe LGBTQ+ people, “it is dangerous, and it’s got one purpose: It is to dehumanize us, and make us feel like we are not a part of this American society, and it has real-life consequences.”

    Porter responded by saying that she agreed with Robinson that the use of such terms to smear members of LGBTQ+ communities whose politics differ from the far-right activists was intended to marginalize them.

    “I think you’re absolutely right,” Porter said. “And it’s not, you know, this allegation of ‘groomer’ and of ‘pedophile,’ it is alleging that a person is criminal somehow, and engaged in criminal acts, merely because of their identity, their sexual orientation, their gender identity. So this is clearly prohibited, under Twitter’s content, yet you found hundreds of these posts on the platform.”

    In addition to Raichik and Michell, whose anti-LGBTQ+ activism has previously been amplified by America’s most-watched cable news host, Tucker Carlson, misleading clips of Porter were also shared by Greg Price , a former Republican operative and Daily Caller social media editor, Sebastian Gorka , who was fired by the Trump White House, and Ian Miles Cheong , a far-right Malaysian blogger Elon Musk frequently replies to and agrees with on Twitter.

    While the tweets from Cheong and Raichik — who falsely asserted that “Rep Katie Porter (D) says pedophilia isn’t a crime- it’s an identity” – were eventually flagged as misleading by Twitter users, the 1.5 million people who follow Michell, Price or Gorka encountered no such warning.

    Although he did not share the video, Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, also lied about what Porter said on Twitter. “Katie Porter just said that pedophilia isn’t a crime, she said it’s an ‘identity,'” Jackson claimed, falsely. “The sad thing is that this woman isn’t the only VILE person pushing for pedophilia normalization. This is what progressives believe!”

    While the HRC report Porter highlighted showed that right-wing activists had violated Twitter’s hateful conduct policy repeatedly before Musk bought the platform, the previous ownership team did make some attempt to rein in Raichik, who was temporarily suspended several times.

    Since Musk took control, however, “retweets of right-wing figures’ tweets that included the anti-LGBTQ ‘groomer’ slur increased substantially, as did mentions of right-wing figures in tweets containing the slur,” according to new data from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation and Media Matters, a watchdog group that monitors right-wing misinformation.

    Michell’s GaysAgainstGroomers account, the study found, “saw an increase of nearly 300% for retweets of tweets with the slur,” comparing the two months before and after Musk took control of the platform. Raichik’s LibsofTikTok “saw more than a 600% increase in its mentions,” over the same period for tweets using “groomer” slurs.

    The post Emboldened Right-Wing Activists Spread Lies About Katie Porter on Twitter appeared first on The Intercept .

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      How Jared Kushner Lost at the World Cup in Qatar

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Sunday, 4 December, 2022 - 17:32 · 7 minutes

    It is not clear from Ivanka Trump’s Instagram record of her family’s three-day visit to the World Cup in Qatar if she or her husband, Jared Kushner, heard any of the chants and songs in support of the Palestinians voiced by Arab fans at multiple venues during the first round of matches.

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    Ivanka Trump with her husband, Jared Kushner, and their children at the World Cup in Qatar in November 2022.

    Ivanka Trump via Instagram

    But the outpouring of support — which was also expressed on huge “Free Palestine” banners displayed in the stands, and by fans who intruded on Israeli television interviews to wave Palestinian flags and berate Israeli reporters — made it clear how badly Kushner had miscalculated, as his father-in-law Donald Trump’s Middle East peace envoy, when he convinced a handful of Arab autocrats to sign economic cooperation deals with Israel that did not respect the rights of Palestinians.


    In his White House memoir, “ Breaking History ,” Kushner claims to have orchestrated “a true turning point in history” when “five Muslim-majority countries — the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kosovo, Morocco and Sudan — signed peace agreements with Israel.”

    According to Kushner, whose agenda seemed to be dictated from the start by his old family friend, Benjamin Netanyahu , the agreements he brokered with nations that were never central to the conflict “have the potential to bring about the complete end of the Arab-Israeli conflict that has existed ever since the founding of the State of Israel.”

    Despite Kushner’s inflated claims, it was clear from the start that there was little public support in the Arab world for any nation to make peace with Israel while millions of Palestinians still live under Israeli military rule.

    Survey data from 2020, when Morocco agreed to sign the deal — in exchange for the Trump administration recognizing the kingdom’s sovereignty over the former Spanish colony of Western Sahara — showed that 88 percent of Moroccans rejected diplomatic recognition of Israel. Polls conducted the same year showed that 89 percent of Tunisians and 88 percent of Qataris agreed that “the Palestinian cause concerns all Arabs.” Just 6 percent of Saudis surveyed said they would support recognition of Israel.


    Broad support for a continued boycott of Israel was clear when the tournament kicked off, and social networks were flooded with video of fans from across the Arab world rejecting the emirate’s own tentative step toward normalizing relations with Israel: its decision to allow Israeli journalists to report on the tournament.


    The fact that even fans of Morocco, one of the five nations that signed Kushner’s “Abraham Accords,” were unwilling to appear on Israeli TV seemed to baffle one Israeli reporter. “But we have peace, huh?” the journalist yelled, as the Moroccan fans walked off and shouted support for Palestine. “You signed the peace agreement!”


    One of the most watched clips to come out of the World Cup’s opening round showed a Saudi fan telling a reporter for Israel’s public broadcaster, in English, “There is only Palestine! There is no Israel!”


    “Israeli reporters realizing that their country is despised by Arabs is hilarious and informative,” Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think tank based in Jerusalem, observed on Twitter . “They actually thought that if they normalize with Arab authoritarian regimes it means Arabs will forget Israeli oppression of Palestinians.”

    Linah Alsaafin, a Palestinian journalist who has worked for Qatar’s state-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera, pointed out that Raz Shechnik of the Israeli news site Yedioth Ahronoth had shared a compilation of clips of his failed interviews with Arab fans — including the tense exchange with the Moroccan fans. (The interviews are almost all in English, even though Shechnik’s Twitter caption is in Hebrew.)


    In one revealing exchange, as Shechnik suggests that the problem is between “only governments,” not people, a man holding a Palestinian flag says, “There’s nothing called Israel. It’s only Palestine. And you just took the land from them. … Bro, there is nothing called Israel. Israel does not exist.”

    In an ensuing thread on his experiences in Qatar, Alsaafin wrote, Shechnik “demonstrated his delusion in thinking Arabs in particular would be welcoming just [because] some of their governments normalised relations with Israel.”

    “Israeli journalists say they were surprised at the level of enmity that they faced in Qatar at the World Cup,” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, added. “I am surprised that they are surprised since what they are doing daily in Palestine is all over the world media (except in Israel maybe) but every action has a reaction.”

    As the Reuters Qatar correspondent Andrew Mills reported , while Qatari authorities permitted displays of support for the Palestinians, they cracked down hard on other forms of protest — like refusing to allow fans to wear rainbow-colored hats , shirts , or even watch straps into matches (to prevent shows of support for LGBTQ+ rights in a country where same-sex relationships are criminalized), and tackling and arresting Iranians who wore T-shirts with the words, “Women Life Freedom,” to support women’s rights in Iran.

    One of the oddest aspects of Kushner’s boast about the Abraham Accords as a Middle East peace deal was the fact that the non-Arab nation of Kosovo was included as a signatory. Kosovo, which is in the Balkans and not the Middle East, is a former province of Serbia where ethnic Albanian Muslims make up a majority. The republic did not strike a peace deal with Israel — for the very good reason that it had never been at war with Israel — but did agree to open an embassy in Jerusalem as part of an economic deal with Serbia brokered by the Trump White House and signed in Kushner’s presence.

    Even though there was only a brief mention of Israel in the agreement signed by Kosovo’s prime minister in Washington in September 2020, and the economic cooperation with Serbia it enshrined was minor, Trump described it at a campaign event that month as a “major breakthrough” that — along with the deals between Israel, Bahrain, and the UAE — might help him win the Nobel Peace Prize.


    “We’re stopping mass killings between Kosovo and Serbia,” Trump told supporters in North Carolina, inaccurately describing an economic agreement between two nations that stopped fighting more than 20 years earlier. “They are going to stop killing.”

    While Kosovo did not qualify for the World Cup, tensions over the nation’s frozen conflict with Serbia — which still refuses to recognize its independence — were in evidence at a match between the Serbian national team and that of Switzerland, which features two stars whose families are refugees from Kosovo .

    Before the match, a social media photograph of the Serbian dressing room showed a flag hanging above the lockers of the players with an old map of Serbia, showing Kosovo as part of their territory, and the slogan “No surrender!”


    During the match, which Switzerland won, with a goal from one of the Kosovan-Swiss players and a commanding performance by the other, ultranationalist Serb fans could be heard chanting death threats and slurs at ethnic Albanians.

    The post How Jared Kushner Lost at the World Cup in Qatar appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Tuesday, 29 November, 2022 - 17:20 · 10 minutes

    Elon Musk claims to be “ fighting for free speech in America ” but the social network’s new owner appears to be overseeing a purge of left-wing activists from the platform.

    Several prominent antifascist organizers and journalists have had their accounts suspended in the past week, after right-wing operatives appealed directly to Musk to ban them and far-right internet trolls flooded Twitter’s complaints system with false reports about terms of service violations.

    As the Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin noted on Twitter, the suspended users include Chad Loder , an antifascist researcher whose open-source investigation of the U.S. Capitol riot led to the identification and arrest of a masked Proud Boy who attacked police officers. The account of video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh , who reports on far-right protests in Southern California, has also been suspended.


    Among the other prominent accounts suspended were the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club , an antifascist group that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ events in North Texas, and CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that has published and distributed anarchist and anti-authoritarian zines, books, posters, and podcasts since the mid-1990s.

    All four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Andy Ngo, a far-right writer whose conspiratorial , error-riddled reporting on left-wing protests and social movements fuels the mass delusion that a handful of small antifascist groups are part of an imaginary shadow army called “antifa.” In a public exchange on Twitter on Friday, Musk invited Ngo to report “Antifa accounts” that should be suspended directly to him.

    “Andy Ngo’s bizarre vision of ‘antifa’ seems to be the metric used to delete the accounts of journalists and publications, most of which engaged in verifiably good journalism and done so completely above board and TOS observant ways,” Shane Burley, editor of the anthology “ ¡No Pasarán! : Antifascist Dispatches From a World in Crisis,” observed on Twitter . “Paranoid delusions about antifa are driving it.”

    As The Intercept reported last year, Ngo had previously tried and failed to have Loder suspended from Twitter, and also joined a botched attempt to have a court order the researcher to stop tweeting about one of the Proud Boys who took part in the Capitol riot.

    In a phone interview on Monday, Loder, a tech company founder and cybersecurity expert, told The Intercept that their @chadloder account was initially suspended last week for about 90 minutes after Musk had replied to Ngo on Twitter. After briefly regaining access to the account, Loder was suspended again and accused by Twitter of having used another account to evade the ban.

    Loder said that they do have access to another dormant account, @masksfordocs — which was set up in early 2020 as part of an effort by a group of activists to donate N95 masks to doctors during the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic — but had not used it for ban evasion. (Ngo had drawn attention to the @masksfordocs account on Twitter, describing it as Loder’s “alt.”)

    “What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder said. “What I suspect happened is that Twitter’s automatic systems flagged my account for some reason and no human being is reviewing these.”

    Since Loder’s account was on a list being passed around by right-wing activists as part of a coordinated campaign to mass-report fabricated violations by left-wing Twitter users, it could have been suspended as a result of that activity. Loder shared screenshots with The Intercept showing that Telegram channels with tens of thousands of followers, including QAnon adherents and Proud Boys, had coordinated a spate of complaints about Loder’s tweets and celebrated Loder’s suspension.

    Although Twitter’s Trust and Safety team was made aware of the organized false-reporting campaign against Loder earlier this month — and such coordinated bulk reporting and false-flagging of accounts are violations of Twitter’s pre-Musk policy against “ platform manipulation ” — that team was subsequently depleted by mass resignations on November 17.

    Still, in a post on the open-source social network Mastodon, Loder joked about the idea that Musk was simply doing Ngo’s bidding.

    No Longer Viable

    Whatever the reason for the suspension, Loder said it’s clear that Twitter is “no longer a viable platform” for antifascist and security researchers.

    “If I get my account back,” Loder said, “it’s only a matter of time before I get mass reported again.”

    Loder, who has shifted to Mastodon, said that for social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.” Now that Musk appears to be reworking content moderation to tilt the playing field in favor of far-right extremists, Loder added, Twitter “is going to turn into Gab with crypto scams.”

    For social networks, “the product you’re selling is content moderation.”

    What that means, Loder said, is that Twitter will probably keep functioning as a website and an app for some time, but be slowly hollowed out as a place to find varying views on matters of public importance, or a space for online organizing against far-right extremism.

    “Twitter is communities of people who choose to organize online,” Loder said, noting how the site has been used by labor organizers and racial justice protesters in recent years to drive real-world change, and by the so-called sedition hunters who have used the platform to crowd-source visual investigations to identify rioters who took part in the failed coup at the Capitol in Washington on January 6, 2021.

    Twitter was a place where communities could gather, despite harassment, because the worst hate speech was banned through content moderation. “Musk has made it clear that’s no longer part of the product,” Loder said. “The entire Twitter information security community has moved to Mastodon.” Some activists who helped create Black Twitter are already talking about how to rebuild their community on that site too.

    “Twitter was never a healthy ‘public square’ for most of us. Let’s not rewrite history while eulogizing the hellsite,” Loder wrote on Mastodon on Sunday. “Twitter was a frightening battleground where we managed barely to claw out an uneasy existence amidst the worst violent neo-Nazi extremists who constantly published our home addresses, threatened our kids’ lives, and sent hordes of racist trolls into our mentions.”

    On Mastodon, they added, “The same principles that allowed us to survive uneasily on Twitter will be required here. Community defense, thoughtful pressure on moderation policies, and eternal vigilance. There are no safe spaces but those we make safe through constant effort. We keep us safe.” Twitter, Loder says, will take a long time to die and disappear entirely, “like a rotting whale carcass.”

    Broken Links

    “I’ll have to repair nearly every article I’ve ever written since my tweets got wiped out,” journalist and videographer Vishal Singh wrote on Mastodon on Monday, after being banned from Twitter. “Hundreds of articles written by countless journalists used my tweets. From all sides of the political spectrum. Academic papers that cited my tweets. These links and embeds are now all broken.”

    Days before Singh’s account was suspended, Ngo had posted screenshots of some of the journalist’s angry tweets along with this misleading, factually incorrect summary: “Vishal Singh, an #Antifa far-left violent extremist in Los Angeles who identifies as a journalist, is calling for deadly violence again.” Singh is a left-wing journalist but did not call for violence in the tweets shared by Ngo, and is not violent. Last year, after Singh was attacked twice by far-right anti-vaccine protesters and lashed out in self-defense, Ngo posted a misleadingly captioned video and falsely accused Singh of being the aggressor.

    On Mastodon, Singh shared screenshots of emails from Twitter, showing that while reports had been filed against their account for the same tweets that Ngo had posted as screenshots, the company concluded that none of those tweets violated official policies.

    On Monday, Singh was also suspended from Instagram. “The mass false report campaign by the far-right has not stopped against my social media accounts,” they wrote on Mastodon . “The goal is to suppress all of my journalism.”

    Last Friday, Twitter also suspended the account of CrimethInc, an anarchist collective and publisher. The group takes its name from “thoughtcrime,” a term coined by George Orwell in the dystopian novel “1984.”

    In the 14 years that CrimethInc has been on Twitter, the account has never violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. This changed last week after a Twitter exchange between Musk and Ngo.


    Ngo asked Musk to suspend the CrimethInc account, calling it an “Antifa collective” and falsely claiming the group had “claimed a number of attacks.” Within hours of Ngo’s request to Musk, and without citing any specific violations of policies, Twitter suspended the @crimethinc account.

    After the CrimethInc suspension, Ngo claimed , with typically wild and incorrect hyperbole, that the “group operates like ISIS: makes propaganda & training material to radicalize militants toward violence.” He also complained that a dozen affiliated accounts had not yet been suspended. Three days later, almost all of the additional accounts Ngo pointed to had also been suspended by Twitter.

    “Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with ‘free speech’ — it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence,” CrimethInc said in a statement sent to The Intercept.

    The collective also explained that, on the morning of the suspension, it received an email from Twitter saying the company had “received a complaint regarding your account,” but had “investigated the reported content and have found that it is not subject to removal under the Twitter Rules.”

    The group said it had received no further emails from Twitter to explain or justify the ban. “This suggests that the decision to ban our account shortly thereafter was dictated by Musk himself, without regard for the Twitter Rules or any other protocol other than his own apparent allegiance to the far right.”

    Twitter did not respond to a request for comment.

    As the investigative journalist Steven Monacelli reported last week, two days after a gunman killed five people and injured 25 others in a mass shooting at Club Q, an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Twitter suspended the account of the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group in Texas that provides armed security for LGBTQ+ gatherings.

    The John Brown Gun Club — named after the white abolitionist leader John Brown who, in 1859, led an armed anti-slavery revolt — assists marginalized communities in defending themselves against white supremacist violence. LGBTQ+ events in Texas, such as a family-friendly drag brunch Monacelli covered in August , frequently attract the attention of armed far-right protesters from the Proud Boys and neo-Nazi groups like Patriot Front and Aryan Freedom Network.

    Twitter’s reason for suspending the account, according to the suspension report , was two tweets that supposably violated Twitter’s rules against “hateful conduct.” One was a reply to a U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweet with the text “@CBP Mugging at gun point,” and another was a joke about pronouns with the text “Every queer a riflethem.” Without being willfully misread or taken out of context, neither of those tweets constitute hateful conduct.

    Since its Twitter account was suspended last week, the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club has been tweeting from a separate account, @elmforkJBGC , which has not yet been suspended. The group has also started posting on Mastodon .

    “The irony isn’t lost on us that our suspension coincides with a coordinated effort to reinstate the most vile antisemitic, transphobic hate accounts,” the Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club said in a statement to The Intercept. “Whether this is an indication of the future of leadership of Elon Musk’s running of Twitter, we cannot say but we can say that the timing and reasoning is deliberate and targeted.”

    The post Left-Wing Voices Are Silenced on Twitter as Far-Right Trolls Advise Elon Musk appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Twitter Allows Russian Officials to Share Antisemitic Cartoon of Zelensky

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 23 November, 2022 - 03:34 · 6 minutes

    Elon Musk’s Twitter failed to stop the circulation of an antisemitic cartoon posted on the network by Russian diplomats drawing on a trope of Nazi propaganda by depicting Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with a huge nose.

    Despite pleas from Twitter users who objected to the anti-Jewish racism of the cartoon, the tweet had not been deleted, contextualized or restricted in any visible way when this article was published, 17 hours after the image was first posted on the official account of the Russian embassy in London.

    Before Musk took control of the social network, tweets containing images that used racist tropes to attack individuals or groups based on their ethnic identity were routinely removed from the platform or made impossible to share.

    Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and the co-author of the book “ Meme Wars ,” posted a screenshot of the Russian embassy tweet and noted that the diplomats were using “open antisemitism” to drum up support for the Russian war on Ukraine.


    The cartoon is a version of an old internet meme , in which an image of Bart Simpson writing on a chalkboard during after-school detention — from the opening sequence of “The Simpsons” — is reworked by inserting topical new text on the board. In the image shared by the Russian officials, the character of Bart was also replaced with a crude depiction of Zelenskyy in which his nose was altered to evoke Nazi imagery of Jews.

    The text on the board, and the tweeted Russian caption for the cartoon, makes reference to speculation encouraged by Russia, but unsupported by evidence, that Ukraine had intentionally fired a defensive missile into Poland during a recent Russian attack as part of a false flag operation intended to draw NATO into the conflict.

    Twitter’s failure to immediately remove the image or restrict the Russian government account that posted it appeared to be in keeping with Musk’s previously stated sympathy with Russia’s war aims and his active embrace of right-wing talking points about the need to make the social network a forum for “free speech,” even if that means allowing hate speech to flourish.

    But Musk’s definition of who should be allowed to speak freely appears to be influenced by the right-wing ideologues and trolls he frequently encourages and agrees with on Twitter. The social network’s decision to allow the Russian government’s racist attack on Zelenskyy came at the same time that some antifascist accounts were being suspended and just after Musk reinstated the accounts of both Donald Trump — who used his tweets to foment the failed coup of Jan. 6, 2021 — and Kanye West, who recently tweeted a threat to unleash punishment on “Jewish people.”

    Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, a news organization that began with collaborative, open-source investigations on Twitter , was among those who drew Musk’s attention to the image and asked if the social network’s new owner is “okay with state run Twitter accounts using anti-Semitic tropes?” Higgins suggested that Musk could even poll his followers on the platform to see if they “are cool with casual anti-Semitism.”

    Elizabeth Tsurkov, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli-Palestinian think-tank based in Jerusalem, noted that the tweet came from diplomats working for the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, who had defended Russia’s wild claims that Ukraine is run by Nazis by endorsing a conspiracy theory that Adolf Hitler was Jewish.

    “So what if Zelensky is Jewish?” Lavrov told Italian television in May, when he was asked about the Russian claim that Ukraine was run by Nazis. “I believe that Hitler also had Jewish blood.” The foreign minister went on to claim that “wise Jewish people” have said that “some of the worst antisemites are Jews.”

    In her comment on the cartoon posted on Twitter by Russian diplomats, Tsurkov wrote: “The people who brought you ‘Hitler was a Jew’ decided to depict Ukraine’s Jewish president this way.”

    Lavrov’s remarks caused outrage and were condemned by his Israeli counterpart, Yair Lapid, as “an unforgivable and outrageous statement as well as a terrible historical error. Jews did not murder themselves in the Holocaust. The lowest level of racism against Jews is to accuse Jews themselves of antisemitism.”

    Three days later, the hawkish Russian state television host Vladimir Solovyov, who is himself Jewish, told viewers that it was perfectly possible for Zelensky to be both Jewish and a Nazi, at least according to the definition used by those around Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. Nazism, Solovyov insisted, was a form of extreme nationalism that could target any national group, not just Jews. “Nazism doesn’t have to be antisemitic,” he said, “it can be anti-Slavic, anti-Russian.”


    The idea that Russians, not Jews, were the main victims of Nazi Germany has a long pedigree in Russia. As the historian Timothy Snyder explained in his book “ Bloodlands ,” the official Soviet history of the nation’s “Great Patriotic War” against Nazi Germany was written to downplay the suffering of the Jews — influenced by Josef Stalin’s antisemitism.

    “If the Stalinist notion of the war was to prevail, the fact that the Jews were its main victims had to be forgotten,” Snyder wrote. “Also to be forgotten was that the Soviet Union had been allied to Nazi Germany when the war began in 1939, and that the Soviet Union had been unprepared for the German attack in 1941. The murder of the Jews was not only an undesirable memory in and of itself; it called forth other undesirable memories. It had to be forgotten.”

    “Putin’s Russian regime talks of ‘Nazis’ not because it opposes the extreme right, which it most certainly does not, but as a rhetorical device to justify unprovoked war and genocidal policies,” Snyder wrote on Substack in April. “[T]he Russian policy of ‘denazification’ is not directed against Nazis in the sense that the word is normally used,” Snyder added, but “operates within the special Russian definition of ‘Nazi': a Nazi is a Ukrainian who refuses to admit being a Russian.”

    “The actual history of actual Nazis and their actual crimes in the 1930s and 1940s is thus totally irrelevant and completely cast aside,” Snyder observed. “This is perfectly consistent with Russian war fighting in Ukraine. No tears are shed in the Kremlin over Russian killing of Holocaust survivors or Russian destruction of Holocaust memorials, because Jews and the Holocaust have nothing to do with the Russian definition of ‘Nazi.’ This explains why Volodymyr Zelens’kyi, although a democratically-elected president, and a Jew with family members who fought in the Red Army and died in the Holocaust, can be called a Nazi. Zelens’kyi is a Ukrainian, and that is all that ‘Nazi’ means.”

    The post Twitter Allows Russian Officials to Share Antisemitic Cartoon of Zelensky appeared first on The Intercept .

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      “Fuck That”: How Street Protests and Youth Activism Brought Kenneth Mejia to Power in Los Angeles

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Thursday, 17 November, 2022 - 18:30 · 9 minutes

    On election night in Los Angeles last week, as it became clear that Kenneth Mejia, a 32-year-old activist and accountant, had been elected the city’s controller in a landslide, his campaign manager, Jane Nguyen, told a group of young campaign volunteers who had been criticized for taking part in protests during the campaign that she had their backs.

    Mejia, the first Filipino American elected to citywide office in Los Angeles, ran an innovative campaign that made use of old and new media, including educational billboards with bar charts showing how the city’s spending on policing compares to other priorities, and TikTok videos featuring the candidate dancing with Gen Z volunteers or in a Pikachu costume. But the campaign was powered by harnessing the energy young activists usually pour into protests — and redirecting it into electoral politics.



    A longtime housing justice organizer with the LA Tenants Union, Mejia was first inspired to run for office by the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign, which had also convinced some veterans of protest movements like Occupy Wall Street that it might be possible to bring about change through electoral politics.

    After three unsuccessful races for Congress since then — first as a Sanders-aligned Democrat , and then as a Green Party candidate — Mejia set his sights on the city controller’s office and assembled a campaign team made up almost entirely of fellow organizers and activists. That included Nguyen, who got into local politics through homelessness advocacy in 2018, when she co-founded a group to campaign for a homeless shelter and services in her Koreatown neighborhood. She then did graphics work for the successful city council campaign of Nithya Raman, who was backed by the Democratic Socialists of America in 2020.

    In her election night speech to volunteers last week, Nguyen spoke of “the harm and the pain that some of you had to endure because you dared to volunteer for this campaign,” and accused Mejia’s opponent, outgoing LA City Councilmember Paul Koretz, of running “one of the dirtiest campaigns that I have ever seen.” (Koretz’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

    “It wasn’t enough, she said, “just to drag Kenneth’s name through the mud, they had to viciously attack some of the youngest members of our team for daring to speak out. We’ve been asked over and over again, ‘Do you denounce the actions of your volunteers?’ ‘Do you condemn them for protesting — for disrupting a meeting?’

    “Here’s what I have to say about that,” Nguyen said. “I mean, fuck that!”


    “We will never apologize for confronting and challenging power,” Nguyen continued, after cheers and chants of “Fuck that” died down. “We will always stand by and fight alongside those demanding a better way of life from people in power. And when Kenneth is in office, I will hold him accountable to that.”

    The Koretz campaign, in an email to his supporters , had indeed attacked Mejia, Nguyen, and their young volunteers for taking part in protests, and for what Koretz called their “deeply disturbing behavior and statements” about city officials. The homepage of Koretz’s campaign website also prominently featured an image of Mejia at a housing protest and a link to a separate website devoted to collecting opposition research about Mejia and his campaign volunteers, called TruthAboutMejia.com .

    111722_koretz

    A screenshot of the campaign website for Paul Koretz, a Los Angeles City Councilmember who ran unsuccessfully for the post of city controller.

    Photo: via KoretzforLA

    Along with screenshots of Mejia’s past online comments in support of defunding the police, and criticism of Democrats including Joe Biden, that site denounced activism by young Mejia campaign volunteers — like the youth climate activist Sim Bilal, who disrupted a mayoral forum in March by shouting insults at the subsequently disgraced Councilmember Kevin de León. The site also denounced Mejia campaign volunteers like Kyler Chin, an 18-year-old web designer and Sunrise Movement organizer, for attending protests to stop the Los Angeles City Council from banning homeless encampments near schools this summer .

    But Mejia and Nguyen, who first met at a housing protest in front of a councilmember’s home, were never likely to distance themselves from volunteers who share their faith in the importance of disrupting the status quo by taking to the streets.


    In fact, the candidate and his campaign manager even attended one of the raucous protests against the City Council’s anti-camping ordinance in August, and trolled Koretz by posting a photo of themselves inside the chamber during a public comment period before activists disrupted the meeting.


    “Almost all of our volunteers consist of activists and organizers,” Nguyen told me by phone from Los Angeles this week. “We don’t have consultants on our team, who are professionals. We have activists who are already on the ground doing the work of advocating for their community.”

    “So what activists do is they protest and sometimes they engage in disruptive protest, including disrupting a mayoral forum or disrupting a City Council meeting or protesting at politicians’ houses,” Nguyen said. “One of our values is holding powerful people accountable, and so Kenneth has never disapproved or condemned our volunteers for their actions.”

    “We are community organizers,” Mejia said on Wednesday in an interview with Spectrum News. “We had over 1,200 volunteer sign-ups; we knocked on over 110,000 doors; we were very good with social media, thanks to our Gen Z team members,” he added.

    Appearing with one of his pet corgis, who played a prominent role in the campaign’s ads, Mejia explained that he had used the billboards, charting the city’s spending, to show that he was already effectively doing the work of the controller by auditing the city’s finances and educating the public about how their tax money was being spent .


    Rather than distance himself from the city’s protest culture, as his opponent and several of the city’s Democratic clubs had demanded, Mejia’s campaign made his experience as a protest leader central to his argument that voters could trust him to keep an eye on the city government.

    A biographical campaign video released in late 2020 started with an analysis of how much money the city spends policing peaceful protests, and featured images of Mejia marching with a placard at one protest, shouting through a bullhorn at another, and banging on a drum at a third.

    Nguyen explained to me that the campaign’s first and most eye-catching billboard , a bar chart showing how massive the Los Angeles Police Department budget is compared to spending on other departments, came out of her work doing graphics for the People’s Budget LA , an alternative city budget produced in 2020 by a coalition of activists led by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles.

    About two weeks before George Floyd’s murder, Nguyen said, as the City Council was getting ready to approve the city budget, Black Lives Matter LA brought activist groups together to prepare to fight for a reduced LAPD budget, in part by producing an analysis of what the city was spending.

    “I was really interested in that because I saw that the LAPD budget took up half of the unrestricted revenue, and it left so very little for homelessness and housing,” Nguyen told me. While combing through the fine print, she noticed that the mayor only reported the LAPD’s operating budget, which was about $1.7 billion, obscuring that the real total , including pension payments and other costs, was more than $3 billion .

    “I just found it mind-blowing that no one knew how big the LAPD budget was,” Nguyen recalled. So she set out to produce a bar chart comparing what the city spent on policing to housing, emergency management, and other departments. “That visualization really radicalized so many people, including myself, and it paved the way for a lot of our campaign on defunding the police,” Nguyen said.


    Essentially the same graphic, displayed on billboards around the city, brought a wave of attention, and helped secure the endorsement of the Los Angeles Times for Mejia’s campaign to convince voters that what the city controller’s office needed was an activist accountant.

    In August, Mejia told Bolts magazine that one of his main goals as controller will be to audit the city’s sweeps of homeless camps and the criminalization of homelessness. “I think what you’ll find is tens of millions of dollars being spent on these sweeps — and you’ll notice that the performance metrics of getting people housed from the sweeps are terrible,” Mejia said. “I’m hoping that we can show just how much the city has failed on tackling homelessness.”

    Nguyen, who will be Mejia’s chief of staff when he takes office in December, told me that she doesn’t expect to keep protesting while working in government. “We’ll be able to hold elected officials and the city government accountable in a different way, and hopefully in a more powerful way,” Nguyen told me, “using the power of audits, and compelling departments and city officials to provide us with documentation.” Mejia, she added, will be “using his platform to publicize his audits and, as someone from an organizing background … mobilize people to pressure their elected officials to act.”

    The post “Fuck That”: How Street Protests and Youth Activism Brought Kenneth Mejia to Power in Los Angeles appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Rupert Murdoch Is Having the Same Problem Dr. Frankenstein Once Faced With His Monster

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 11 November, 2022 - 11:30 · 5 minutes

    In the aftermath of the midterm election debacle for the Republican Party, Rupert Murdoch’s conservative media outlets are trying, in more and less subtle ways, to send a message to Donald Trump: It’s over.

    On Wednesday, the New York Post devoted its first post-election front page to hailing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as “DeFuture” of the Republican Party. On Thursday, the Post carpet-bombed Trump with criticism, portraying him on its front page as “Trumpty Dumpty” who “couldn’t build a wall” and “had a great fall,” leaving it to others to put the party’s pieces back together.


    Trump, the Post columnist John Podhoretz argued, “sabotaged the Republican midterms” by elevating a string of weak gubernatorial and Senate candidates who supported his lies about the 2020 election but repelled voters.

    The Wall Street Journal editorial pages were equally scathing, describing the former president as “the Republican Party’s Biggest Loser,” alongside a column headlined “DeSantis Is a Winner. What Does That Mean for Trump in 2024?”


    On Murdoch’s most influential outlet, Fox News, two of Trump’s closest allies on the television channel he gets his opinions from , Laura Ingraham and Kayleigh McEnany, sounded like hostage negotiators, urging the former president to admit his time was up and let his supporters go.

    After beginning her monologue Wednesday night by blaming “the media” for “obsessing over the losses of Trump-backed candidates in states like New Hampshire and Pennsylvania,” Ingraham addressed Trump, without mentioning his name. “Going into 2024, the Republicans are going to be looking for candidates who are focused on winning, not just making a point or settling a score,” she said, as a graphic over her shoulder read “It’s About America, Not Grudges,” and the headline on the screen beneath her changed to “Focus on Ego and Grievance Turning Off Voters.”


    Appealing to younger voters, Ingraham added, has “got to be the goal for the next presidential election.” Looking directly into the camera and speaking slowly, as if addressing an audience of one sitting before a television in Mar-a-Lago, Ingraham continued: “The populist movement is about ideas. It is not about any one person. If the voters conclude that you’re putting your own ego or your own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country, they’re going to look elsewhere, period.”

    McEnany, Trump’s former press secretary , seemed to be reading from the same script on Thursday when she told viewers that “there are 72 million people in this country that make up a movement. It is a conservative movement, it’s not tied to any one person.”


    “In 2016, they decided, ‘Our home is in President Trump,’” McEnany said. “This time around, these 72 million people, they will decide where their home is, only they will decide. No pundit will say, ‘It’s Trump,’ ‘It’s DeSantis.’ They’re smart, they’re wise, they’re going to read the tea leaves, and I have all the trust in the world they’re going to pick where their home is.”

    “Then why did the former president come up with the name ‘DeSanctimonious’ a couple of days before” the election, fellow Fox host Lisa Kennedy Montgomery broke in to ask. “Well, he shouldn’t have,” McEnany responded. “There is,” she added in a description of a future Republican Party that must exclude Trump, “no place for nicknames.”

    Other Fox guests voiced more direct criticism of Trump, but the channel’s coverage largely ignored the former president and switched focus to DeSantis.


    Trump, it must be said, appears to have no interest in taking any of these hints to go away quietly — even from the television network that operated as a de facto arm of his two presidential campaigns, in 2016 and 2020, and served as something akin to state TV during his years in office. “Despite having picked so many winners, I have to put up with the Fake News,” he complained on Truth Social. “For me, Fox News was always gone, even in 2015-16 when I began my ‘journey,’ but now they’re really gone.”

    “NewsCorp, which is Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the no longer great New York Post,” Trump raged on Thursday evening, “is all in for Governor Ron DeSanctimonious.” In the same rambling statement , Trump also tossed in a new conspiracy theory, claiming that he had dispatched the FBI to Florida in 2018 to shut down a Democratic plot to steal that year’s gubernatorial election from DeSantis. (In fact, Trump’s allegations of election fraud in Florida in 2018 were debunked by local law enforcement .)

    It is far too early to say if Murdoch’s campaign to force Trump from the stage will be a success, but the effort to cast the former president as a loser by focusing on the cast of odd candidates he supported does have a precedent.

    In the 2010 midterms, Republicans lost three winnable Senate races because of deeply flawed , pro-insurrection and racist candidates supported by Sarah Palin, the party’s former vice presidential nominee turned Fox News contributor. Palin eventually decided to pass on a run for the White House in 2012, but it was not until June 2015 that she finally lost her contract with Fox — the week after Trump announced that he was running for president.

    The post Rupert Murdoch Is Having the Same Problem Dr. Frankenstein Once Faced With His Monster appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Stephen Miller Mails "Race-Baiting Misinformation" to Asian American Voters

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Friday, 4 November, 2022 - 21:02 · 5 minutes

    Asian American voters , who could decide close elections in states like Pennsylvania, are being deluged with incendiary, misleading ads sent to their mailboxes, phones, and screens by former Trump aides, including Stephen Miller, in the closing days of the campaign.

    Leaders of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community in Pennsylvania have denounced the flood of digital ads and direct mail from Republican groups — which seek to blame Democrats for the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and cast efforts to combat anti-Black racism as a form of discrimination against white and Asian communities.

    “Asian Americans, like many other communities of color and immigrant and refugee communities have had to fight through many barriers to vote — especially misinformation,” Wei Chen, an organizer in the Chinese American community in Philadelphia said in an interview on Friday. “The ads are new; the tricks are not.”

    Chen, who co-founded the state’s Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance, or API PA, said that mailers from Miller’s group America First Legal, falsely claiming that the Biden administration discriminates against Asian Americans, have started appearing in the Philadelphia suburbs.

    The flyers, which rely heavily on misleading headlines and text from right-wing news outlets, appeared after a deeply dishonest digital ad, produced by former Trump aides who also work with Miller’s foundation, aired. The ad sought to blame President Joe Biden for the rise in racist attacks on Asian Americans, which first spiked in March 2020 when then-President Donald Trump started calling Covid-19 “the Chinese virus” and “the Kung flu.”


    The flyers from Miller’s group have been mailed to Asian American households in other states too, but the effort seems particularly intense in Pennsylvania, where more than 250,000 Asian Americans are eligible to vote , and turnout among the heavily Democratic community spiked to over 75 percent in 2020. Asian Americans are the fastest-growing demographic in the United States and make up 45 percent of newly naturalized citizens in Pennsylvania, according to data from Chen’s group.


    Chen told me that, while watching Chinese dramas on YouTube recently, the ads blaming Democrats for attacks on Asians that Trump’s rhetoric seemed to incite started popping up on his channel. He took it as an insult to his intelligence and that of his community.

    “This kind of ad, the political rhetoric has a real-world impact and our Chinese community and Asian community have to deal with the consequences of racist fear-mongering that Trump and the Republicans and Fox News are putting out,” Chen told me. “Exploiting the pain Republicans have caused our community by blaming Chinese people for Covid and stirring up violence, it’s such a loser’s move. It’s a miscalculation to think that Asian Americans won’t see through it,” he added.

    Helen Gym, a member of the Philadelphia city council whose parents who emigrated from Korea, sees “these horrendous, race-baiting mailers,” as part of a decades-long effort to suppress the Asian American vote. “I think anything that does the race-baiting and the fear-mongering — ‘You’re not welcome, you don’t count’ — is always an attempt to dissuade, suppress, breed cynicism and fear,” she said in a phone interview.

    Gym said that the best way to combat the misleading ads is through direct contact with voters from members of their community. “People need to operate by trust and faith. There’s no question that millions of dollars of mailers flooding into mailboxes can be countered by individuals who are on the ground working with the AAPI community,” Gym told me.

    “What you are seeing in Philadelphia in particular over the last few years is an enormous investment in on the ground organizers, especially on civic engagement and community work that extends well beyond election day,” Gym said.

    “Asian American voters have massive power in Pennsylvania, and that power has rattled Republicans so much that they’re lobbing race-baiting misinformation at our people, trying to deceive and manipulate Asian American voters,” Mohan Seshadri, the executive director of API PA, said in a statement.

    Chen pointed out that API PA has the reach and credibility to help Asian American voters see through the ads he refers to as “dirty tricks.” “We are talking to tens of thousands of our voters, knocking hundreds of thousands of doors and making millions of calls in 15 different languages,” Chen said. At least 15,000 of those phone calls have been in languages other than English.

    Speaking to people in their native languages is important, Chen told me, because Asian Americans who do not speak English at home are “more susceptible to misinformation” in ads that make outlandish claims unsupported by the facts.

    Nikil Saval, a Pennsylvania state senator who represents part of Philadelphia, suggested in an interview that the barrage of ads from Miller and his allies seemed like “a kind desperate move,” inspired by the obvious success of Democratic organizing in Pennsylvania’s AAPI community in recent years. “This kind of targeting is in some sense a reaction to that work,” Saval said. It’s an effort, he added, “to kind of siphon off a segment of Asian American voters around issues of public safety or crime — specifically within this framework of white supremacy. It is a white and Asian coalition that they invoke.”

    Because Asian American and Pacific Islander voters “are increasingly organized, vocal, and powerful,” Saval suggested, Republicans are trying to incite and weaponize anti-Black racism through the ads mailed out by Miller’s group. “There is this kind of hope that a different kind of white supremacist coalition could be fomented based on this kind of desperate appeal,” Saval told me. “I don’t think it’s going to work, because I think the effort on the other side is much stronger.”

    The post Stephen Miller Mails “Race-Baiting Misinformation” to Asian American Voters appeared first on The Intercept .

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      Nobel Laureates Press Egypt to Free Alaa Abd El Fattah, Writer on Hunger Strike, Before COP27

      news.movim.eu / TheIntercept · Wednesday, 2 November, 2022 - 13:08 · 6 minutes

    Fifteen Nobel Prize winners called on world leaders visiting Egypt next week for the COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh to demand freedom for political prisoners, “most urgently, the Egyptian-British writer and philosopher, Alaa Abd El Fattah, now six months into a hunger strike and at risk of death.”

    In a letter sent on Wednesday to heads of state and climate envoys due to speak at the climate conference, the Nobel laureates urged them “to bring the voices of the unjustly imprisoned into the room,” by speaking their names and reading from Abd El Fattah’s writing.

    Abd El Fattah, a jailed writer and activist whose calls for democratic change in Egypt have frightened four successive authoritarian governments into prosecuting him for just attending protests or posting critical comments online, has been on a “Gandhi-style” hunger strike since April , consuming only 100 calories a day. His activist sisters, Sanaa Seif and Mona Seif, revealed this week that he plans to stop drinking water on Sunday, when COP27 begins.



    Abd El Fattah, known to his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers as @alaa , rose to international prominence as one of the most compelling voices to emerge from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak.

    Although he has spent much of the past decade in jail, a collection of his writing, “ You Have Not Yet Been Defeated ,” which includes reflections smuggled out of prison, was published last year.

    “Alaa Abd El Fattah’s powerful voice for democracy is close to being extinguished, we ask you to breathe life into it by reading his words,” the Nobel laureates wrote to leaders, including President Joe Biden, who plan to attend the conference.

    In response to a request from Abd El Fattah’s publishers, the letter was signed by: Svetlana Alexievich, J. M. Coetzee, Annie Ernaux, Louise Gluck, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Kazuo Ishiguro, Elfriede Jelinek, Mario Vargas Llosa, Patrick Modiano, Herta Muller, Orhan Pamuk, Roger Penrose, George Smith, Wole Soyinka and Olga Tokarczuk.

    When Abd El Fattah, who comes from a family of Cairene rights activists, was first jailed in 2006, a campaign to demand the release of the activist blogger was launched online , including on a blog called, simply, “Free Alaa!”

    That slogan, and an image of the young writer’s curly hair, was revived as a social media hashtag in 2011, when the military council that took power after Hosni Mubarak was toppled by the Tahrir Square uprising detained him for reporting on a subsequent massacre of Coptic Christian protesters by the army.

    In the years since, Abd El Fattah’s family and supporters have been forced to defend him again and again from unjust prosecution and imprisonment by the authorities — first during the brief rule of the freely elected Islamist leader Mohamed Morsi, and then after Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Morsi’s defense minister, seized power in a coup in 2013.

    Abd El Fattah has been held in harsh conditions in Egyptian prisons for most of the past decade, after Sisi banned street protests and criminalized online dissent. Since he revealed plans to begin a full hunger strike, his family has intensified efforts to save his life by calling for supporters to press the British government to intervene. Because Abd El Fattah’s mother was born in London, he was able to obtain British citizenship last year.


    In the build up to COP27 in Egypt, climate activists have pointed out that their counterparts in the host country are still not free to even protest for change.

    “The reality most of those participating in #Cop27 are choosing to ignore,” Abd El Fattah’s sister Mona Seif observed on Twitter last month, “is not just that Human Rights and Climate justice are interlinked, but in countries like #Egypt your true allies, the ones who actually give a damn about the planet’s future are those languishing in prisons.”

    The Swedish climate activists Greta Thunberg and Andreas Magnusson joined Abd El Fattah’s sisters at a protest outside the Foreign Office in London this week.

    LONDON, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 30: (L-R) Mona Seif, sister of Alaa Abd El Fattah, climate activists Greta Thunberg and Andreas Magnusson, and Sanaa Seif, sister of Abd El Fattah, pose for a photograph during at sit-in for jailed British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah on October 30, 2022 in London, England. Alaa Abd El Fattah, a British-Egyptian blogger and activist, has been on hunger strike in an Egyptian prison for six months. His sister, Sanaa Seif, has been staging a sit-in outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office in an effort to force the British government to intervene. (Photo by Hollie Adams/Getty Images)

    Alaa Abd El Fattah’s sisters, Mona Seif, left, and Sanaa Seif, right, with climate activists Greta Thunberg and Andreas Magnusson at sit-in outside the U.K. Foreign Office this week.

    Photo: Hollie Adams/Getty Images

    During the 2020 campaign, then-candidate Joe Biden pledged that he would condition $1.3 billion in U.S. security aid to Egypt on respect for human rights from el-Sisi, who had been coddled by President Donald Trump. “Arresting, torturing, and exiling activists … or threatening their families is unacceptable,” Biden tweeted that year. “No more blank checks for Trump’s ‘favorite dictator.'”

    But last year, Biden administration officials reportedly told Sisi’s government that just $130 million of aid would be withheld until Egypt ended the prosecutions of a few nongovernmental organizations and dropped charges against or released just 16 of the estimated 60,000 political prisoners in Egyptian jails. (A report released this year showed that nearly 6,000 Egyptians were jailed for political activities during Biden’s first year in office.)

    In the days before the climate conference, Egypt’s government has made it quite clear that protesters are not welcome anywhere outside the strictly controlled “ Climate Demonstrations Designated Zone ,” in the conference’s “Green Zone.” According to Hossam Bahgat, the director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, permission to access that zone appears to be impossible for activists to obtain.


    At least 67 people were reportedly arrested this week in Egypt for speaking out about the inadequate response to climate change, including an Indian activist who set off on a protest march from Cairo and some who were detained on charges of “spreading false news” for sharing calls on Facebook for demonstrations.

    “This type of awareness raising used to be celebrated in Egypt, Bahgat noted. “Not in today’s carceral Egypt.”


    The post Nobel Laureates Press Egypt to Free Alaa Abd El Fattah, Writer on Hunger Strike, Before COP27 appeared first on The Intercept .