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democracy now
Israeli Government Funded Covert Influence Campaign Targeting US Lawmakers: NYT
The head of an Israeli watchdog group called the operation "anti-democratic" and "extremely irresponsible."
Jun 05, 2024
Israel's Ministry of Diaspora Affairs organized and paid for a digital campaign to influence U.S. lawmakers, especially Democrats who are Black, The New York Timesreported on Wednesday.
The ministry allotted $2 million to the operation in October and hired Stoic, a Tel Aviv-based political marketing firm, to carry it out. Stoic established fake news websites and hundreds of fake accounts on X, Instagram, and Facebook that posted pro-Israeli messages, trying to push lawmakers such as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), the House minority leader, Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) to fund Israel's military and support its war efforts, the Times reported.
The influence campaign had been reported by a few news and nonprofit organizations in recent months, but the Times article, which drew from operation documents and interviews with current and former diaspora ministry officials, was the first to show that Israel's government was behind it. Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, published a related story one hour later on Wednesday.
Critics condemned the Israeli government for its role in the disinformation campaign.
"So in addition to the pro-Israel lobby spending tens of millions to defame and defeat progressives in Congress, we now learn that Israel creates fake media to target friends and opponents by inundating with fake news supporting Israeli positions," James Zogby, co-founder of the Arab American Institute, wrote on social media.
Wow—New York Times & Haaretz report Israel ordered a secret digital operation on US lawmakers (esp. Black Democrats) that spread misinformation & anti-Arab sentiment and attacked pro-Palestinian Americans, to sway public opinion & influence the lawmakers to fund Israel’s military pic.twitter.com/D5U5ewiqLP
— Prem Thakker (@prem_thakker) June 5, 2024
The disinformation campaign comes amid other efforts by pro-Israel groups to influence U.S. politics during its assault on Gaza, notably the lobbying and campaign money spent by groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its affiliates.
The Israeli disinformation campaign also drew comparisons to Russia's well-known attempt to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which was a central focus of the U.S. political commentariat in the years that followed. Ishmael Daro, an editor at Democracy Now!, made a tongue-in-cheek prediction that the reaction from the U.S. political establishment would be similar this time.
When Russia set up bots to post ineffective propaganda in 2016, it led to a multi-year meltdown by much of the U.S. political establishment that basically treated it like a coup attempt. I assume we'll get a similar reaction to this. https://t.co/sEXeO41ozb pic.twitter.com/nPkQtWsCyb
— ishmael n. daro (@iD4RO) June 5, 2024
Last week, both Meta and OpenAI issued reports on Stoic's disinformation campaign and said they had blocked the company's network from further activity. Meta said it had closed more than 500 fake Facebook accounts and OpenAI called Stoic a "for-hire Israeli threat actor," NBC Newsreported. Stoic's users remain active on X, the Times reported.
Many of the fake social media posts were generated using ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot owned by OpenAI, and much of the language in the posts was "stilted" and repetitive, the Times reported.
The covert scheme has also been characterized as "sloppy" and "ineffective," and it made little penetration with the general public or government figures. "We found and removed this network early in its audience building efforts, before they were able to gain engagement among authentic communities," Meta wrote in its report.
The Times did not explain that the covert influence campaign was discovered in February by the Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) of the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, and by Marc Owen Jones, a professor in Middle East studies and digital humanities at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, according to social media posts.
FakeReporter, an Israeli disinformation watchdog, followed up those initial discoveries with a March report on the campaign's activities, including the fake social media accounts and creation of the online platforms—Non-Agenda, The Moral Alliance, and Unfold Magazine—that created or republished news from a pro-Israel perspective, focusing on, for example, purported links between the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) and Hamas. The findings were reported in Haaretz at the time.
That Israel "ran an operation that interferes in U.S. politics is extremely irresponsible," Achiya Schatz, the executive director of FakeReporter, told the Times. He characterized it to Haaretz as "amateurish" and "anti-democratic."
FakeReporter in fact issued a second report on Wednesday showing that Stoic's influence network may have gone further than the Times reporting shows. The watchdog group uncovered four additional websites, apparently Stoic-affiliated, that contain Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content. DFRLab had issued a report in March which also cited pro-Israeli disinformation and Islamophobic rhetoric, in that case targeted largely at Canadians.
The new report concluded that the influence network has "apparently developed into a large-scale effort to target various groups, some outside the U.S., using Islamophobic and anti-immigrant content."
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Israeli Scholar Sees Hope for Democratic Palestine 'To Replace This Apartheid State'
"We are seeing... important processes that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project," said Ilan Pappé, following his interrogation in the U.S.
May 21, 2024
Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a prominent anti-Zionist, expressed hope for a free, democratic Palestine in which Jewish and Arab people can coexist, during an interview on Tuesday with Democracy Now! following his interrogation by U.S. federal agents last week.
Pappé, director of the European Center for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, was interrogated by the agents for two hours about his views after arriving in Detroit on a flight from London on May 13. The agents took his phone away before returning it. Pappé initially said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had interrogated him but later clarified that he was not sure which U.S. federal agency the agents represented.
Pappé
cited the interrogation in Detroit as an example of the "sheer panic and desperation" of Israel and pro-Israel lobbies due to fear the country will become a "pariah state." The interrogation came amid crackdowns on pro-Palestine demonstrations on U.S. college campuses, as well as arrests of protestors and cancellations of pro-Palestine intellectual activity in Europe.
In Tuesday's interview, Pappé denounced Israel's historical policy toward Palestinians, declaring it to be clearsighted in its cruelty and intentional in its methods, as he has long done in his scholarly work, most notably in his 2007 book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
Referring to events in the late 1940s, he told Democracy Now! that "the Nakba is a bit of a misleading term, because it means, in Arabic, a 'catastrophe.' But really what the Palestinians suffered was not an actual catastrophe, but rather ethnic cleansing, which is a clear policy motivated by clear ideology."
"There is not one moment in the history of the Palestinians in Palestine, since the arrival of Zionism in Palestine, in which Palestinians are not potentially under danger of losing their home, their fields, their businesses, and their homeland," he added.
Pappé has argued that as ugly as that history may be, the current war in Gaza is even worse—a step up from ethnic cleansing to genocide, in his view. His forthcoming book, Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic, documents the influence of the pro-Zionist lobbyists in the U.S., the U.K., and elsewhere.
Despite that influence, Pappé said that he sees signs that the ideological hold of Zionism is weakening, and a freer, more democratic Palestine may be possible, tellingDemocracy Now!:
I think we are seeing processes, important processes, that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project. Hopefully, the Palestinian national movement and anyone else involved in Israel and Palestine would be able to replace this apartheid state, this oppressive regime, with a democratic one for everyone who lives between the river and the sea and for all the Palestinians who were expelled from there since 1948 until today.
"I am really hopeful that there will be a different kind of life," he added, "for both Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea under a democratic, free Palestine."
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Advocates Lament 'Extremely Disappointing' Exclusion of Noncitizens From Biden Marijuana Pardons
"President Biden can and should ensure that marijuana possession convictions do not jeopardize a person's immigration status," argued one immigrant rights attorney.
Oct 07, 2022
While welcoming U.S. President Joe Biden's executive action Thursday pardoning Americans convicted of low-level federal marijuana possession offenses, immigrant rights advocates expressed disappointment that the policy does not apply to noncitizens--and hope that the administration will ensure that everyone benefits from the clemency.
"Federal immigration authorities regularly deny green card and citizenship applications due to marijuana possession convictions."
As Common Dreams reported, Biden granted "a full, complete, and unconditional pardon to all current U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who committed the offense of simple possession of marijuana," a plant listed by the Drug Enforcement Administration in the same category as heroin and in a more serious class than cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl.
While progressives largely applauded Biden's move, many expressed hope and expectation that is was only a first step toward federal decriminalization and, ultimately, legalization of a plant that is legal for recreational or medical use in most states today.
Some called for the inclusion of noncitzens and undocumented people in the policy. The California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice tweeted that Biden "says no one should be in jail for just using or possessing marijuana, but fails to include immigrants without status in his pardon."
"It's not the first time the government actively excludes immigrants without status from important decisions or reparations," the advocacy group added.
\u201cMarijuana arrests account for over half of all drug arrests in our country.\n\nThis is an important step forward, but we must keep pushing for more. Legalize marijuana. Expunge records. Protect undocumented folks. End the war on drugs.\u201d— Cori Bush (@Cori Bush) 1665164663
Although Drug Policy Alliance executive director Kassandra Frederique said Thursday that her group was "thrilled to see President Biden holding true to his commitment to pardon every person with simple marijuana charges at the federal level," she tempered her praise during a Friday interview with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman.
Frederique lamented that "noncitizens were excluded from this, which is really unfortunate, because people who are noncitizens, cannabis is one of the main reasons why people are detained or deported."
"Drug Policy Alliance has learned an incredible amount of the intricacies between immigration policy and drug policy over the last decade," she continued. "And in fact, most people don't realize that our first drug laws were xenophobic immigration policies."
"And so," Frederique added, "this is why Drug Policy Alliance is working with our groups around the country to really figure out how do we continue to push where the president is right now, to a broader conversation that's actually going to bring the necessary material condition changes that our community needs."
\u201cUndocumented immigrants in the U.S. were unjustly excluded from President Biden's pardons for simple possession of marijuana under federal law, says Kassandra Frederique (@Kassandra_Fred) of @DrugPolicyOrg.\u201d— Democracy Now! (@Democracy Now!) 1665157020
Jane Shim, senior policy attorney at the Immigrant Defense Project, called Biden's move "one step in addressing" the harms caused by marijuana prohibition, which she said "has devastated poor communities and communities of color for too long."
"However, it is extremely disappointing that the administration went out of its way to exclude undocumented immigrants," she continued. "Furthermore, even immigrants who were pardoned may remain at risk of detention and deportation because of a marijuana offense, thanks to our punitive immigration laws."
"President Biden can and should ensure that marijuana possession convictions do not jeopardize a person's immigration status," Shim argued. "Federal immigration authorities regularly deny green card and citizenship applications due to marijuana possession convictions."
\u201cWe ALSO need to know: What will the Administration do to ensure that those immigrants who are pardoned under the Executive Order will no longer have their immigration status in jeopardy?\u201d— Immigrant Defense Project (@Immigrant Defense Project) 1665088337
Shim noted that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) "has already deported thousands of people for marijuana possession, and continues to do so today."
"Pardons that clear the way for employment, housing, and educational opportunities will be little solace to families threatened with separation through deportation by ICE," she added.
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