Gaza-Israel Conflict | October 2023

[Foinikas]

Its posts like this that confirms you are a dirty little Indian whose managed to escape the pakora stand in Mumbai and gotten into Greece - do t be embarrassed to share your ethnicity - be proud man - be proud I. Being short dark brown Indian

What? I'm an Indian because I'm joking with @LeGenD ?

I'm getting confused by you guys. I give up.

 

[mangochutney]

The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal​

Chris McGreal


I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar
Mon 16 Oct 2023 12.39 BST


Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, set the tone as he spoke about how far to assign guilt for the worst single atrocity against Jews in his country’s history.
“It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, it’s absolutely not true. They could’ve risen up, they could have fought against that evil regime,” said Herzog.
In different ways, the sentiment that the Palestinians are collectively responsible for the actions of Hamas in killing of about 1,300 Israelis and abduction of 199 – and therefore deserve what is coming to them – has been echoed far beyond Israel’s borders.

In the US, Senator Lindsey Graham called for the wholesale destruction of Gaza.
“We are in a religious war here. I’m with Israel. Do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself. Level the place,” he told Fox News.
In the UK, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, Jake Wallis Simons, took a different tack in generalising guilt by writing that “much of Muslim culture is in the grip of a death cult that sacralises bloodshed” before deleting his tweet after a backlash.
Ariel Kallner, a member of the Israeli parliament for Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, had the answer. He demanded a repeat of the mass expulsion of Arabs in 1948 known to Palestinians as the Nakba or Catastrophe.
“Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of 1948,” he said.

It remains to be seen if that is Israel’s plan after it ordered more than one million people to get out of northern Gaza as the military prepares further attacks in addition to the bombing and shelling that has already killed 2,700 Palestinians, including 700 children.
But the dehumanising language spilling out of Israel and from some of its supporters abroad is of a type heard at other times and places that helped create a climate in which terrible crimes take place.
The shocking ways in which Hamas butchered Israeli civilians, including small children, and then celebrated the slaughter reminded me of reporting the Rwandan genocide three decades ago. Hutu militiamen revelled in the killing of around 800,000 Tutsis, including neighbours and children, in unimaginably horrific ways. Even years later in prison, some were unrepentant.

The aftermath of the Hamas attack is also reminiscent of the 1994 genocide in language used not just about the murderers but Palestinians in general, although not for the first time.
Those who led and carried out the Rwandan genocide often cast it in the language of Tutsis as outsiders and interlopers, and the killing as an act of self-defence. If we don’t do it to them, they will do it to us.
Tutsis were debased as “cockroaches”, a word also invoked by a then chief of the Israeli defence forces to describe Palestinians. Other Israeli political, military and religious leaders have at different times described Palestinians as “a cancer”, “vermin”, and called for them to be “annihilated”. They are frequently portrayed as backward and a burden on the country.

While Israel has not revealed its plans for Gaza, Palestinians naturally fear another ethnic cleansing of the kind Kallner is pushing for given their history. Palestine’s envoy to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, has accused Israel of dehumanisation and actions in Gaza in recent days that “are nothing less than genocidal”.
It’s a long way from Rwanda and any comparisons will seem outrageous to some. But as those pressing for news organisations to call Hamas terrorists implicitly acknowledge, language matters.
A prominent Israeli journalist and radio presenter, David Mizrahy Verthaim, has called for wholesale bloodletting.
“We need a disproportionate response … If all the captives are not returned immediately, turn the strip into a slaughterhouse. If a hair falls from their head - execute security prisoners. Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” he wrote on X.
Others are looser in their language.

When Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant, ordered a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip with “no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed”, he said: “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”
Perhaps Gallant only meant Hamas but he didn’t say so and that left a lot of leeway for those who would go further.
In an echo of the US after 9/11, the Israel Defence Forces posted on X: “You either stand with Israel or you stand with terrorism”. Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted: “Anyone that is pro-Palestinian is pro-Hamas.”
That was a sentiment that led the US into wars most Americans now regret, but it was a mentality that also led American soldiers to commit war crimes.

Some of these statements might be no more than lashing out in the heat of the moment as a natural reaction to a shocking atrocity. There is certainly some of that. But in Israel, they fall on ground made fertile by decades of discourse dehumanising of Palestinians.
For years, Israeli leaders have advocated ethnic cleansing, euphemistically called “transfer”, with a discourse that portrays Palestinians as a fake people with no history that matters. In 1989, Netanyahu lamented that Israel missed the opportunity presented by global attention on China’s repression of pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen square “to carry out mass expulsions among the Arabs of the (occupied) territories”.
Opinion polls show that significant numbers of Israelis view Arabs as “dirty”, “primitive”, and as not valuing human life. Generations of Israeli school children have been imbued with the idea that Arabs are interlopers and merely tolerated through the beneficence of Israel.

A 2003 study of Israeli textbooks by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem showed Arabs are principally depicted “with a camel, in an Ali Baba dress”.
“They describe Arabs as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop. The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists. You never see a Palestinian child or doctor or teacher or engineer or modern farmer,” the study said.
In 2002 during the second intifada, the Tel Aviv newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth published a letter by Israeli children titled: “Dear soldiers, please kill a lot of Arabs”. The paper said dozens of such letters were sent by schoolchildren.

Some of those same children are now enforcing the occupation in the West Bank where Israeli settlers have largely had a free hand to drive Palestinians off their land and out of their villages, and sometimes to beat and kill. And some will be headed into Gaza.

• Chris McGreal writes for Guardian US and is a former Guardian correspondent in Washington, Johannesburg and Jerusalem

The language being used to describe Palestinians is genocidal | Chris McGreal

I covered the Rwandan genocide as a reporter. The language spilling out of Israel after the butchery of the Hamas attacks is eerily familiar, says Guardian US writer Chris McGreal

www.theguardian.com

 

[hussain0216]

Jewish ISIS Mossad false flags beginning:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1713993585211916422

https://twitter.com/x/status/1713987542343672306

It was very very very predictable that the Jews would try something like this

 

[Trango Towers]

Instagram/facebook is shadowbanning posts, which may lead to that company being ditched by more people soon enough. Twitter might get more former Facebook/instagram users if things continue in this way.

Muslims need a platform. Or a platform for free thinkers without hate

 

[Vapnope]

What? I'm an Indian because I'm joking with @LeGenD ?

I'm getting confused by you guys. I give up.

My man you have collected like 12 nationalities already. How it's like to be on top of the world?

 

[Trango Towers]

Israel is forcing them to be Hamas.

We are all Hamas even though it was created by israel. Anyone standing up for the freedom of an oppressed is Hamas.

 

[Falcon29]

Breaking: The occupation sends another threat to evacuate Al-Kuwaiti Hospital in the city of Rafah

It was very very very predictable that the Jews would try something like this

The Mossad are activating their sleeper cells. They armed and funded ISIS in Syria. Everyone knows these are their desperate false flags.

 

[mehmed bey]

I don't even know what that man is blabbering. U.S.A. started a war against Iraq in 1990 to liberate Kuwait. US (and NATO) waged a war on Serbia to liberate Kosovo. Both Kuwait and Kosovo are Muslim. Calling this a religious war is absurd because Saudi Arabia, UAE, Pakistan etc., are all secretly supporting war on Hamas. Obviously, they can't tell it openly. Just look at their circumspection.

When someone uses the parallels without specifics then they become the conjectures at best.
I understand, its like Ness Cafe. Someone can get the ting in an instant. Soup. Coffee, ideology. Opinions etc . Whatabout whatabout
I had a blue shirt today. It was blue sky' and I have blue eyes . All similar, they share the colour?
It is called Nominalism

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714000391149342788

 

[Gripen9]

phul saapportttt.......

Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?

Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news.

www.aljazeera.com

Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?​

Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rise has led to a surge in online disinformation spread by far-right accounts in the country. Now they are bringing that skillset to the Israel-Gaza war [Gianluigi Guercia/Pool via Reuters]
By Marc Owen Jones
Published On 16 Oct 202316 Oct 2023

The cliche goes that the first casualty of war is truth.
With Israel’s occupation of Palestine, disinformation often comes with a side of anti-Palestinianism and Islamophobia, turbocharged by social media amplification, especially under Elon Musk’s leadership of X, formerly known as Twitter.

KEEP READING​

list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4

Clinical India beat Pakistan to maintain perfect Cricket World Cup record​

list 2 of 4

In cricket-crazy Kashmir, the India-Pakistan World Cup clash tests emotions​

list 3 of 4

Maldives president-elect: Indian troops out a week after new term​

list 4 of 4

‘I have pangs in my heart’: Pakistan fans a glaring absence at India clash​

end of list
But an intriguing element of the disinformation that has flooded social media since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel is that a lot of it has been produced or spread by right-leaning accounts based out of India.
Some of these fake stories include Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby and beheading a young boy on the back of a truck. Blue check accounts have pushed false reports into the stratosphere of virality. One extremely popular tweet shared by thousands of people even claimed the Hamas attack was a US-led psyop.

The rise of the Islamophobic ‘disinfluencer’​

BOOM, one of India’s most reputed fact-checking services, found several verified Indian X users at the helm of a disinformation campaign.
These “disinfluencers” – influencers who have routinely shared disinformation – have been “mostly targeting Palestine negatively, or being supportive of Israel”, according to BOOM.
They have peddled tropes that have sought to showcase Palestinians as fundamentally brutal.
In one instance, an account began circulating a video that claimed to show dozens of young girls taken as sex slaves by a “Palestinian” fighter. However, the video was likely from a school trip to Jerusalem. While relatively low quality, if you look carefully, you can see girls happily chatting and using their phones.

Despite this, the video got thousands of retweets and racked up at least 6 million impressions. An analysis of the accounts sharing the video showed that most were based in India.
It was even shared in the Telegram channel of Angry Saffron, an apparent open-source intelligence or OSINT channel operating from India. This suggests either sloppy intelligence or disinformation aimed at exploiting the credibility that the description “OSINT” might imply.

Sign up for Al Jazeera​

Week in the Middle East​

Catch up on our coverage of the region, all in one place.
Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
In another instance, a video circulated that falsely claimed to show Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby. The video garnered more than a million views in one post alone. Seven of the top 10 most-shared tweets featuring the misleading video were profiles based in India or containing the Indian flag in their biography.
These seven tweets alone received more than 3 million impressions on X. However, the video was from September and had nothing to do with kidnapping or indeed with Gaza.

Islamophobia, India and social media​

Many of the accounts sharing these false videos also spend a lot of their time posting anti-Muslim comments on X.
One account, Mr Sinha_, who shared the false video of a boy being beheaded by Hamas, included the hashtag #IslamIsTheProblem in the same post.

Another account that shared the misleading video of Palestinians kidnapping sex slaves had previously written: “The only difference is when Muslim girls convert to Hinduism they live happily ever after. But when Hindu girls convert to Islam they end up in a suitcase or a fridge.”
Others have been more explicit in their hatred of Palestine. One Indian account, purporting to belong to a retired Indian soldier, stated, “Israel must finish off Palestine from the planet.”
It is no secret that India has an Islamophobia problem, one that has only increased since the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A report by the Australia-based Islamic Council of Victoria found that the majority of all Islamophobic tweets can be traced back to India.
The plight of Palestinians has drawn Islamophobes like moths to a light and this can be witnessed on social media. Part of this online hatred can be traced to what has been called the “BJP’s IT Cell”, who have fanned the flames of hatred.

In her book, I Am a Troll, Swati Chaturvedi discusses the BJP’s online social media army. According to Sadhavi Khosla, one of Chaturvedi’s interviewees, “The BJP has a network of volunteers who take instructions from the social media cell, and two affiliated organisations, to troll critical voices.”
Khosla said she left the “IT Cell” after tiring of the constant barrage of “misogyny, Islamophobia and hatred” she had to disseminate.

A perfect storm: Musk, BJP and #GazaUnderAttack​

While the BJP’s IT Cell may have an Islamophobia problem, it also has a disinformation problem, and it is coming to the conflict in Gaza
Pratik Sinha, a co-founder and editor of the Indian non-profit fact-checking website AltNews, tweeted: “With India now exporting its disinformation actors in the Indian mainstream media and on social media in support of Israel, hopefully the world will now realise how the Indian right-wing has made India the disinformation capital of the world”.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of X and his decision to scale back efforts to curb lies spread on the platform has potentially set a precedent that might be influencing other technology giants in their approach towards managing harmful content. Notably, companies like Meta and YouTube appear to be re-evaluating their existing commitments to mitigating hate speech, disinformation and other detrimental content on their platforms.

Last week, the European Union even sent a warning to Musk following the deluge of disinformation on X following the Hamas attack on Israel.
Western support of Israel, Big Tech’s renewed indifference to content moderation and the digital reach of right-wing Islamophobic accounts from India are turning the Gaza crisis into a springboard of hate targeted at Palestinians and Muslims.

 

[TriptiD]

you can't distinguish between Palestinians and Hamas.

I just quoted @MMM-E who used the term "Palestine and HAMAS".

 

[Falcon29]

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714004533871800775

 

[hussain0216]

phul saapportttt.......

Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?

Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news.

www.aljazeera.com

Analysis: Why is so much anti-Palestinian disinformation coming from India?​

Amid the Israel-Gaza war, Indian right-wing accounts are among leading amplifiers of anti-Palestinian fake news.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's rise has led to a surge in online disinformation spread by far-right accounts in the country. Now they are bringing that skillset to the Israel-Gaza war [Gianluigi Guercia/Pool via Reuters]
By Marc Owen Jones
Published On 16 Oct 202316 Oct 2023

The cliche goes that the first casualty of war is truth.
With Israel’s occupation of Palestine, disinformation often comes with a side of anti-Palestinianism and Islamophobia, turbocharged by social media amplification, especially under Elon Musk’s leadership of X, formerly known as Twitter.

KEEP READING​

list of 4 itemslist 1 of 4

Clinical India beat Pakistan to maintain perfect Cricket World Cup record​

list 2 of 4

In cricket-crazy Kashmir, the India-Pakistan World Cup clash tests emotions​

list 3 of 4

Maldives president-elect: Indian troops out a week after new term​

list 4 of 4

‘I have pangs in my heart’: Pakistan fans a glaring absence at India clash​

end of list
But an intriguing element of the disinformation that has flooded social media since Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel is that a lot of it has been produced or spread by right-leaning accounts based out of India.
Some of these fake stories include Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby and beheading a young boy on the back of a truck. Blue check accounts have pushed false reports into the stratosphere of virality. One extremely popular tweet shared by thousands of people even claimed the Hamas attack was a US-led psyop.

The rise of the Islamophobic ‘disinfluencer’​

BOOM, one of India’s most reputed fact-checking services, found several verified Indian X users at the helm of a disinformation campaign.
These “disinfluencers” – influencers who have routinely shared disinformation – have been “mostly targeting Palestine negatively, or being supportive of Israel”, according to BOOM.
They have peddled tropes that have sought to showcase Palestinians as fundamentally brutal.
In one instance, an account began circulating a video that claimed to show dozens of young girls taken as sex slaves by a “Palestinian” fighter. However, the video was likely from a school trip to Jerusalem. While relatively low quality, if you look carefully, you can see girls happily chatting and using their phones.

Despite this, the video got thousands of retweets and racked up at least 6 million impressions. An analysis of the accounts sharing the video showed that most were based in India.
It was even shared in the Telegram channel of Angry Saffron, an apparent open-source intelligence or OSINT channel operating from India. This suggests either sloppy intelligence or disinformation aimed at exploiting the credibility that the description “OSINT” might imply.

Sign up for Al Jazeera​

Week in the Middle East​

Catch up on our coverage of the region, all in one place.
Sign up

By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy
In another instance, a video circulated that falsely claimed to show Hamas kidnapping a Jewish baby. The video garnered more than a million views in one post alone. Seven of the top 10 most-shared tweets featuring the misleading video were profiles based in India or containing the Indian flag in their biography.
These seven tweets alone received more than 3 million impressions on X. However, the video was from September and had nothing to do with kidnapping or indeed with Gaza.

Islamophobia, India and social media​

Many of the accounts sharing these false videos also spend a lot of their time posting anti-Muslim comments on X.
One account, Mr Sinha_, who shared the false video of a boy being beheaded by Hamas, included the hashtag #IslamIsTheProblem in the same post.

Another account that shared the misleading video of Palestinians kidnapping sex slaves had previously written: “The only difference is when Muslim girls convert to Hinduism they live happily ever after. But when Hindu girls convert to Islam they end up in a suitcase or a fridge.”
Others have been more explicit in their hatred of Palestine. One Indian account, purporting to belong to a retired Indian soldier, stated, “Israel must finish off Palestine from the planet.”
It is no secret that India has an Islamophobia problem, one that has only increased since the rise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
A report by the Australia-based Islamic Council of Victoria found that the majority of all Islamophobic tweets can be traced back to India.
The plight of Palestinians has drawn Islamophobes like moths to a light and this can be witnessed on social media. Part of this online hatred can be traced to what has been called the “BJP’s IT Cell”, who have fanned the flames of hatred.

In her book, I Am a Troll, Swati Chaturvedi discusses the BJP’s online social media army. According to Sadhavi Khosla, one of Chaturvedi’s interviewees, “The BJP has a network of volunteers who take instructions from the social media cell, and two affiliated organisations, to troll critical voices.”
Khosla said she left the “IT Cell” after tiring of the constant barrage of “misogyny, Islamophobia and hatred” she had to disseminate.

A perfect storm: Musk, BJP and #GazaUnderAttack​

While the BJP’s IT Cell may have an Islamophobia problem, it also has a disinformation problem, and it is coming to the conflict in Gaza
Pratik Sinha, a co-founder and editor of the Indian non-profit fact-checking website AltNews, tweeted: “With India now exporting its disinformation actors in the Indian mainstream media and on social media in support of Israel, hopefully the world will now realise how the Indian right-wing has made India the disinformation capital of the world”.
Elon Musk’s acquisition of X and his decision to scale back efforts to curb lies spread on the platform has potentially set a precedent that might be influencing other technology giants in their approach towards managing harmful content. Notably, companies like Meta and YouTube appear to be re-evaluating their existing commitments to mitigating hate speech, disinformation and other detrimental content on their platforms.

Last week, the European Union even sent a warning to Musk following the deluge of disinformation on X following the Hamas attack on Israel.
Western support of Israel, Big Tech’s renewed indifference to content moderation and the digital reach of right-wing Islamophobic accounts from India are turning the Gaza crisis into a springboard of hate targeted at Palestinians and Muslims.

They are Hindu turds, that's why

 

[Falcon29]

Breaking: The occupation sends another threat to evacuate Al-Kuwaiti Hospital in the city of Rafah

Reuters: The Kuwaiti Specialized Hospital in Rafah in the Gaza Strip says that workers will not evacuate it despite receiving Israeli warnings.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1714007086101656028

 

[Baghial]

https://x.com/Milanista_Sab/status/1713984489481765035?s=20

an arbe guy shot 2 swedish.
With ak47.. brusseks. Local time 19.15

Shooter still loose