Saturday Commentary and Review #141
Israel's Security Intelligence Blunder, Europe: "Whole and Free?", Germany's AfD Breaks the Cordon Sanitaire, "Combating Hate" Used For Censorship, The Man Who Would Be King
Every weekend (almost) I share five articles/essays/reports with you. I select these over the course of the week because they are either insightful, informative, interesting, important, or a combination of the above.
As I write this weekend’s SCR, the IDF is moving into the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas’ border raid that happened one week ago today. The Fog of War is still thick, and no side can be trusted to tell the truth. We will have to wait for the dust to settle (pun not intended) before attempting to separate fact from fiction.
Some facts can be established:
Hamas launched raids from the Gaza Strip into Israel
Israelis were massacred by Hamas
Over 100 people were taken hostage by Hamas and re-located to the Gaza Strip
Israel is currently pounding the living shit out of Gaza, with many civilians killed as a result
Israel has told the people of the northern portion of Gaza to flee south and has given them a 24 hour notice to do so
Western capitals are giving Israel carte blanche to hit Gaza (most likely for a limited time before the scale of civilian casualties becomes too large to ignore)
We don’t know what the scope of the IDF operation is. We don’t know if any other forces will enter this conflict. We don’t know if any Palestinians will remain in the Gaza Strip when all is said and done.
We do know that the underlying issue of this conflict (i.e. how Israel and the Palestinians live next to one another) will not be resolved by this war.
As we watch events unfold, it would serve us best to not jump too quickly into the fast moving fire of a dynamic story. Instead, I’ll share with you an overview of Israel’s intelligence failure regarding the Hamas raids from a former Israeli intelligence officer and deputy national security advisor.
Improvements in planning and tactics:
The military wing of Hamas meticulously planned and coordinated an operation which included an unprecedented use of sophisticated home-made solutions. This in turn raises further questions as to the failure to learn of such plans, or detect the work done on technical devices. Specifically, the key to the border fence breach was the use of small bombs dropped from drones, which were used to disable tanks as well as destroy the monitoring cameras guarding the fence. The Hamas operators managed to maintain strict secrecy as these preparations were underway – which incidentally, gives the lie to the claim that the attack was a spontaneous response to Israeli actions in Jerusalem in the prior week.
Drones have been the success story of three wars now (in differing levels of success, of course): Azerbaijan vs. Armenia in 2020, Russia vs. Ukraine, and now the Hamas raids.
Strategic intelligence failure:
The intelligence failure begins at the strategic level of misapprehending Hamas intentions. Over the preceding two weeks, the Hamas “de facto government” in Gaza, led by Yahia Sinwar, seemed to be angling for more Qatari money (brought in suitcases full of cash, since the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah controls the banks and refuses to help what they see as a rebellious province) and for more workers to be allowed into Israel, which the Netanyahu government was willing to concede. Israeli analysts concluded that Hamas is steadily becoming more concerned with running a government rather than a terrorist attack against Israeli civilian targets. Whether or not Sinwar knew this or was used as cover – we may never find out. His indirect dialogue with Israel through the good services of the Egyptian Intelligence Service served as cover for the well-guarded plans of the Hamas military wing.
We do know that more emphasis has recently been placed on security in the West Bank, as opposed to the area outside of the Gaza Strip:
All the while, the Israeli Directorate of Military Intelligence (DMI) as well as the Shin Bet (the internal security service, with jurisdiction also over Palestinian affairs generally), responding to a rise in terror attacks in the West Bank, concluded that the Gaza border could be held with fewer troops, with 21 battalions diverted over the last few months to the West Bank, trusting that an incursion into Israel from Gaza was unlikely. Hence also what seems to have been a reduced level of alert.
Check this out:
Another, less explicable failure occurred at the tactical level of intelligence gathering. The key asset at the crucial moment on the early morning hours of October 7 should have been visual observation of the penetration point and a timely alert. But using drone attacks, as indicated above, the Hamas attackers apparently bombed and neutralized the long-range observation unit (staffed by young IDF women soldiers) and the compound they were working from. Hamas rendered the IDF blind for a painfully long period of time.
Operational failure:
To this was added what some observers, particularly MG (res.) Yitzhak Brik, a former tank officer and later IDF ombudsman, have been warning about for the last 15 years. The IDF, once upon a time a well-trained and relatively large military based on its reserve armored formations, has become much smaller, less disciplined, less well trained (since the reserves are rarely called up), poorly prepared for ground warfare and maneuver, and much too reliant on airstrikes, precision munitions, and highly specific intelligence. As a result, there was little that could compensate for the lack of intelligence on 7 October.
While individuals and special forces units did fight with great bravery, and indeed suffered painful losses, it took much too long for the IDF formations to be there when they were needed. For much of the day the residents of the area Israelis call “the Gaza envelope” – the town and villages surrounding the Gaza Strip to the east – felt abandoned to their fate.
As usual, take everything you have read here with a grain of salt. In my opinion, this analysis seems very objective, with only some small politicking regarding Iran and its presumed role (depending on who you ask).
The Israeli public is furious with Bibi over this attack. Hamas is now getting the civilian casualties it wants in Gaza courtesy of the IDF’s strikes.
One last comment: thank you all for being very respectful in the comments section last week, as the subject of Israel and Palestine is one of the most heated ever. I appreciate it.
I came across this hilarious exchange earlier today on Twitter/X:
Dan Carlin hosts three very, very popular history podcasts. In this exchange, he unwittingly concedes that diversity isn’t “our greatest strength” (at least when it comes to Israel). He also argues in favour of the ethno-state (again, at least in the case of Israel) as opposed to multi-ethnic liberal democracy. It’s both funny and revealing.
What he said is also true. If Israel adopted multi-ethnic democracy, it would cease to be a Jewish state pretty quickly, ending its originally stated purpose (yes, I know that there are Arab parties in Israel). Multi-ethnic liberal democracy is not the panacea that its evangelists have insisted that it is.
One of the biggest evangelists of liberal democracy is Oxford Professor and Hoover Institution Fellow Timothy Garton Ash. He is a proponent of the ‘Open Society’, and never fails to take the mainstream liberal position on any issue. In this long essay for the New York Review of Books, he takes a historical view of Europe from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present, and asks whether the continent is moving towards or away from becoming “whole, free, and at peace”? Reading this essay is a good exercise because we can see the assumptions that Ash, like other liberals, proceed from when arguing for the implementation of their worldview.
He divides the post-Berlin Wall Fall into two halves. The first half:
Europe’s post-Wall era is a tale of two halves. Painting with a broad brush, we can characterize the period from 1989 to 2007 as one of extraordinary progress. Political freedom spread across Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. Germany was united. Soviet troops withdrew. New democracies joined the European Union and NATO. In 1989 what was then still called the European Community had just twelve members and NATO had sixteen. By 2007 the EU (into which the European Community was transformed by the 1992 Maastricht Treaty) had twenty-seven members and NATO twenty-six. There had never been a time when so many European countries were sovereign, democratic, legally equal members of the same security, political, and economic communities. As a European citizen, you could fly from one end of the continent almost to the other—from Lisbon to Tallinn, from Helsinki to Athens—without needing to show a passport. Many of the countries along the way shared a single currency, the euro. Here was an unprecedentedly large, single European space enjoying an unprecedented level of peace and freedom.
To be sure, this was also a period that saw five wars in the former Yugoslavia, including the most brutal, genocidal one in Bosnia. But the last of these wars, in Macedonia, was over by the end of 2001. These two decades also saw the September 11 attacks on the United States. Yet with hindsight September 11, 2001, which was a major turning point in Middle Eastern and US history, does not appear to have been one in European history. The consequences of the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to the radicalization of some of the Islamist terrorists who subsequently attacked European capitals such as London, Madrid, Paris, and Berlin, but the process of radicalization had deep roots in Europe itself, especially among second-generation European Muslims.
The second half:
The crucial European turning point came in 2008. Two separate but almost simultaneous developments—Vladimir Putin’s military occupation of two large areas of Georgia, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, in August and the eruption of the global financial crisis with the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September—began a downward turn that continued throughout the second half of the post-Wall period. The financial crisis segued into a “Great Recession” in many European countries. It also provoked the Eurozone crisis that started in 2010, hitting Southern European countries such as Greece especially hard. Also in 2010 Viktor Orbán started demolishing democracy in Hungary. In 2014 Putin followed his Georgian aggression with the annexation of Crimea and the beginning, in eastern Ukraine, of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
The refugee crisis that began in 2015 prompted a sharp rise in support for hard-right nationalist-populist parties such as the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Marine le Pen’s Front National in France. In Poland, the Law and Justice party, having won both the country’s presidency and an absolute majority in parliament, set about following Orbán’s example to erode Poland’s fragile democracy. In 2016 came the Brexit referendum, which resulted in Britain leaving the EU, and then the election of Donald Trump as US president, which was also a significant moment in European history. The Covid pandemic struck in 2020, with economic, social, and psychological consequences that are still becoming apparent. This cascade of crises reached its lowest point (so far) with Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Ash does concede the hubris of the liberal democrats:
It would require another essay to analyze all the many varieties of hubris that contributed to this downward turn after 2008, but it’s worth highlighting one fundamental mistake in the way many Europeans (and Americans) came to view our recent history. Put most simply, this was the fallacy of extrapolation. We saw the way things had gone for nearly two decades after 1989 and somehow assumed they would continue in that direction, albeit with setbacks along the way. We contemplated one of the most nonlinear events in modern history—the fall of the Wall and the peaceful end of the Soviet empire—and made a linear projection forward from it.
It would also require from me an entire essay to tear apart this one. One thing that I will state is that liberals in Western Europe made the false assumption that those in the former Eastern Bloc wanted individual liberties just like they enjoyed first and foremost. The fact of the matter was that those stuck behind the Iron Curtain mainly sought national liberation as their primary objective.
Also note how Ash’s view is that it’s either his way or the highway. There is nothing permitted outside of liberal democracy. It’s either his system or its some sort of authoritarian dystopia. This is a testament to his arrogance.
More:
Is Europe itself at war? Many people in Eastern Europe would say yes; most in Western Europe would say no. Europe is not at war in the way it was in 1943, when most European countries were direct parties to the conflict; but neither is Europe at peace in the way it was in 2003. Many European countries are supporting Ukraine’s war effort with weapons, ammunition, training, and money. And as in 1943, the only way forward to a lasting peace is through victory in war.
A cease-fire or peace agreement now, effectively compelling Ukraine to sacrifice territory the size of a small European country, would be a recipe for future conflict, not just in Europe but also in Asia, since President Xi Jinping of China might reasonably conclude that armed aggression pays. Yesterday Crimea, tomorrow Taiwan. A nuclear-armed Russia cannot be reduced to “unconditional surrender,” like Germany in 1945. But an outcome in which Russia is forced to give up the Ukrainian territory it has secured by armed aggression is still attainable and would be the only sure foundation for a durable peace.
Nowhere does Ash, purportedly a rationalist, ever take into consideration Russia’s security interests that led to its invasion of Ukraine. Once again, tunnel vision. His solution is forward NATO deployment:
To achieve this, two things are necessary, one tangible and one intangible. European countries need to abandon the post-Wall illusion that peace can be secured entirely by nonmilitary means, tangibly increase their defense expenditures, make credible forward deployments on NATO’s eastern frontier, gear up their defense industries to supply Ukraine’s almost World War II–level need for weapons and ammunition, and be prepared militarily and economically for the long haul. Barring miracles, on the eightieth anniversary of the 1944 D-Day landings next June 6, the Russo-Ukrainian War will still be grinding on.
The mischaracterization of Hungary’s system:
Such a broadly positive picture of European freedom must, however, be qualified in several ways. Among the twenty-seven member states of the EU, there is one, Hungary, that Freedom House classifies as only “partly free.” As early as 2013, observing Orbán’s dismantling of its fragile new democracy, the Princeton political scientist Jan-Werner Müller asked, “Can a dictatorship be a member of the EU?” Hungary is not yet a full-blown dictatorship in the sense that Putin’s Russia is, but it’s certainly no longer a liberal democracy. Political scientists characterize its political system as competitive or electoral authoritarianism. Although EU membership has in some respects constrained Orbán’s neoauthoritarian regime, it has also greatly facilitated its consolidation—for example, through the billions of euros in EU funds that he has used to strengthen his power base. If a crucial Polish election on October 15 goes the wrong way, Poland may follow Hungary down the path from its current condition of illiberal democracy (that is, a liberal democracy in an advanced state of decay) to soft authoritarianism—or descend into furious disorder.
Disagreement over small issues is not permitted in liberal democracy, as per Ash. All liberal democracies must be economically, socially, and culturally liberal. Tolerance of tradition is tolerance of intolerance, and thus not permitted. Even the popular will via democratic vote is verboten when it comes to this.
Europe can only be “free” if its borders are open and if it welcomes migrants en masse:
Yet if Europe is everywhere it’s nowhere. To be an effective protector of the interests and values of Europeans, a European political or security community must be bounded. Its boundary will not be a line between unambiguously Europe and unambiguously Not-Europe, because there is no such line. The question therefore becomes not whether there is a border but the character of that border.
The answer being given by today’s Europe is truly shocking when measured against the hopes of 1989. That year was all about bringing down walls, lifting barriers, cutting barbed wire, opening frontiers. One of the greatest achievements of the first half of the post-Wall era was freedom of movement. Inside the EU, European citizens could now choose to work, study, and live in any other member state. Across the larger Schengen area, a wider group of Europeans could travel freely, without frontier controls. Yet in recent years, especially since the refugee crisis of 2015, Europe has been building new walls, erecting new fences, and closing external frontiers even as—and partly because—it has opened internal ones.
In 1989 we took down an Iron Curtain through the center of Europe. In 2023 we are erecting a new Iron Curtain around the periphery of an arbitrarily defined European space. On land, it consists of actual fences, such as the one Hungary has erected on its frontier with Serbia, and accompanying fortifications. At sea, it consists of naval patrols, some of which have pushed back migrant boats into non-European territorial waters, in contravention of international humanitarian law. It also involves paying neighboring authoritarian governments, whether in Turkey, Libya, or Morocco, to keep back millions of migrants who wish to come to Europe from Africa and the wider Middle East. Pope Francis has accurately described the Libyan detention camps to which some of these would-be migrants have been returned as “places of torture and ignoble slavery.”
This may not appear to be an ethical dilemma for a nativist, particularist version of European values, such as that championed by Orbán or Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, but it certainly is for anyone who embraces the liberal, universalist version of European values enshrined in Article 2 of the Treaty of the European Union.
This is the vision that Ash and other liberals have for Europe. Is there any question as to why so many people are turning against it?
Fewer and fewer Germans are as certain about liberal democracy as they once were. As you all know by now, the nascent AfD party has zoomed up in the polls, becoming the second most popular political grouping in the country after the CDU/CSU.
Dissatisfaction with a cratering economy, rampant migration, and general liberal elitism have seen these populists surge in the polls, so much so that Politico has concluded that “Germany’s far right ‘firewall’ cracks”:
The political maneuver shaking Germany’s postwar democratic order involves a piece of legislation that is about as mundane as it gets.
Center-right legislators in the eastern German state of Thuringia wanted to cut a local property tax by a small amount — and did so with the support of the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
The move broke with years of tradition in which mainstream parties have vowed to maintain a Brandmauer, or firewall, between themselves and the AfD, a party many in a country alert to the legacy of Nazism see as a dire threat to democracy. Even accepting the party’s support, the thinking goes, would legitimize far-right forces or make them salonfähig — socially acceptable.
And so, when parliamentarians from the conservative Christian Democratic Union, or CDU, passed the tax reduction on a late afternoon in September with AfD votes, it sent tremors across the country’s political landscape that still are reverberating.
No one has made a case as to why the AfD is akin to “Nazism”. Is it because they don’t want open borders? Is that the threshold now?
This is funny because you can hear Germans saying this in that very German way:
“For me, a taboo has been broken,” Katrin Göring-Eckardt, a leader of the Greens who hails from Thuringia, said after the vote. “It shows me not only that the firewall is gone, but that there is open collaboration.”
Growing support:
That especially is the case in the states of the former East Germany, where the AfD now leads in polls at around 28 percent. Next year, the eastern states of Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg will all hold parliamentary elections. Polls show the party leading in all three states.
The AfD is likely to expand its presence in the parliaments of Bavaria and Hesse when those states vote on Sunday. In Hesse, the AfD is coming close to overtaking German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party, according to the latest polls.
The dilemma facing mainstream parties is clear. To work with the AfD means to normalize a party that many believe seeks to subvert the republic from within. But to ostracize the party only alienates its many voters.
Actually, AfD did better than expected in last weekend’s votes in both Bavaria and Hesse:
AfD has broken through into the former West of Germany.
Fears:
Germany’s political leaders are all too aware that the Nazi seizure of power began with democratic electoral success. In fact, it was in Thuringia where, in 1930, the Nazi party first took real governing power in coalition with conservative parties.
That fact was not lost on the CDU’s opponents.
“German conservatism has already been a stirrup holder of fascism,” Janine Wissler, a head of the Left party, told the German Press Agency after the vote. “Back then, too, it started in Thuringia,” she added. “Instead of having learned from that, the CDU is going down a path that’s as dangerous as fire.”
You cannot ignore 20-30% of the population in a multi-party participatory democracy. You can try, but the internal contradictions of coalitions that serve as a firewall to unwanted parties comes through, leading to the paralysis of governance.
More:
The problem is far from Germany’s alone. Mainstream parties are under growing pressure due to the rise of the radical right across Europe.
In France, parties from across the political spectrum have formed a cordon sanitaire, or sanitary cordon, to keep Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Rally, out of the presidency. But with Le Pen’s party now the biggest opposition group in the National Assembly, the cordon is getting harder to maintain.
In the European Parliament, where a similar cordon has been erected, the center-right European People’s Party has been openly courting the European Conservatives and Reformists, home to Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice party and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s far-right Brothers of Italy party.
In Thuringia, the stakes are even higher as the local branch of the AfD contains some of the party’s most extreme members. State-level intelligence authorities tasked with surveilling anti-constitutional groups have characterized the party’s local branch as extremist.
AfD’s rise has been so rapid that a constitutional ban of the party might already be too late.
Opponents of free speech from the political left see the concept of “hate speech” as leverage against this enshrined liberal principle. “Hate speech is not free speech”, they refrain, constantly. If it is not free speech, then it is not to be protected, and therefore can be censored and/or banned.
Unlike the United States of America which has a very robust protection of free speech via its First Amendment, countries like Canada and those across the European Union have laws to limit speech in certain instances. Naturally, these exceptions allow for censorship of speech, where the authorities act as censors. The situation in Europe regarding speech is looking dimmer and dimmer, as new laws have been passed to “combat” dis/mis/malinformation, as defined by those who passed these very same laws.
In the USA, censorship has been outsourced to BigTech and Social Media giants, a neat little workaround to sidestep the First Amendment. Using media, NGOs, and other organizations, BigTech implements censorship on its platforms, and the results are very, very partisan. One of these nebulous NGOs is the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a UK-based non-profit founded by an ex-Labour Party official named Imran Ahmed. Paul D. Thacker looks behind the curtain to see what this organization is in fact actually doing:
In March of 2021 a nonprofit group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) released a report about online misinformation. Founded in the U.K. by a former Labour Party political figure named Imran Ahmed, the CCDH was virtually unknown at the time in the U.S., but that was about to change. The report quickly reached the hands of executives at Twitter. “COVID-19 misinfo enforcement team is planning on taking action on a handful of accounts surfaced by the CCDH report,” a Twitter official wrote on March 31. One account they eventually took action against belonged to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was then running against Joe Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.
A few months later, the same report was being cited by the Biden administration. At a press briefing in July 2021, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki quoted from the CCDH report in a briefing where she accused Facebook of undermining federal vaccine policies. “There’s about 12 people who are producing 65% of anti-vaccine misinformation on social media platforms,” Psaki claimed, citing the CCDH’s work, while warning social media companies to shut down these “misinformation” accounts. “They’re killing people,” President Biden told a reporter a short time later, leveling the charge of murder against Facebook for its alleged role in providing a platform for “vaccine misinformation.”
Facebook’s Vice President Monika Bickert later criticized CCDH’s claims for being free of evidence—failing to define the term “anti-vaxx,” for example—and neglecting to explain how they came up with their numbers and conclusions. But it had little effect. By then the report had popularized the idea of a “disinformation dozen,” a narrative that hardened as it was promoted by countless news outlets, fact checkers, and social media accounts devoted to round-the-clock attacks on “disinformation.”
It’s interesting to note just how many British names and organizations have popped up in US affairs relating to intelligence since Trump entered office. Does this have something to do with plausible deniability? Maybe it’s a legal thing? Maybe both, I guess.
CCDH vs. Elon and X:
More recently, the CCDH has popped up again, leading the battle against Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, who has been cast as a champion of racists and antisemites. “The CCDH has been at the forefront of reporting on the hate proliferating on X/Twitter since Musk completed his takeover in late October 2022,” Ahmed wrote last month in The Observer. In a number of publications over the past year, the group has repeatedly blamed Musk for allowing his platform to spread hate speech. Once again, these efforts have been uncritically amplified in the press and in a letter to Musk from House Democrats that reiterates Ahmed’s claims, and cites him and CCDH.
What do we know about CCDH?
In effect, it seems, the organization provides the White House with a powerful weapon to use against critics including RFK Jr. and Musk, while also pressuring platforms like Facebook and Twitter to enforce the administration’s policies. While few journalists have bothered to investigate the opaque group, the available evidence paints a picture that is likely different from what many in the public would expect of a “public interest” nonprofit.
The scale of the CCDH’s success must be emphasized for those unfamiliar with the crowded mob of D.C.-based nonprofits churning out reports that seldom get a passing glance from the nation’s policymakers. For a tiny, unknown, nonprofit to gain so much attention in D.C.’s crowded, competitive policy space is akin to a pudgy, amateur athlete catching the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl, while setting a new world record in the marathon, all in one week.
And what about Imran Ahmed?
Where does he get his money? Why did he decide to leave behind politics and start a nonprofit focused on misinformation? And perhaps most importantly, how did a relative unknown from London gain such enormous influence from the White House bully pulpit and within Democratic Party politics?
Imran Ahmed is a political operative who spent several years advising conservative members of the British Labour Party before jumping into nonprofit campaigning to run two interrelated dark money groups: Stop Funding Fake News and the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Shortly after appearing on Twitter in 2019, Stop Funding Fake News claimed some very sizable left-wing scalps in London, mostly by lobbing vague accusations of fake news at political enemies. The group helped to run Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour Party leadership while tanking the lefty news site Canary, after starting a boycott of their advertisers, according to reports in British media outlets, sources who spoke with Tablet, and CCDH’s own claims of success.
Although CCDH is still based in the U.K., Ahmed grew the group dramatically after he jumped across the Atlantic to incorporate CCDH as a D.C. nonprofit in 2021. In the states, he forged ties in Hollywood: Talent agent Aleen Keshishian, who teaches in the cinema program at the University of Southern California, now sits on his board. Just as he had done for the Labour Party, Ahmed used the CCDH to attack as “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” various critics of the Biden arm of the Democratic Party.
After Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced he was running against Biden for the Democratic nomination and appeared on Joe Rogan, Ahmed told the BBC, “He’s working really hard to keep people from knowing he’s a hardcore anti-vaxxer.”
More:
In a replay of his success in the U.K., Ahmed is now trying to drive away Elon Musk’s advertisers on X, this time based on dubious claims that the social media site is a playground for racists. Speaking to the Financial Times, Ahmed said, “We don’t talk in the language of technology, we talk in the language of morality ... Advertisers are also human beings. Some of them just don’t want to fund the primary vector of hate and disinformation in our society.”
Ahmed’s history is hard to track. The two groups he has run—Stop Funding Fake News and CCDH—seem to pop up out of nowhere, switch addresses, rarely disclose funders, omit naming all employees, and feature websites that change names or disappear from the internet. Jen Psaki’s reference to the “Disinformation Dozen” report made the group famous in July 2021, yet the Internet Archive only has records beginning in 2022 for CCDH’s website.
One rumor that came up often in the dozen or so conversations I’ve had, with people who have observed Ahmed for years, is that he works for British intelligence. Along with other questions emailed to Ahmed a couple weeks back, Tablet asked him to address the allegation he is connected to British intelligence, but he did not respond to repeated requests for comment. One of Ahmed’s long-standing friends told me that Ahmed once mentioned that he had applied to either MI5 or MI6. Because the conversation took place so long ago, the friend couldn’t remember which of the two British intelligence agencies it was, and they never later discussed if he had gotten in.
“There’s nothing surprising about this,” said Mike Benz, a former State Department official who now runs the Foundation for Freedom Online, a free-speech watchdog. “This is not the first rodeo of British and U.S. intelligence services creating a cutout for the purpose of influencing the online news economy, to rig public debate in favor of political speech that supports agency agendas.” Ahmed’s story is critical to understanding the new push for censorship under the guise of combating hate.
This is fascinating investigative reporting that all of you should read. Click here to read the rest.
We end this week with a video about a man who spent 15 years “in exile” on a seasonally-inhabited island in the UK’s Channel Islands after being wrongly suspected of a series of sexual assaults:
Born on Jersey in the Channel Islands (part of the British Crown Dependency), Alphonse Le Gastelois (1914-2012) moved to the small, only seasonally inhabited Écréhous island chain roughly six miles away in 1961, after being wrongly suspected of a series of heinous sexual assaults. Relocating for his own safety and peace of mind, he remained there, living mostly in isolation, until 1975, even after he was proven innocent when the string of attacks continued in his absence and the real culprit was finally caught in 1971. First broadcast in 1978, this clip from the BBC series Nationwide: Remote Britain tells Le Gastelois’s incredible story of ‘self-imposed exile’, including his formal attempt to become ‘King of the Écréhous’ – a request that would ultimately go unfulfilled in law, if not in legend. Depicting the power of unfounded rumour and gossip to derail a life, his story is one that echoes with amplified intensity in the internet age.
A nice slice of history!
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Also note how Ash’s view is that it’s either his way or the highway. There is nothing permitted outside of liberal democracy. It’s either his system or its some sort of authoritarian dystopia. This is a testament to his arrogance."
Uh, yeah. "Liberal Democrats" would have zero problem sending any of us who disagree straight to a gas chamber of they could get away with it.