Disinformation Deceit

The Middle East has been in turmoil since the Hamas’ attack against Israel on October 7, 2023, when at least 3,000 missile rockets were fired from the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip towards the major cities of Israel, in which 1,400 Israelis were killed, including 260 people who were massacred at a music festival. Israel retaliated to this “act of war” proclaimed by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu by killing 2750 (till October 15th) Palestinians, a majority of whom were innocent and had nothing to do with the Hamas’ attack on Israel.

However, the analysis of the Israeli-Hamas conflict is not our “preview” in this article. Still, we have to analyse and comprehend the extraordinary usage of disinformation, not only regarding the above-mentioned conflict but also the Russian-Ukrainian War, which started a year ago. Although disinformation is a major player in what Noam Chomsky called “manufacturing consent,” it has always been an extremely useful tool for “governmental and non-governmental agents” to make, change, and manipulate the belief system of the masses regarding an issue, event, person, or policy.

News Houses, websites, papers, and research journals are especially utilised in this function of systematic dispersion of disinformation and conceptual rebuilding. In this regard, we must examine an Aljazeera report concerning the usage of disinformation in far-right India, which is being built by his Fuhrer (if only Hitler allows me) Narendra Modi. The report says,

“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.”

Furthermore, the report says,

“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.”

Concerning the question, why is the campaign of disinformation spreading rapidly in India? The report says,

“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”, which has 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.”

The architect of what BJP supporters claim is a New, Modern, and Hindu Bharat, Mr Modi, with his romance with the Hindutva ideology and Islamophobia, is flooding Indian politics with utopian and surreal ideas, which are gaining momentum in India because it is still an underdeveloped country with fairy tales surrounding it everywhere, in every aspect of life.

As every dictatorship has an obsession with disinformation, Modi’s utopia is also based upon disinformation, distorted facts about history, and the stupendous “emotionality” of the enraged anti-Muslim Hindu public.

Even so, this situation is not only limited to the Israeli-Hamas conflict; the war going on in Ukraine has also been “whitewashed” with disinformation by the American government and its allies. Disinformation regarding the Ukrainian-Russian war was a “hot topic” before the attack of Hamas on Israel, and facts were manufactured, especially referring to the “all-win-win” position of the Ukrainians. However, the Russians are giving Ukraine and its President Zelensky a tough time, and there is no “all-win-win” state for Ukrainians.

In this modern world, where the globe (because of the internet) is considered a village, disinformation is a severe problem. Because of this, governments (who don’t control social media platforms) are in less control of their people, and conspiracy theories are prevailing in modern societies all over the world. Utopian narratives are building up, and the masses, as they lack critical thinking, are indulged in them, and a new generation of Utopianians (people who believe in utopias) is forming gradually, which has to be considered an end to free thinking and a dominant era of conspiracy theories and manufactured reality.