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Marwa Fataft’s Twitter mentions were flooded.
As violence escalated in Israel-Palestine earlier this month, Fatafta, a Palestinian and Berlin-based human rights policy analyst who works as a political analyst for Berlin, published photos and stories of families killed in the Gaza Strip. In response, they were being trolled. Some hate speeches, which Palestinians called “terrorists” like himself, came from far-right Israeli accounts. It looks like a lot of them were from India – Fataft said they had Indian names and the Indian flag on their usernames.
“It seemed that all these ethno-nationalists from India and Israel came together,” Fataft told BuzzFeed News. “It was a fascinating phenomenon. I was not trolled by the people of India before. “
The Israeli military as deadly violence It killed 248 Palestinians and Hamas killed 13 Israelis in ceasefire, ending online hate speech against Jews has risen, like anti-Semites violence.
But the conflict has also sparked a wave of hate speech and misinformation against Muslims around the world. Full-page advertisement in the New York Times accused pop star models Dua Lipa and Gigi and Bella Hadid anti-Semitism. Last week, the Israeli People’s Committee, Israel’s lobby group, He has made Facebook ads which put the face of representative Ilhan Omar on top of Hamas rockets truly inaccurate writing: “When Israel targets Hamas, representative Omar calls it an act of terrorism.” Israel’s official Arabic Twitter account they angered the Muslims Tweeting verses from the Koran along with an image of an Israeli air strike in Gaza (later that tweet was deleted).
This Middle East conflict can cause waves of hatred and lies against Muslims is not new. But the novel is all about the source: India. In the largest democracy in the world, hatred against Muslims has steadily become online and offline. Just a year ago, politicians from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party as well as dozens of news channels he denounced the reunion The deliberate expansion of Tablighi Jamaat, an international Islamic missionary group coronavirus After more than 4,000 cases in India they were connected to that. At the time, #CoronaJihad was one of the most important Twitter trends in the region.
On Saturday, First Draft News, a UK non-profit organization that investigates misinformation, published an analysis of more than 300,000 tweets related to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. They found a campaign that included thousands of tweets and trawls that were allegedly created in India, one of Twitter’s key markets.
“As we were looking at the tweets, we noticed that the major hashtags always had some references from India,” Carlotta Dotto, chief data journalist for First Draft, told BuzzFeed News. “It was striking.”
Dotto turned his attention to #UnitedAgainstJehad, a deliberately misspelled hashtag that nearly 6,000 accounts were cited more than 40,000 times from May 12 to May 17. The analysis showed the hashtag coordinated campaign aimed at achieving this trend, aided by Muslim troops reflected by Hindu nationalists over the years – such as jihad maite, an unfounded conspiracy theory that accuses Muslim men of converting Hindu women to Islam through marriage. Ten percent of the accounts that use the tag were created in May.
“It was clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict was being used to promote their stories on Twitter and was attracting attention to the network around the world,” Dotto said.
Although he previously tended to avoid participation in the Indian region, relations between India and Israel improved tremendously at the hands of Modi, who in 2017 became the first Indian prime minister to visit the country. This is partly because the leaders of both countries are conservative nationalists. In addition, right-wing Indians rely on their country’s long-standing rivalry with Pakistan.
“India’s right wing seems fascinating to Israel for a variety of reasons,” Jency Jacob Boom, editor-in-chief of India’s data verification body, told BuzzFeed News. “It’s a small country surrounded by Muslim neighbors that is struggling. It has a strong leader focused on protecting its borders.”
“Whenever there is tension between an Islamic country and any other country, the far-right ecosystem is serious about what is on the non-Muslim side,” Jacob added. “For them, it is a natural attack that exposes all the prejudices they face towards Muslims in general.”
Members of the Bharatiya Janata party and its supporters have taken control of the conflict. Tajinder Pal Singh Bagga, BJP spokesperson, call Islam “Created Terrorism in the World” said “Virus” and said, “Israel This Vaccine for this Virus is please help Israel.” He too claim Muslims believe that “Religion is greater than the nation.” Each of Bagga’s tweets has received thousands of retweets and likes. Hundreds of messages denouncing Muslims were also sent via WhatsApp, an instant messaging app owned by Facebook owned by hundreds of millions of Indians.
“We checked most of the #IndiaStandWithIsrael tweet handles” he tweeted Rana Ayyub, a top Indian journalist run by top-right followers. “A common thread is the desire for blood to see the gut-wrenching hatred of Muslims and the massacre of Muslims and their place.”
As the guardian of Israel he tried to keep it with a barrage of hatred and lies, even members from outside the country were not easy. Boom, for example, has almost verified it two dozen stories, some of whom painted Palestinians falsifying their stress.
“It’s become one of our big issues,” Jacob told BuzzFeed News.
One of the pieces of misinformation portrayed in a lie a simulated funeral organized by young Jordanians in 2020 to prevent the coronavirus blockade, while Palestinians were holding a funeral for “international sympathy”. Another viral clip he tried to pass A news story about Palestinian make-up artists in 2017 about Palestinian residents who were being wounded in the current conflict.
“Repression is supranational,” Fataft said. “Islamophobia is the common denominator here.”
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