DisinfoLab has come up with a report giving details of how Muslim Brotherhood has launched a campaign against India targeting India’s economic interests. According to the report titled Muslim BrotherHood Arrives In India, the #BoycottIndianProducts hashtag that was being shared on Twitter in the last few days, was part of this campaign against India.
The #BoycottIndianProducts campaign on social media was started after the eviction drive against encroachers in Assam recently, which had turned violent after some encroachers had attacked the police. Holding the govt responsible for the incident, people mostly from Pakistan and middle eastern countries including Turkey, Egypt and Iraq had launched the campaign to boycott products made in India.
According to DisinfoLab, ‘news articles’ were also published that promoted this anti-India trend by several media houses connected to Muslim Brotherhood, including Al-Jazeera. Most of the users used the Arabic hashtag #مقاطعة_المنتجات_الهندية , but some also used the English version #BoycottIndianProducts. There was another tag saying #IndiaIsKillingMuslims, and an unusually large number of people from the Islamic countries had posted the tags, which creates the doubt that it was planned by someone.
According to DisinfoLab, the Assam incident was just an excuse to run the campaign, as the conspirators were already ready with the plan, waiting for a trigger. Both anonymous Twitter account and verified handles of well-known people from Islamic countries had posted the hashtags calling for boycott of Indian products.
Even though the campaign was targeting India, the report states it also targeted Saudi Arabia and UAE, two middle eastern countries with close ties with India.
The report by DisinfoLab states that most of the prominent handles promoting this campaign were related to the Muslim Brotherhood (al-Ikhwān al-Muslimūn). Some of the Muslim Brotherhood ‘influencers’ who led this psy-war against India include:
Mohamed Al Sagheer, Member of Board of Trustees of International Union of Muslim Scholars, an organization of Muslim Islamic theologians and known as the “supreme authority of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Earlier he had appeared on Al Jazeera calling for the boycott of French products.
Sami Kamal El Din, Egyptian Journalist based in Istanbul, who has been listed as a terrorist twice by the Egyptian govt, and an expert in propaganda. He had impersonated an Egyptian intelligence official to call several Egyptian celebrities asking them to support the US move to US mission in Israel to Jerusalem, the video of which was ‘leaked’ and the story was published in New York Times. His YouTune channel was deleted on request of Egypt for spreading fake news.
Ahmad Muaffaq Zeidan, journalist who mainly covers Taliban and Al Qaeda. He has put on watch list by National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States for suspected links with Al-Qaeda and Muslim Brotherhood.
Yasser Abu Hilalah, former Managing Director of Al Jazeera Arabic News, who is known to have ties with the officials of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) and even shared platforms with them. Disinfolab says that Hilalah amplified the campaign targeting India and had retweeted several media articles which had highlighted the campaign.
Omar Abdulaziz, activist who is sympathizer of several terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, especially Daesh (ISIS).
The campaign run by the Islamists were covered by several media houses, mostly in Arabic, and Dsinfolab says that the line between ‘report’ and ‘promotion’ was blurred in those reports. These reports presented the boycott campaign as a genuine reaction to ‘atrocities to Muslims in India’, not giving real details of the Assam incident, and not disclosing the nature of people behind the campaign. The media reports didn’t mention that most people posting the hashtags were from Egypt, Turkey and Qatar and several of them were linked with Muslim Brotherhood, and several videos and images posted by them were from unrelated incidents, which are already debunked by fact-checkers in India.
The most prominent media house that published reports on the campaign, almost promoting them, was Al Jazeera. All the major portals of the media house promoted the campaign by tweeting from its various handles like Al Jazeera Global, Arabic, Kuwait, Turkey, Egypt etc.
It is notable that the United States has already put many of Al Jazeera journalists in terrorism watch list. Ahmad Muaffaq Zaidan, the Islamabad bureau chief for Al Jazeera, was listed as a member of al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood by the NSA.
Other media houses that promoted the anti-India campaign included the Turkish state-owned news channel TRT World. In fact, TRT World had launched a promotion of the news article through TRT Arabia, which ran a Facebook Ad. This media house has a history of running anti-India fake news.
Some other media houses which actively pushed the campaign included Rassd News Network (RNN) from Egypt, Arabi21 from Egypt funded by Qatar, Al-Araby News from UK funded by Qatar, US-based Arab-American newspaper Watan Serb etc.
In the campaign against India, the social media users had used several fake news. They had shared images and videos from old, unrelated incidents claiming those depicted attacks on Muslims by majority Hindus. And while reporting the campaign, the middle east based media houses had failed to mention that the campaigners were using fake news in the propaganda.
Not just users from middle eastern countries, users from Pakistan were also not behind in spreading fake news in the campaign. They were at the forefront in sharing a video of a Muslim family attacked by Muslims in India to claim that the Muslim family was beaten by Hindus.
The DisinfoLab report further analyses how the boycott Indian product campaign was pushed by various Twitter handles, and how they helped increase the reach of the same. The report says that such campaigns will increase in the future due to the focus on the topic. It also states that Twitter has repeatedly failed to apply even most basic filtering and monitoring to combat fake news and info-war.
It should be a wake-up call for the govt of India as well as for Indian social media users, the report concludes.
