Rioters set fire and broke into hotels used to shelter asylum seekers in northern England on Sunday, as the country grapples with the worst social unrest it has seen in years.About that disinformation:
The violence was triggered by the stabbing of three young girls in Southport, northwest England, earlier in the week. The far right has seized on and spread a wave of disinformation, including false claims the attacker was an immigrant, to mobilize anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant protests. Police say the suspect was born in Britain.
Before the fire and fury in Southport, there was a name – Ali Al-Shakati.(Yes, Andrew Tate -- the American-born, British-raised alleged rapist and human trafficker who lives in Romania and said he converted to Islam in 2022, retransmitted the false story that the perpetrator of this attack was "an illegal migrant.")
Al-Shakati has never existed, we now know, but that didn’t stop an obscure, Russian-linked fake news outlet from naming him as a 17-year-old supposedly Muslim asylum seeker responsible for the murder of three schoolgirls in the town on Monday.
Channel3 Now, a website that masquerades as a legitimate American news outlet but acts as an “aggregator” for real news stories as well as fake viral claims, published the claim on the back of speculation which appeared to have started on X, formerly known as Twitter.
... the name was boosted by thousands of other Russia-linked accounts before being repeated by authentic Russian state media, which cited Channel3 Now in its reporting.
The claim was meanwhile picked up by far-Right figures such as Tommy Robinson – founder of the anti-immigrant English Defence League, which played a major role in instigating the riots in Southport and elsewhere this week – and notorious influencer Andrew Tate, whose posts about Al-Shakati garnered millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes.
But it's the involvement of other bad actors, including Russian actors, that concerns me. Riots like this haven't happened in America, even though crimes reportedly committed by undocumented immigrants become major stories in the right-wing press, and sometimes in the mainstream media.
When did this happen in the U.K.? Just a couple of weeks after a Labour government took power. Obviously, that just happened to be when the crime took place. It was a particularly brutal attack, and the person charged with the crime is a young Black man of Somali descent. (I'm sure many of the rioters know that the Ali Al-Shakati rumor is untrue and hate British-born Blacks as much as they hate immigrants.) So you'd expect right-wing outrage. But provocateurs seem to want more than outrage now -- they want riots.
The global far right doesn't want unrest like this in America at this moment because it would make Donald Trump and other Republicans look bad. But if Kamala Harris wins the election, I assume the right will seize the first opportunity to make her look as if she has an out-of-control border letting in thousands of brutal criminals. I assume they'll want her to have to deal with riots like this during whatever limited "honeymoon" she has as a new president, if they get an opportunity to stir the pot.
We already know that if Harris wins, "mainstream" Republicans will do everything they can to make her presidency seem like a failure and to make her a one-term president. That's a given when a Democrat wins the White House. But the far right will have its own plans. She'll need to be ready.
No comments:
Post a Comment