A grim video of a beheading by a Mexican drug cartel was shared as an attack on Israeli citizens. A nine-year-old photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his son, taken before the latter departed for his military service, was portrayed as the leader sending his offspring to war. Footage of a funeral staged in Jordan to evade a pandemic lockdown was misrepresented as Palestinians faking deaths in Gaza. A 2014 video of the Islamic State destroying a mosque in Syria was labeled as the Israeli bombing of a Palestinian mosque.
For the next few nights, Zubair found himself staying up until well after dawn, debunking the cascade of disinformation through his Twitter account, which has close to 1 million followers. According to him, roughly two-thirds of the disinformation about the conflict was coming from the Hindu right, which is one of the most formidable purveyors of propaganda in the world. Dispensing with complexity and real-world consequences, the disinformation machinery of the Hindu right has been operating in an amoral zone, treating the Israel-Hamas war as little more than an entertaining spectacle happening somewhere far away, and as a windfall for its Islamophobic agenda.
[Keep an eye on this conflict, which has burned hot and cold ever since the 1947 partition of India and Pakistan and the massive relocations immediately afterward. The threat of nuclear war includes a possible rapid escalation between those two countries if this gets very hot again. As an aside, the rise of Hindu nationalism hasn’t done India’s Christians any favors either. — Ed]
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