When news first emerged last month that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was preparing to fire his top military commander, Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, officials in Moscow seemed jubilant. They had been trying to orchestrate just such a split for many months, documents show.“We need to strengthen the conflict between Zaluzhny and Zelensky, along the lines of ‘he intends to fire him,’” one Kremlin political strategist wrote a year ago, after a meeting of senior Russian officials and Moscow spin doctors, according to internal Kremlin documents.Russian President Vladimir Putin’s administration ordered a group of Russian political strategists to use social media and fake news articles to push the theme that Zelensky “is hysterical and weak. … He fears that he will be pushed aside, therefore he is getting rid of the dangerous ones.”The Kremlin instruction resulted in thousands of social media posts and hundreds of fabricated articles, created by troll farms and circulated in Ukraine and across Europe, that tried to exploit what were then rumored tensions between the two Ukrainian leaders, according to a trove of Kremlin documents obtained by a European intelligence service and reviewed by The Washington Post. The files, numbering more than 100 documents, were shared with The Post to expose for the first time the scale of Kremlin propaganda targeting Zelensky with the aim of dividing and destabilizing Ukrainian society — efforts that Moscow dubbed “information psychological operations.”
The details are fascinating - and sound very familiar to Zionists. But while this campaign was centered around troll farms that had people paid by the Kremlin, anti-Israel propaganda seems more taking advantage of the many antisemites who are already out there and eager to do their part to destroy Israel.
Indeed, an earlier campaign against the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny in 2021 sounds virtually identical to those that now accuse Israel of "genocide:"
Amnesty International has stripped the Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny of his "prisoner of conscience" status after it says it was "bombarded" with complaints highlighting xenophobic comments that he has made in the past and not renounced.A spokesman for the human rights organisation in Moscow told the BBC that he believed the wave of requests to "de-list" Navalny was part of an "orchestrated campaign" to discredit Vladimir Putin's most vocal critic and "impede" Amnesty's calls for his release from custody.But on review, Amnesty International concluded that comments made by Navalny some 15 years ago, including a video which appears to compare immigrants to cockroaches, amounted to "hate speech" which was incompatible with the label "prisoner of conscience"."We had too many requests; we couldn't ignore them," spokesman Alexander Artemev told the BBC, explaining that the team initially discounted Navalny's previous statements - which he has not repeated - as "not relevant" in the light of his current, political persecution.Amnesty's offices worldwide, including that of the secretary general, were then hit with complaints from "so-called concerned citizens", Mr Artemev says, in an apparently co-ordinated move.
Even though Amnesty knew it was a coordinated campaign, it still caved.
As the article shows, much of the campaign was spearheaded by Max Blumenthal's Grayzone site and writers, which is also a major source of anti-Israel lies like denying any rapes occurred on October 7.
There are tiers of propagandists. The top tier creates the lies and makes them sound somewhat believable. The second tier isn't that imaginative but they eagerly spread these lies. What these articles shows is that there is a Tier Zero, where Russian (and presumably Iranian, Syria, Chinese and other) leaders decide what they want the lies to be and the goals they want to accomplish.
For example, as I've mentioned, there is a large set of bots on Twitter who pretend to be patriotic Israelis but who are trying to split Israeli society. The scope of that campaign is way beyond the abilities of a couple of individuals, and opinion is divided as to whether it originates in Iran, Iraq or Egypt.
Some of the tactics resemble those used in academia. Anti-Israel academics will write social science papers accusing Israel of something, and then other academics will refer to those papers as if they are established fact and build on them. This is how the "settler-colonial" lie became ubiquitous; even though it is absurd on the face of it since Jews were returning to their own ancestral land and aren't "settlers," it is accepted as undeniably true.
The "apartheid" and "genocide" memes have gone through similar cycles but accelerated, and helped by so-called "human rights groups." Again, their arguments are bogus, and anyone who knows anything about those topics knows this. But they recruit academics and "experts" who have a track record of hating Israel, and, surprise, these "experts" all agree Israel is guilty of anything and everything - and no one else is.
This is why it is critical to always, always look at source materials and verify everything and anything that people accuse Israel of. I've shown hundreds of times that the claims fall apart very quickly,. But as the world shortens its attention span and TikTok and Hollywood star opinions are prized more than real experts, this is a very uphill battle.
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