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Bannon Seeking To Escape Irrelevance — In Sweden

Bannon Seeking To Escape Irrelevance — In Sweden

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Steve Bannon revealed to a Swedish newspaper that he will be visiting the country to “learn from” the Sweden Democrats (SD), an anti-immigration, anti-Muslim party attempting to rebrand away from its neo-Nazi roots. In seeking alliances with Sweden’s most prominent right-wing party leaders, Bannon is trying to dig himself out of the political irrelevance his downfall has brought. But it appears that even the members of a party with neo-Nazi origins are embarrassed to be associated with him.

In a March 28 interview with Dagens Nyheter, a daily newspaper in Sweden, Bannon revealed his plan to visit the country in the next few months “to learn” from the Sweden Democrats, “some of whom we have studied closely.” When asked what insights would he share with SD members from his time at the White House (he was fired in August 2017), Bannon said he’d urge the SD to continue fighting, increase the party’s contact with the base, and stay away from the so-called “globalists.” He also called SD leader Jimmie Åkesson a “dynamic” politician and characterized SD as an example for “the whole world to study.”

Bannon’s interest in Sweden is neither new nor surprising, as he has long telegraphed his plans to export his far-right politics to Europe. During Bannon’s time at the helm of Breitbart.com, as well as during and after his White House stint, the outlet has shown an obsession with a mythical migrant crime wave in Sweden, particularly as the nation prepares for a general election (Sweden has become a gateway to the anti-migrant agenda in Europe). Bannon’s announcement of his plans comes on the heels of a series of embarrassing setbacks for him — ranging from a humiliating electoral loss by a Republican politician he championed in a ruby-red state to his ousting from Breitbart, which he helped build. It appears he is looking for a comebackwherever he can find it.

When asked directly whether the SD party invited him to visit Sweden, Bannon gave a vaguely affirmative answer, stating he didn’t want to make an announcement yet but that he would “definitely come to Sweden … relatively soon.” But just hours after the interview was published, the secretary of the Sweden Democrats party denied that anyone in the party arranged or even had knowledge of Bannon’s trip and refused to say whether SD will welcome Bannon to Sweden.

Though SD was born out of neo-Nazi circles in the late ‘80s, it has since attempted to enter the mainstream by distancing itself from the overt white nationalism of some of its past leaders. In 2006, the party changed its logo from the torch used by the U.K.’s fascist National Front to an innocuous blue and yellow flower. Now, Sweden Democrats is the nation’s most established right-wing party and boasts a thriving (if controversial) social media presence. But its polarizing message has pushed its supporters away from the party in recent months.

Though SD was polling as the nation’s second-largest party last June, a December 2017 poll showed support for SD has dropped to its lowest level since 2015. In February, a local SD member was forced to resign after posting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories on Facebook. Just last week, the party suffered another self-inflicted wound when one of its members was sentenced for repeated domestic abuse.

The recently created more extreme far-right party Alternative for Sweden (inspired by the German AfD) serves as an additional threat to SD. AfS hopes to curry favor with SD’s most extreme elements and has successfully recruited several SD parliamentarians in the past few months, including one who was expelled from SD for extremist ties.

It’s a testament to Bannon’s toxicity that the Swedish party that perhaps most viably embodies Bannon’s ideology has denied any contact with him, seemingly in an attempt to protect its vulnerable credibility. SD’s Åkesson has admitted that in the past, his party has been its own worst enemy, a problem which Bannon might find hard to resist, probably because he can easily relate.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

How Alex Jones Has Pushed The “Crisis Actor” Conspiracy Theory About Parkland Students

How Alex Jones Has Pushed The “Crisis Actor” Conspiracy Theory About Parkland Students

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is reportedly one strike away from being totally banned from YouTube for spreading the conspiracy theory that survivors of the Parkland, FL, school shooting were “crisis actors.” In response to the threat, Jones is attacking YouTube for supposed censorship and defending himself by contending that he never “called the students crisis actors.”

However, Jones has been pushing conspiracy theories about the students since the shooting occurred, including saying that students speaking out against gun violence were paid or scripted. Jones repeatedly made comments over the past several weeks, up to and including his March 3 claim that they are “Democratic Party operatives” who have “been scripted for what they’re saying,” demonstrating his major role in spreading the conspiracy theory.

Jones repeatedly suggested Parkland students were “scripted” and “funded” “Democratic Party operatives”

Jones: Parkland students are “Democratic Party operatives” who have “been scripted for what they’re saying.”

ALEX JONES (HOST): Last Friday, CNN said, we are lobbying YouTube to take down Alex Jones. He says no kids died in Florida. He said they’re all crisis actors. And then they banned videos where I was saying they’re not crisis actors. It’s a real shooting. They’ve just been Democratic Party operatives and been scripted for what they’re saying, the four they chose for media coverage out of 3,000. That’s all come out. [Infowars Censored, 3/3/18]

Jones: The “anti-gun students” were “coached,” and the Democrats “admitted it.”

ALEX JONES: We don’t believe crisis actors were there, and we believe the shooting really happened. But they’re banning all that. Our headline, “The Truth About Crisis Actors,” let’s work with YouTube. Let’s talk about, were the anti-gun students coached? Which is now come out and admitted. The Democrats now admitted it in BuzzFeed. They banned it. [Infowars Censored, 3/3/18]

Jones:  Parkland survivors are “being funded, they’re being given scripts.”

ALEX JONES (HOST): And, again, you saw how David Hogg, the number one individual picked out of the school of three thousand to now lead the national anti-gun movement funded by George Soros — oh, guys, I left it in the podcast studio last night. BuzzFeed came out and admitted that the Democrats run the entire anti-gun children’s movement — young people movement, but said it was a great thing. While they ban our videos for saying it. We’re saying they’re being funded, they’re being given scripts. Not that they’re crisis actors, not that the shooting didn’t happen.

[…]

This is the deep state’s children, they’re high school seniors, coming out, meeting with Democrats, meeting with Bernie Sanders, meeting with everybody, and saying, “We are going to abolish the Second Amendment.” So that’s where we’re at here. And the levels of lies are so intense. [Genesis Communications Network, The Alex Jones Show, 2/28/18]

Jones: There’s a “cover-up going on” with Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg regarding his involvement with his school’s drama department and his father’s former position in the FBI.

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: You have been digging deep into the Florida crisis situation. I think what most people are interested in is internet ablaze with rumors that there’s something off about these kids. There’s something off about the reporting in general.

[…]

ALEX JONES: There’s so much evidence that it gives me a headache. And I think you just alluded to the beginning of it. What we do know is there’s a cover-up going on. They are pulling videos of this young man, a David Hogg, whose father is an FBI agent, whose mother is a big Democrat and big anti-gun person, who is an anti-gun activist and has been in a bunch of anti-gun videos and reports already. They are pulling these videos everywhere and pulling videos, off Facebook, Instagram, you name it, from their own sites of him in some type of CNN visit, internship, VIP thing. Then they’re pulling photos of them in the drama department with the other three students. So, A, there’s a cover-up going on. B, when you pull back from this, they are demonizing anyone that even asks questions. [Genesis Communications Network, The Alex Jones Show, 2/21/18]

Jones: The Parkland shooting was “the perfect false flag.”

ALEX JONES (HOST): Wow, we said the perfect false flag would be a white nationalist attacking a multicultural school as a way to make the leftists all look like victims and bring in gun control and a war on America’s recovery and now right on time what we’ve been warning of, their main card, the thing we said was imminent, appears with all the evidence. [Genesis Communications Network, The Alex Jones Show, 2/15/18]

CNN: The Alex Jones YouTube Channel “received one strike” for a video called “David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines In TV Interview.”

InfoWars, a far-right media organization run by Alex Jones and known for peddling unfounded conspiracy theories, is on thin ice with YouTube after it posted a video that portrayed the survivors of the Parkland school shooting as actors.

The Alex Jones Channel, Infowar’s (sic) biggest YouTube account, received one strike for that video, a source with knowledge of the account told CNN. YouTube’s community guidelines say if an account receives three strikes in three months, the account is terminated.

That video focused on David Hogg, a strong voice among survivors of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The attention has given him a powerful platform — but it has also made him the subject of demonstrably false conspiracy theories that claim he’s so skilled as a public speaker that he must be a paid actor.

On Wednesday, YouTube removed the video from InfoWars’ page for violating its policies on harassment and bullying. The video was titled, “David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines In TV Interview.” [CNN, 2/23/18]

BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel: Jones posted a YouTube video “suggesting that the students have ulterior motives” and stressing “that Hogg and his peers are ‘drama’ kids and all very interested in journalism.”

According to a CNN report, Jones’ Infowars channel earned its first strike after posting a video with the title “David Hogg Can’t Remember His Lines In TV Interview,” suggesting Parkland shooting survivor David Hogg was a crisis actor. The second strike came from a similar Parkland video. So far, it feels consistent. So for fun, I took a cursory glance at Jones’ Infowars account on Wednesday. Took about 90 seconds to find this:

The video — while it doesn’t explicitly say Hogg and other students are crisis actors — digs through old photos of Hogg. I paused the video with closed captioning to show here where Jones stresses that Hogg and his peers are “drama” kids and all very interested in journalism, suggesting that the students have ulterior motives.

One interpretation of this is that YouTube is being very careful and diligent. It’s sticking only to extreme forms of harassment when it comes to assigning strikes (a wide strike zone, so to speak). Another interpretation is that YouTube doesn’t want to deal with the fallout from banning Jones, and is allowing America’s best known conspiracy theorist to impugn the motives of child shooting survivors because of a few syntax technicalities. [Infowarzel newsletter, 3/4/18]

Infowars.com: Hogg “denies being a crisis actor,” but his “credibility was thrown into question” because he did an interview with CBS six months before the shooting.

Hogg’s credibility was thrown into question after a video surfaced of him giving an interview with CBS six months ago on a story unrelated to last week’s school shooting.

The student, who works at the school paper, also interviewed school shooting survivors hiding in a closet as the massacre was unfolding at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. [Infowars.com, 2/21/18]

How Sweden Fights Back Against Fake News

How Sweden Fights Back Against Fake News

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

In 2016, the story of a juvenile sex crime in an Idaho town swept through the national right-wing media ecosystem, picking up fabricated and lurid details along the way; several months later, the newly inaugurated President Donald Trump falsely suggested that a terrorist attack had recently taken place in Sweden, baffling the country. The two incidents, though seemingly unrelated, were spurred by the same sentiment: rabid anti-immigrant bias fueled by a sensationalistic, right-wing fake news ecosystem.

In the global culture wars being waged online and in real life — from Twin Falls, Idaho, to Malmo, Sweden — influencers successfully mobilize anti-Muslim extremists, far-right media, and fake news websites in coordinated campaigns to promote misinformation. Their motivation may stem from an ideological agenda, the desire to create chaos, the intention to profit from emotionally resonant website content, or a combination of all three. And though misinformation is usually later debunked, the truth generally fails to travel as far or penetrate as deep as the original story, allowing a steady drumbeat of misinformation to continue. In the cases of Twin Falls and Sweden, this misinformation was fueled by xenophobia and sought to manipulate people into associating immigration and violent crime.

The case of Twin Falls

What’s happening in Sweden?

Lessons learned

Response and enduring challenges

The case of Twin Falls

The Twin Falls, Idaho, case was the perfect story for anti-immigrant activists and far-right media. For the rest of us, it was the perfect example of how these anti-immigrant (and, specifically, anti-Muslim) activists and media seize on a story, elevating it, and twisting the facts to push their agenda.

In June 2016, two refugee boys, ages 7 and 10, and a white 5-year-old girl were discovered partly clothed in the laundry room of an apartment complex. The incident was filmed on a cell phone borrowed from one of the boys’ older brother. A year later, the two boys and the older brother whose phone they used, were charged, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced.

The incident had all the hallmarks of a crime story fit for the far-right echo chamber: sex crimes committed by refugees against white children in a historically white town with a growing Muslim population; a lack of sustained national media attention, creating an opening for accusations of a media cover-up; local politicians unable to get ahead of the narrative; and the backdrop of a highly politicized presidential election.

Misinformation about the case was initially spurred by anti-Muslim activist groups, such as ACT for Americaand Refugee Resettlement Watch, as well as anti-Muslim media figures and various white nationalists who had been seemingly preparing for an incident to exploit in Twin Falls since a local paper reported in early 2015 that the city would soon be accepting Syrian refugees. After the incident, far-right websites including Breitbart, Infowars, The Drudge Report, The Rebel Media, WorldNetDaily, and fake news websiteMadWorldNews ran with the story, fabricating new details for which there was no evidence, including that the young boys were Syrian (they weren’t), held the girl at knifepoint (they didn’t), and their families celebrated afterward (they didn’t).

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential election, Breitbart produced daily content on the story and sent its lead investigative reporter, Lee Stranahan, to investigate the “Muslim takeover” of the town. Infowars attempted to link the assault to Chobani, an immigrant-owned yogurt company that employs several hundred refugees, in a report headlined “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists.” Chobani sued Jones over the claim, and eventually settled; Jones issued an apology and a retraction. The story also bled into mainstream conservative news. Former Fox host Bill O’Reilly claimed the national media chose to not cover the local crime story because they “want[ed] to protect the refugee community.” O’Reilly pushed the narrative that sexual assault is committed frequently by Muslim refugees, saying, “the cultural aspect of the story is valid” in response to a Fox News contributor claiming that “we’re seeing sexual assaults happen across the world from refugee populations” in Germany and Norway.

The story showed how a local crime story can become a breeding ground for right-wing fabulation in service of pushing an anti-Muslim agenda. And, when repeated frequently enough, these narratives become coded, so that a single word or phrase can conjure a version of reality that may not exist at all.

In the case of Twin Falls, many commenters explicitly extrapolated the mythical migrant crime wave of Europe to the American heartland. The Times quoted one American woman writing, “My girl is blond and blue-eyed. … I am extremely worried about her safety.” It is therefore not surprising that the vast majority of Trump voters think illegal immigration is a very serious problem for the country, particularly in the context of crime. And thanks to “alt-right” outlets like Breitbart, which consistently use crime in Europe to fearmonger about immigration into the U.S., local crime can have policy implications across continents. As the so-called “alt-right” attempts to expand its reach internationally, these high-profile crime stories are powerful fodder.

What’s happening in Sweden?

In February, Trump told rally attendees in Florida to “look at what’s happening last night in Sweden” while talking about cities where terror attacks have occurred. The statement baffled most Americans, as no terror attack had occurred in Sweden the night before; Trump later clarified that his comment was in reference to a Fox News segment about “immigrants & Sweden.” The segment, according to The Washington Post, was likely an interview with an American filmmaker who “has blamed refugees for what he says is a crime wave in Sweden.” His “documentary,” part of which was aired during the Fox segment, was deceptively edited and pushed debunked claims of a surge of refugee violence.

If you gleaned your news about Sweden from far-right or conspiratorial websites, as many Americans do, Trump’s dog-whistle would have resonated clearly. The far-right sites have created a narrative that Sweden is the “rape capital of the world,” is in the throes of a cultural civil war, and that there are areas of the country so dangerous that even police don’t dare enter. As Media Matters and others have documented, influentialfar–right websites, white nationalists, right-leaning tabloids, fake news websites, and even more mainstreamconservative outlets have cultivated an obsession with the mythical migrant crime wave in Sweden, publishing nearly daily content on the subject.

What is happening in Sweden is, actually, nothing close to the hellscape far-right media attempts to portray. The country’s crime rate pales in comparison to the United States’, and while high levels of immigration have created social and economic anxieties for native Swedes and immigrants alike (anxieties driven in no small part by anti-Muslim activists), no data shows that immigration is causing such problems in the country.

But these anti-immigrant narratives have created space for fabricated claims to fester. And in this ecosystem, as in the Twin Falls case, real stories can take on a life of their own. In December 2016, for example, Swedish local news outlet Kristianstadbladet (The Kristianstad Blade) reported that “new clientele” had been frequenting a church often visited by those experiencing homelessness and some people had desecrated the church pews. Despite a lack of information about who the new clientele were, Swedish hate site Fria Tider leapt to claim that it was a reference to refugees and they were the ones urinating, defecating, and masturbating in the church’s pews. MadWorld News, an American fake news website known for its anti-Muslim content, amplified the story in the United States, adding claims that “migrants scream Islamic chants and smash liquor bottles on the floor in an attempt to silence Christian worshippers from praying to God” and that “a migrant even tried to kidnap a child from a baptism ceremony.” The article was shared over 4,700 times. The story was also published on Focus News, a fake news website run by a 25-year-old Macedonian, and from there shared thousands of times in Macedonia, Georgia, and Kosovo. The story was fact-checked and debunked but by then the claim had already spread.

Stories like these, driven by far-right media and anti-Muslim activists, helped lay the narrative foundation for Trump’s Sweden reference. After his statement, right-wing media, fake news websites, and at least one neo-Nazi website clamored to defend him, using his comment to amplify a crime narrative that, up until then, had sparked limited interest outside the far-right media landscape. And while online attention to the country peakedafter Trump’s claim, his amplification of the contrived and bigoted narrative took it from the fringe to the mainstream and effectively primed a larger audience to believe that, even if nothing has happened in Sweden, it could.

Sweden’s commitment to an open, democratic society is also a vulnerability. According to a late 2015 internal memo, Swedish police were instructed not to report externally the ethnic or national origin of suspected criminals. The decision, while an admirable attempt not to stoke racial tensions, has raised suspicion. Many far-right outlets perceived the move as an attempt to cover up what they deemed a migrant crime wave, and the controversy became so salient that the Swedish government had to respond. Now these same websites are targeting the Swedish government over its proposal to restrict the accessibility and distribution of personal sensitive data related to criminal offenses. Sweden’s open and progressive crime reporting practices that discourage unnecessary emphasis on people’s ethnicity or religion allow fake news purveyors to speculate on a suspected criminal’s ethnic background with impunity, as well as manufacture an inflated perception of criminality.

Lessons learned

These examples illustrate that in a politically and culturally charged media environment, completely fabricatedstories packaged to look as if they were published by a reputable news agency and partially true stories sensationalized by ideological or bad-faith actors alike can spread with such a degree of virality that by the time the truth is reported and the fake news fact-checked, the damage is already done. The articles themselves are left uncorrected and continue to be shared and referred back to as cautionary tales of the supposed crime wave and general societal degradation spurred by Muslim immigration and refugee resettlement. They are exceedingly easy to manufacture and disseminate, but difficult to disprove until all facts are available, which can be months or years later.

There is also evidence that Russian actors are attempting to sow political discord offline. In March, in the wake of Trump’s comments about alleged crime in Sweden, a Russian TV crew reportedly tried to pay young people in Sweden to riot on camera with the intention of portraying a nation roiled by violence. And a Facebook event called “Citizens before refugees,” which was created by what is now known to be a Russian actor, attempted to organize an anti-refugee rally in the town of Twin Falls, Idaho.

It’s easy for mainstream news consumers to dismiss these reports as misinformation-filled rants by white supremacists and various far-right ideologues (which they are), but in the aggregate, they act as a powerful rallying cry for an entire swath of Americans who yearn to see their deep-seated cultural and economic anxieties rationalized, their biases validated.

What’s happening in Sweden is what’s happening in sleepy towns in the United States. The ideologies, tactics, and goals are all the same. There will be another case like the Twin Falls assault and another story like that of the Swedish church, and in the context of a media landscape eager to exploit these situations and a presidential administration that encourages xenophobia and has deep ties to the far-right and a burgeoning fake news ecosystem, the impact of the next viral story could be much worse.

Responses and enduring challenges

In order to confront the problem of anti-immigrant sentiment flamed by misinformation and fake news, mainstream media and governments alike need to be realistic about the challenges and possible solutions. In a recent report released by the Swedish government, the authors noted, “One important question is where the limit is for which expressions are harmful to society in large and its citizens.” It’s a question that may never have a perfect answer, but seeking to understand the ecosystem and its players, ideologies, relationships, and methods is a good start.

In that report, which focused on “white hatred,” experts outlined several far-right commentators and websites (many of which are American), suggesting that these groups be researched further in an effort to counter their racist, anti-immigrant, anti-feminist ideology. The report also detailed the role of tech companies like Facebook and Google in limiting distribution of their content online. Sweden has also ramped up its efforts to fight fake news through elementary school media literacy programs, news outlet initiatives, and bilateral law enforcement partnerships, including with the country’s Scandinavian neighbors.

In the United States, the commitment to identifying and solving the problem has been far less sustained. Trump himself has regularly pushed anti-Muslim sentiment and misinformation, and he’s known to get his information from the types of outlets that push bigoted misinformation. The administration has also decided that fake news is actually news that is unfavorable to it, and it’s officials have on multiple occasions pushed fabricated stories, and Trump himself has told over 100 lies in less than one year in office.

The antagonistic attitude that this administration has taken means the burden for combating anti-immigrant sentiment and fake news largely falls on media, local authorities, and other institutions. For example, fake news in Twin Falls may have been better combatted had the local authorities been more engaged in getting out accurate information. A local Twin Falls newspaper editor told The New York Times’ Caitlin Dickerson that, while local reporters attempted to correct falsehoods about the story, city officials refused to write guest editorials doing the same out of fear of political backlash:

“Behind closed doors, they would all tell you they were pro-refugee, and we wanted them to step forward and make that declaration in a public arena, and it just never really happened,” he told me. “That was frustrating to us especially at the beginning because it really felt like the newspaper was out there all alone.” He continued: “There were days where we felt like, Godammit, what are we doing here? We write a story and it’s going to reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it’s going to reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of a voice do we have in this debate?”

In the era of “alternative facts,” American news outlets and their fact-checking arms have stepped up their game, but the U.S. would be smart to develop interdisciplinary domestic and international partnerships, as Sweden has. This year, four states passed bills mandating media literacy be integrated into school curricula, and others are considering following suit. It would be worth considering Sweden’s dedicated media literacy program, taught to teens and young adults, as a model.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Fascist Trolls And White Nationalists Defend Trump’s Anti-Muslim Video Retweets

Fascist Trolls And White Nationalists Defend Trump’s Anti-Muslim Video Retweets

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

On Wednesday morning, President Donald Trump retweeted three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right, ultranationalist Britain First political organization, who has previously been “found guilty of religiously aggravated harassment.” Trump’s retweets of three videos attempting to link Muslims to violent crime, one of which has been debunked and the other two of which lacked context, were praised by white nationalists and far-right ideologues on Twitter and by Internet trolls on 4chan, 8chan, and Reddit message boards. At least one prominent fake news website also defended Trump’s retweets.

Prominent white nationalist David Duke:


Far-right vlogger and identitarian movement supporter Peter Sweden:


White nationalist podcast host James Allsup:

White nationalist associate of Richard Spencer, Evan McLaren:


White nationalist congressional hopeful Grant J. Kidney:

White nationalist group Defend Europa:

Anti-immigration hate website VDARE:

A poster on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board: “Trump just went full alt right.”

Another 4chan/pol/ user wrote, “PRAISE TRUMP,” calling the videos Trump shared “/POL/-TIER MUSLIM CHIMPOUT VIDEOS” — an indication that the videos were extreme enough to have been promoted by 4chan users.

One user on the 8chan/pol/ message board, in reference to Trump’s tweets, wrote, “I’m still not tired of winning. Sieg fucking heil.”

And on the pro-Trump subreddit “/r/The_Donald,” one user shared the videos Trump retweeted and directed other users to an online tool that can be used to download the videos, likely to share them through different mediums.

Fake news website Conservative Tribune praised Trump’s tweetstorm in a post, writing, “Refusing to cower to political correctness, President Donald Trump went rogue Wednesday, taking dead aim at radical Islamic terrorists and the violence they sow.”

Network And Cable News Ignore Rohingya Plight In Primetime

Network And Cable News Ignore Rohingya Plight In Primetime

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

The Myanmar government’s military forces are conducting ethnic cleansing of the country’s RohingyaMuslim population — an ethnic and religious minority in Myanmar — through systematic violence and expulsion. Facing murder, rape, and now famine, hundreds of thousands have fled the country in recent months. Prime-time cable news and broadcast evening newscasts, however, have been reluctant to cover what the U.N. is calling a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

National newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post as well as Time magazine and NPR have reported extensively on the state-sponsored “clearance operations” with in-depth analyses and multimedia features devoted to the state-sponsored violence, but broadcast evening newscasts and prime-time cable news shows have been nearly silent on the issue. In a period of nearly two months following a government crackdown and subsequent mass flight of Rohingya from Myanmar into Bangladesh, evening news referenced the crisis a mere three times: in two reports by Fox News and one from ABC’s World News Tonight.

Of the two reports by Fox News, one, which appeared on the September 21 edition of The Story with Martha MacCallum, exploited the ethnic cleansing to scandalize Hillary Clinton’s past support for Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi — Myanmar’s de facto civilian leader who has drawn criticism for her failure to denounce the recent violence — and to praise the response from President Donald Trump’s administration. The other Fox News report, which appeared on the October 10 edition of Special Report, was a 20-second segment in which host Bret Baier garbled the word “Rohingya” and focused on Pope Francis’ response to the violence.

CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, and evening prime-time programming on MSNBC and CNN completely ignored the humanitarian disaster taking place in Myanmar. While CNN International devoted almost 50 segments to the expulsion of Rohingya, none of these reports were re-aired during CNN’s evening programming. Moreover, most reports of Rohingya erasure on CNN International occurred on CNN Newsroom, a program that airs between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m.

While the Trump administration has called for the Myanmar military to cease its campaign against the Rohingya, U.S. officials have stopped short of encouraging a formal resolution condemning the violence or imposing targeted sanctions against the military’s leaders. Additionally, the United States still funds military cooperation with Myanmar. And the Trump administration has placed a ban on refugees from around the world and plans to cap refugee admissions over the next year at 45,000 — the lowest limit ever. Last year, refugees to the United States from Myanmar, including Rohingya, outpaced arrivals from Syria, a nation that has been embroiled in a civil war for over six years that has displaced millions

Activists say they are being censored, and local journalists say they are putting their lives on the line in order to expose Myanmar’s crimes against humanity. Cable and broadcast news networks have an opportunity and responsibility to lift up voices of the Rohingya, whose plight is only becoming more desperate amid the news cycle’s continued silence.

                       Dayanita Ramesh and Miles Le / Media Matters

Methdology:

Media Matters used Nexis to search transcripts from ABC’s World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News and weekday programming between 5 p.m. and 11 p.m. on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC from August 24 to October 16, 2017, for mentions of one or more of the following terms: Rohingya, Burma, Myanmar, or Bangladesh. Reports of flooding across South Asia were not included.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

“Alt-Right” Ship Detained In Mediterranean For Apparent Human Trafficking

“Alt-Right” Ship Detained In Mediterranean For Apparent Human Trafficking

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

Defend Europe, an anti-immigrant group that attempts to disrupt humanitarian search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean Sea, recently chartered a boat that was stopped in a Cyprus port, where several members were arrested for forging documents and engaging in potential human trafficking. Since then, pro-Trump media trolls associated with the campaign have been conspicuously silent.

The members were stopped in and deported from a sea port in the self-declared Turkish state of Northern Cyprus Thursday after spending two days in detention for document forgery and potential human trafficking of 20 Sri Lankan nationals who were aboard the C-Star, the campaign’s ship. Turkish Cypriot authorities deported nine crew members, including the ship’s captain and a German “second captain” believed to be neo-Nazi Alexander Schleyer. The authorities also transferred the director of the company that owns the ship, Sven Tomas Egerstrom, to Greek-controlled Cyprus for further questioning.

Refugee Rights Association advocate Faika Pasha told The Associated Press that some of the Sri Lankans on board reported having paid a trafficker to be taken to Italy and confirmed that five Sri Lankans remained in Cyprus to claim asylum. (Defend Europe claims the Sri Lankans were actually bribed by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to claim they were seeking asylum.)

Defend Europe is a campaign by anti-immigrant, “alt-right” activists to disrupt humanitarian search and rescue missions of migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. The effort is the brainchild of Generation Identity, a pan-European “Identitarian” movement known for its members’ high-profile political stunts.

Since the arrest and deportation of the C-Star’s crew members, Defend Europe has been doing some damage control on Twitter, claiming the ship was “released” and that “lies and #fakenews from NGOs have been exposed once again.” The next day, the account pinned an image of the group’s alleged goals on its feed, one of which was to “save migrants in danger of drowning and making sure they get to the nearest non-European safe port.”

However, Generation Identity’s Austrian co-founder, Martin Sellner, has repeatedly claimed that Defend Europe’s goal is to take migrants from North Africa back to Libya — a violation of the non-refoulement principle of the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention against sending refugees back to their county if they would be in harm’s way. In June, Sellner said, “We want to face those human trafficking ships on the sea. We want to disrupt their doings. And, of course, if you meet an account of people in distress on the sea, save them but bring them back to where they started from.” He reiterated his stance a month later, saying that Defend Europe will “do everything in our power to make sure that they go back to Africa, where they belong.”

Since the detainment of Defend Europe members and their subsequent expulsion from Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus, the movement’s right-wing media allies and pro-Trump trolls have been noticeably mum. As of this piece’s publication, Brittany Pettibone, who has actively been reporting in support of Defend Europe from Catania, Sicily, had tweeted only twice on the subject since the incident, both times promoting Defend Europe’s conspiratorial narrative that NGOs are propagating fake news and “hiding something” about their alleged collusion with international human trafficking rings.

Even more notably, Lauren Southern, a Canadian media troll who made a name for herself denying the existence of rape culture and demonizing minorities and who has been actively involved in the Defend Europe campaign, has not tweeted a single time about the recent incident (though she has retweeted in support of Defend Europe). Online payment service Patreon recently suspended Southern’s account for violating the crowdfunding platform’s terms by soliciting donations for the Defend Europe campaign; Southern has since resorted to using PayPal. PayPal previously froze Defend Europe’s account, saying in a statement, “Our policy is to prevent our services being used by companies whose activities promote hatred, violence or racial intolerance.”

Peter Sweden, a previously vocal Holocaust denier who reversed himself in mid-July, has been similarly silent on the recent controversy surrounding Defend Europe. Sweden has bragged about disrupting search and rescue missions in the Mediterranean and has also been interviewed by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, taking the opportunity to fearmonger about crime in Sweden.

Katie Hopkins, a columnist for British news site MailOnline who regularly appears on Fox News to voice her Islamophobic, anti-immigrant views, has also been silent on Twitter about the C-Star’s deportation from Cyprus. Hopkins recently tweeted a photo of herself with Sweden, which she later deleted. Her involvement with the Defend Europe campaign has been documented by the anti-extremism research and education group HOPE Not Hate.

Tara McCarthy, who hosts a YouTube show alongside Pettibone and who has said, in a since-deleted tweet, that she hopes “zero” migrants crossing the sea to Europe “make it alive,” has also not commented on the C-Star’s seizure.

According to HOPE Not Hate, pro-Trump propaganda outlet Breitbart, white nationalist site AltRight.com, racial nationalist organization American Renaissance, Nazi website The Daily Stormer, and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke have also voiced support for Defend Europe’s mission. As of noon on July 28, none of these outlets or individuals had responded to the latest developments.

The silence of these pro-Trump trolls exposes their opportunism and cowardice. They engage in high-profilestunts to profit and promote themselves and then back away when the going gets tough, as prominent troll Mike Cernovich did when he attempted to deny involvement in the “Pizzagate” conspiracy. The pro-Trump trolls subscribed to the Defend Europe campaign for donations and foreign Twitter followers, but now they’re stuck in a sordid relationship with a movement that is endangering innocent lives and potentially violating international law. It remains to be seen how they will meme their way out of this one.

Header image by Sarah Wasko / Media Matters

Sweden Is Far Right Gateway Into Europe

Sweden Is Far Right Gateway Into Europe

Reprinted with permission from MediaMatters.

 

Sweden is known as a bastion of progressive values and policies, but underneath the dominant ideology, there is a motivated, well-connected nativist movement that has existed for decades and is now re-emerging, armed with fake news.

With a population of just under 10 million, Sweden is a small, historically ethnically homogenous country that in recent years has accepted the largest number of asylum seekers per capita of any European nation. Sweden’s white nationalists, once relegated to the fringe, have been re-energized by a global so-called populist movement and a relatively progressive immigration policy that is anathema to their agenda. And there are signs that they may be succeeding in their efforts. Xenophobic hate crimes are up, stricter immigration policies have been imposed, and Sweden Democrats, the far-right political party, with ties to neo-Nazism is, for the first time ever, polling as the second most popular party in the country. To top it off, there is evidence that the media discourse on immigration has taken a dark turn to portray migrants “as a problem,” and fake news is on the rise.

Enter the Swedish “alt-right,” a movement that sees progressivism as having been imported into Swedish society as an experiment in cultural Marxism and views Sweden’s relatively small size and homogeneity as having contributed to a sort of “unitarian zeitgeist” of liberal thought.* The members of this movement see it as a fight to “diversify” the Swedish media landscape while promoting a decidedly racist agenda. Together, these attributes have created an environment ripe for the spread of “alt-right” ideas, and the most well-known white nationalist of the American “alt-right” has taken notice.

Richard Spencer, president of the white nationalist “think tank” the National Policy Institute (NPI), after having been recently alienated from a movement he named, is looking for legitimacy in a country he has dubbed “the most alt-right.” According to BuzzFeed, Spencer recently began a partnership with two Swedish “alt-right” outlets, Arktos Media, a publishing house that prints white nationalist literature in English, and Red Ice, a Swedish white nationalist video and podcast platform that often features international guests. The partnership, the AltRight Corporation, which has been called an attempt at a “more ideological Breitbart,” also has its own website and, until May 23, also had its own podcast, AltRight Radio. Soundcloud has since banned the podcast for violating its hate speech policy. But this movement is not confined to the internet. For the past nine years, Sweden has hosted an “alt-right conference” which is attended by members and sympathizers from all over the world. One prominent American “alt-right” figure (whose name was not divulged) told AltRight.com’s Daniel Friberg that Sweden’s annual alt-right conference was the most “well-attended” he’d been to and, notably, the “most radical,” too.*

Migrant crime is a favorite topic of the “alt-right” in Sweden, in part because the outlets that promote this content know they’re speaking to an audience favorable to their ideological agenda, not facts. (Media Matters previously documented Breitbart’s use of a racist meme to categorize stories about migrant crime in Sweden, most of which also had little basis in reality). Journalists know this is happening but remain ill-equipped to respond to it. A recent study found that eight out of 10 Swedes believe fake news is altering their “perception of basic facts.” Sweden has acknowledged the rise of “inaccurate information” and, in March, the country’s prime minister announced a plan to combat fake news ahead of Sweden’s 2018 general election. Yet, Sweden remains vulnerable to fake news and, as the education minister admits, there is “some naivety when it comes to the information society.” Often the flow of misinformation looks something like this: A Swedish or British tabloid reports on a study or crime with a sensational headline and few details or context; “alt-right” or far-right outlets cite the original source but add new details to further sensationalize the story; these outlets promote each other to amplify the story; and eventually the story makes its way to a more mainstream news outlet. Sometimes, the news that a story is false makes its way back to Swedish media, but by then, the damage is already done.

Last year, American film producer Ami Horowitz made a deceptively edited film rife with false claims about migrant crime in Sweden. In February of this year, after having been promoted by U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail and conspiracy theorist website Infowars, he was invited for an interview with Fox’s Tucker Carlson, not once but twice, and one of the segments was later cited by President Trump as the impetus for his fact-free suggestion that something “was happening last night” in Sweden, which he couched amid discussion of terror-hit cities. The interview received so much attention that the Swedish police and embassy pushed back, one Swedish newspaper responded by fact-checking each of Horowitz’s assertions, and another criticized Trump’s complicity in the “Sweden-bashing by the hard-core American right.” But how equipped is Sweden to deal with xenophobic fake news that doesn’t reach the pedestal of the president of the United States, and, thus, does not grab international attention?

Christian Picciolini, a former leader in the neo-Nazi movement who now runs a nonprofit dedicating to helping people leave hate groups, says he's worried by the so-called

In another, more recent example, Swedish tabloid Dagens Nyheter published a study titled, “Young Men Who Commit Shootings Often Have A Foreign Background,” which found that 90 out of 100 shooting suspects had at least one foreign-born parent. Of course, these findings are concerning, but a closer look illustrates problems that are not unique to Sweden: Unemployment, lack of educational opportunities, and mental illness were all identified by experts as important contributing factors to gun violence. It is also worth noting that almost half of the individuals counted in this study were merely suspected, not convicted, of perpetrating these crimes. Of course, this context was missing from the misleadingly titled article that notorious Islamophobe Virginia Hale later wrote for Breitbart. Alex Jones’ Infowars also engaged with the story, citing the Swedish fake news purveyor and “alt-right” outlet Fria Tider (which has been called the “Breitbart of Sweden”*) in its report, with an even more misleading headline: “SWEDEN: MIGRANTS RESPONSIBLE FOR 90% OF SHOOTINGS.” Both articles used the opportunity to push debunked claims about crime in Sweden.

Though they’re false, these claims are repeated so often that they begin to exist as facts. For example, the fact-checking website Snopes has debunked many stories on Sweden and even issued a three-part seriesdebunking the most common misleading narratives on Swedish migrant crime. But the narratives persist. There are a few reasons for this. It’s now widely known that sensational headlines get more clicks, and the effect is especially heightened when they play on a person’s deep-seated emotions like anger and anxiety. Sweden has not become the “rape capital of Europe,” but real or imagined, Sweden’s historically liberal refugee admissions policy has created enough tension to make people vulnerable to fake news about the population. Another universal reason for the rise of fake news, as it relates to Sweden, is disaffection from mainstream outlets and increasing preference for alternative sources. A 2016 study in Sweden found half of media consumers get their news from sources other than Sweden’s traditional news sources and around 20 percent have “no confidence” in them.

There are uniquely Swedish reasons for why the country is susceptible to fake news. These include the well-intentioned ways crime is defined and reported and the language barriers to understanding Swedish news. For instance, according to a late 2015 internal memo, Swedish police were instructed not to report externally the ethnic or national origin of suspected criminals in order not to appear racist. The decision, while admirable and also not unique to Sweden, has raised suspicion. Many far-right outlets perceived the move as an attempted cover-up, and the controversy became so big that the Swedish government responded to the contention. Another Swedish practice that has unintentionally created the illusion of increased crime is the way Sweden defines and categorizes crime and the culture around crime reporting. For example, Sweden defines sexual assault much more broadly than the U.S. and other European countries do, and records every single offense as a separate crime, even if they are committed by the same perpetrator. The country has also created a culture in which victims are encouraged to report crimes rather than stigmatized. Sweden’s open and progressive crime reporting practices, when viewed comparatively, allow fake news purveyors to speculate on a suspected criminal’s ethnic background with impunity, as well as manufacture an inflated perception of criminality.

From the reader’s perspective, the fact that most “alt-right” outlets and fake news purveyors link to Swedish language news stories in order to validate their claims forces even the most critical reader to either know Swedish or rely on rough translations to discern the validity of the source. Knowing this, outlets can wrongly attribute or incorrectly paraphrase quotations from Swedish sources that advance their narrative without fear of retribution.

The intersection of fake news and the “alt-right” is a particularly troubling one. It is ever-shifting, beholden neither to facts nor ideology and, in the realm of the internet, almost totally unaccountable. What we do know is that its adherents are white men who are targeting everyone else, that it’s not going away, and that we must remain vigilant. Sweden is the favorite target of the American “alt-right” as it expands to Europe, desperately looking for legitimacy, and armed with total lies.

*These quotations were taken from the now-deleted AltRight Radio podcast, “Eurocentric #2: Killing Captain Sweden.”

 

Trump Blames Clinton For Execution Of Iranian Scientist After The Right-Wing Lie Was Debunked

Trump Blames Clinton For Execution Of Iranian Scientist After The Right-Wing Lie Was Debunked

Published with permission from Media Matters of America

Echoing a myth peddled by right-wing media, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed that there was a link between the execution of Shahram Amiri, a nuclear scientist in Iran, and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, which contained a couple emails that appear to discuss Amiri’s case. But there is no evidence either that Clinton’s server was hacked, which would have been necessary for Iran to see the emails, or that the email discussion of Amiri had any connection to his eventual death.

Iran Executed A Nuclear Scientist For Treason, Accusing Him Of Giving Information To The U.S.

BBC: “Iranian Nuclear Scientist Shahram Amiri Executed For Treason.” The BBC reported that the Iranian government executed Shahram Amiri, an Iranian nuclear scientist, for providing “‘vital information to the enemy,’” according to a judiciary spokesperson. Amiri had “defected of his own accord,” U.S. officials said, and initially returned to a “hero’s welcome” in Iran, the BBC reported, but he was later “arrested and tried for treason. From the August 7 report:

An Iranian scientist who provided the US with information about the country’s nuclear programme has been hanged for treason, the government has confirmed.

Shahram Amiri was executed for giving “vital information to the enemy”, a judiciary spokesman said.

Amiri disappeared in Saudi Arabia in 2009 and resurfaced a year later in the US, where he claimed to have been abducted and interrogated by the CIA.

[…]

After reappearing in the US in 2010, he said he had been kidnapped and put under “intense psychological pressure to reveal sensitive information”.

However US officials at the time said Amiri had defected of his own accord and provided “useful information”.

He initially returned to Tehran to a hero’s welcome, but was later arrested and tried for treason. [BBC.com, 8/7/16]

Sen. Tom Cotton Later Said Clinton Had Emails About The Executed Iranian

Sen. Tom Cotton: “Reckless” And “Careless” Clinton Had Emails About The Executed Iranian On Her Private Email Server. The Hill reported that Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) attempted to portray Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as “reckless” on CBS’s Face the Nation by citing emails on her private server “that included references to the Iranian nuclear scientist who was executed there for treason.” From the August 7 report:

“I’m not going to comment on what he may or may not have done for the United States government, but in the emails that were on Hillary Clinton’s private server, there were conversations among her senior advisers about this gentleman,” Cotton said on CBS’s “Face The Nation.”

“That goes to show just how reckless and careless her decision was to put that kind of highly classified information on a private server and I think her judgment is not suited to keep this country safe.” [The Hill, 8/7/16]

Right-Wing Media Run With The Claim To Imply Clinton’s Emails Led To Scientist’s Execution

Fox & Friends Co-Host Ainsley Earhardt: “Many People Are Wondering” If “He Die[d] Because Someone Hacked Into Her Emails.” On Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Ainsley Earhardt explained that “the reason these stories” about Clinton’s private email server and Amiri’s execution “connect” is because of the possibility that “someone hacked into her emails and they found out that he was spying for the U.S. and then as a result he was killed.” From the August 9 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends:

STEVE DOOCY (CO-HOST): Meanwhile, our big story yesterday was the execution of that Iranian scientist by the name of Shahram Amiri. And yesterday at the Department of State, the report is — there he is right there;  he was executed on Wednesday. His name showed up in a couple of email on Hillary Clinton’s unsecured email server in her basement in Chappaqua, New York. And yesterday, Elizabeth Trudeau, who is the State Department spokesperson, was asked about: Is there possibly a connection between his death and her email? Here’s what she said.

[BEGIN VIDEO]

ELIZABETH TRUDEAU: We’re not going to comment on what may have led to this event, but as we spoke about with Matt, there was public reporting on this topic back in 2010. Former Secretary Clinton discussed this issue in public at that time. So this is not something that became public when the State Department released those emails.

[END VIDEO]

DOOCY: So they dodged the question.

PETE HEGSETH (CO-HOST): That’s right. There was public comment at the time but certainly no outing of him as a spy or an ally of the United States.

[…]

HEGSETH: What she said in 2010 is that he’s free to go, he’s free to come, and those decisions are his to make. So, basically saying if he’s with the Iranians, he can go back to Iran. Nothing about him being a spy. But in the emails you hear coded language to “our friend” and other things he had done to benefit the United States.

AINSLEY EARHARDT (CO-HOST): And the reason that these stories connect is many people are asking does this individual, did he die because someone hacked into her emails and they found out that he was spying for the U.S. and then as a result he was killed. We don’t know that. But many people are wondering that. Just like the families in Benghazi are wondering if their sons — if they were tracked and they were located in Benghazi in Libya because of Hillary Clinton’s negligence.

HEGSETH: At the very least it underscores her recklessness with that server. [Fox News,Fox & Friends, 8/9/16]

Fox News’ Sean Hannity: “Is [Clinton] Responsible … For What Happened Here?” On Fox News’ Hannity, host Sean Hannity asked retired United States Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, “Do you make that connection? Is [Clinton] responsible, by being being reckless and irresponsible and not protecting that server, for what happened here?” after explaining that it “would appear that [Amiri] was compromised and somehow was found out.” From the August 8 edition of Fox News’ Hannity:

SEAN HANNITY (HOST): I look at all this, and I look at what he said this weekend. This person had access to the country’s secret and classified information, had linked to — this is what Iran says, according to the AP, Iran confirmed that he had been hanged for treason and spying, and that they said this person had access to the country’s secret classified information, has “been linked to our hostile and number one enemy, America, the great Satan,” a spokesman for the Iranian judiciary said. He provided the enemy with vital and secret information about the country. So it would appear that this guy was working for us. It would appear that he was compromised and somehow was found out. Now, if Senator Cotton, pretty credible senator, says that he knows that in fact this information came from her server, do you make the connection? Is she responsible then, by being reckless and irresponsible and not protecting that server, for what happened here? [Fox News, Hannity, 8/8/16]

Wash. Examiner: “Hillary Clinton’s Private Emails May Have Played A Role In [ Amiri’s] Recent Fate.” The Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood wrote that State Department spokesperson Elizabeth Trudeau “dodged questions” when asked about the connection between Clinton’s email server and Amiri’s execution and speculated about whether a pair of her private emails “may have played a role in his recent fate.” From the Washington Examiner article:

A State Department spokeswoman dodged questions Monday about whether the discussion of Shahram Amiri, an Iranian scientist who was executed by the Iranian government for working with the U.S., in a pair of Hillary Clinton’s private emails may have played a role in his recent fate.

“We’re not going to comment on what may have led to this event,” said Elizabeth Trudeau, a State Department spokeswoman.

“I couldn’t speak to Iranian judicial procedures related to this specific case,” Trudeau said. “We’ve made our concerns known writ large around Iranian due process.”

She noted the State Department had been “very public about this case when [Amiri] chose to return to Iran,” pointing to a press conference Clinton gave in July 2010.

In those remarks, Clinton compared Amiri’s ability to leave the U.S. on “his own free will” with Iran’s decision “to hold three young Americans against their will.” She did not reference the scientist’s work with the U.S. government. [Washington Examiner, 8/8/16]

Breitbart: “Erik Prince: Hillary Clinton ‘Very Likely Caused’ Iranian Nuclear Scientist’s Death.” On Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Stephen K. Bannon, Bannon asked former Navy SEAL and former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince whether Clinton “should be considered complicit” in Amiri’s death, to which Prince replied that “Hillary’s emails, playing fast and loose with national security matters, very likely caused this guy to die.” From the August 8 interview:

Bannon asked if Hillary Clinton should be considered complicit in the execution of Iranian nuclear physicist Shahram Amiri, on charges of spying for the United States, who was discussed in some of the emails on Clinton’s unsecured private server.

“The physicist that came out, he defected, he was a treasure trove of information, but the CIA and the Clinton State Department botched it while he was in the States, left him pretty much unsupported,” Prince replied, calling it a major mistake to leave Amiri’s family in Iran.

[…]

“Once again, the administration screwed it up. He goes home; of course, he’s arrested. And then Hillary’s emails, which were in the open, certainly readable by foreign powers, were talking about Hillary’s so-called friend, who was a defection, and not an abduction, as the guy was claiming,” he added.

Prince said that if the American people want to break through what Bannon described as “the media Praetorian Guard” around Clinton and Obama, to get some real coverage of the Amiri story, they should understand that “Hillary’s emails, playing fast and loose with national security matters, very likely caused this guy to die.”

“This administration, particularly Hillary Clinton, plays fast and loose with classified information, and doesn’t really care about the people who help America, and they suffer, and our national security will suffer for it yet again in the long term,” Prince concluded. [Breitbart News, 8/8/16]

Gateway Pundit: “Sen. Tom Cotton: Clinton’s Unprotected Emails Got Iranian Nuclear Scientist Executed.” Jumping off of Cotton’s comments, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft wrote that Iran “found out [Amiri] was working for the US thanks to Hillary Clinton’s emails. Nice work, Hillary.” From the August 7 article:

Iran hanged nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri.

They found out he was working for the US thanks to Hillary Clinton’s emails.

Nice work, Hillary.

[…]

Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) told Face the Nation on Sunday that Hillary got this Iranian nuclear scientist killed. [The Gateway Pundit, 8/7/16]

Drudge Report: CLINTON EMAIL LED TO EXECUTION IN IRAN?

[Twitter, 8/7/16]

Trump Attempts To Link Clinton’s Email Server To Scientists Execution

Trump: “Many People Are Saying That The Iranians Killed The Scientist Who Helped The U.S. Because Of Hillary Clinton’s Hacked Emails.”

[Twitter, 8/8/16]

There Is No Evidence That Links Clinton To The Scientist’s Execution

Wash. Post: “Clinton’s Email Server Did Not Lead To An Iranian Scientist’s Death.” The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin wrote that “despite what you may read on Donald Trump’s twitter feed,” Amiri’s execution was “not caused by Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server.” He explained that there’s both “no reasonable connection between the discussion of Amiri’s case on email by Clinton’s staff to Amiri’s eventual execution” and “no evidence her server was hacked.” From the August 8 article:

Despite what you might read on Donald Trump’s twitter feed, the Iranian execution of a nuclear scientist who defected to the United States and then changed his mind was not caused by Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. The scientist outed himself; it wasn’t Clinton’s fault.

[…]

[T]here’s no reasonable connection between the discussion of Amiri’s case on email by Clinton’s staff to Amiri’s eventual execution. There’s no evidence her server was hacked. The Iranians knew all about Amiri well before the emails were released publicly. His kidnapping story never held water and his fate was sealed long before his sentence was carried out. [TheWashington Post, 8/8/16]

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during a campaign event in Radford, Virginia February 29, 2016. REUTERS/Chris Keane