Bombing Iran and the orchestrated denigration of Islam

It's worth watching where the propaganda demonising Muslims lies.

Rebecca Weisser’s Twitter (sic) feed is filled with junk. Several recent posts include terf attacks on support for trans people as “mutilation”, and retweeting a debunked chart showing trans people as the dominant demographic of mass shooters.

There are regular retweets of covid disinformation (a campaign that emerged out of the Atlas Network/Charles Koch space).

This is not particularly surprising, since much of Weisser’s career connects the Australian Atlas Network partner junktank bodies with the “conservative media” that spreads their messaging. Her bio from the Atlas-linked Budapest junktank the Danube Institute illustrates the model.

Weisser’s feed also continues her longterm activity promoting fear of Islam. Whether or not Weisser considers herself loosely connected to the Islamophobia network of the Global North, she regularly repeats its talking points.

In this column, Weisser describes one Budapest event hosted in December 2015 by Viktor Orbán’s unofficial offshoot of the Atlas Network’s partners. The event was replicated at the Melbourne Club on the 14th September the following year with several of the same speakers from the UK and Hungary. Weisser and husband were not named on the guest list, but John O’Sullivan was.

Weisser explains how she and her husband came to be part of John O’Sullivan’s activity in Hungary. O’Sullivan began with the “thought collective” of neoliberalism, the Mont Pelerin Society, in 1971 and has decades-long connections to its junktanks and the media outlets that platform their talking points.

O’Sullivan began his fear mongering about Muslim impacts on population and culture in 2001 if not earlier:

From Voicing Diasporas.

This is the way Weisser characterises the then head of ASIO and Muslims in Australia:

Weisser also notes that Douglas Murray was at the Budapest event. He did not follow the other speakers to the iteration at the Melbourne Club but is now an advisory board fellow to several high profile Australians at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship and is funnelled to Australian audiences by John Anderson AO. (1) Nafeez Ahmed has written extensively on Murray’s transatlantic activity in the space.

Murray has become noisier about deportations in recent years.

More recently, Weisser wrote this column: “Visa versa: How Burke punishes Israel and indulges Islamism.” Australians across much of the political spectrum would read this as another of the inversions of reality common across the Right’s talking points.

With regard to Weisser’s attitude to Iran, she appeared before a senate hearing on Iran sanctions in 2016:

Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative places the Foundation for Defence of Democracy as a node in the supranational networked activity promoting the “Global Muslim Brotherhood Conspiracy Theory”. It is seen by Iran as an “Anti-Iran advocacy group”.

The Australian’s opinion pages have regularly platformed another node in the Islamophobia industry with a search for Daniel Pipes bringing up 153 hits from 2001. His most recent contribution was an Iran “all or nothing” opinion on the 2 March: “So, bravo to Trump for finally responding to two generations of warfare against modernity and humanity. May he now not leave the battlefield and declare victory until the job is complete.”

These are several of Weisser’s posts on Twitter in recent weeks, including promoting fake images massively exaggerating the size of Iran protests in Melbourne. (Note that support for Iranian protesters is part of the NatCon coalition against Islam.)

The manufactured contrast between “good” resistance to Iran’s Islamic regime and the linking of Muslims to antisocial activity pervades Weisser’s feed.

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