{"id":109891,"date":"2020-12-19T17:30:59","date_gmt":"2020-12-20T00:30:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=109891"},"modified":"2020-12-19T17:30:59","modified_gmt":"2020-12-20T00:30:59","slug":"fatal-food-for-thought","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/12\/19\/fatal-food-for-thought\/","title":{"rendered":"FATAL FOOD FOR THOUGHT"},"content":{"rendered":"

ALI SUKHANVER<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

It\nwas really a marvelous addition to my knowledge that sometimes the dead also\nattend conferences and participate in discussions; this horrible reality was revealed\nupon me when I was going through a report of the EU DisinfoLab. This Brussels-based\nNGO is an organization working to combat disinformation against the European\nUnion. It claims on its webpage that it is an independent non-profit organization\nand it focuses on tackling sophisticated disinformation campaigns targeting the\nEU, its member states and core institutions. The recently issued report is on\nthe Indian Chronicles. Commenting on the report, the Aljazeera said that it has\nunearthed a 15-year-old operation run by an Indian entity that used hundreds of\nfake media outlets and the identity of a dead professor to target Pakistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nEU DisinfoLab said in its investigation-report, Over the last months, we took\na deeper dive, with a specific focus on the Commission to Study the\nOrganization of Peace (CSOP). We soon realized that this US-based NGO \u2013\naccredited to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) \u2013 had\nbecome inactive in the late 1970s before being resurrected in 2005. Shockingly,\nwe discovered that the organization had not only been revived, its former\nChairman and grandfather of international law in the US\u201d, Louis B. Sohn who\npassed away in 2006, seemingly attended a UN Human Rights Council meeting in\n2007 and participated in an event organized by Friends of Gilgit-Baltistan\u201d in\nWashington D.C. in 2011.\u201d The report pointed out that India has been engaged in\nsuch type of activities for the last fifteen years. For accomplishment of her\nheinous plans India has not only got direct control of more than 10 NGOs\naccredited to the UN Human Rights Council but also established more than 750\nfake media outlets in 119 countries along with getting registration of more than\n550 website domain names. And the most criminal action performed is that of\nimpersonation of EU institutions and of resurrection of the dead people, media\nand NGOs. This still ongoing operation started in 2005 and since then is being led\nby the Srivastava Group and amplified by an Indian news agency Asian News\nInternational commonly known as the ANI; says the report. From the day one, the\nmain targets of this operation are Pakistan and China though other nations\nhaving conflicting relations with India have also not been spared. The sole\npurpose has ever been to promote anti-Pakistan and anti-Chinese feelings with\nthe help of disinformation tools and ultimately to get more support from\ninternational institutions such as the UN and the EU.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\ngovernment of India has ever been a staunch follower of the fake-news\ntradition. On 10th<\/sup> March 2020, the Aljazeera said commenting on\nincreasing number of Covid-19 cases, India\u2018s battle against the corona-virus\nhas many obstacles \u2013 large crowds, a stretched health system and inadequate\ninfrastructure but beyond these, familiar foes are rearing their heads:\nmisinformation and fake news. Through its vast social media networks, a wave of\ninaccuracy is spreading on corona-virus. From offering unverified home remedies\nto tackle the virus, to floating fake advisories asking people to avoid foods\nsuch as ice cream and chicken and sharing conspiracy theories, Indians\u2019 phones\nare being flooded with misinformation.\u201d The situation became so pathetic that\nMr.Modi had to make an appeal to the citizens, asking them to not heed to \u2018rumours\u2019\nsurrounding COVID-19. But before the citizens could listen to the appeal of Mr.\nModi the country\u2019s stock exchange had plunged to its lowest level since 2010;\ncertainly as the result of fear of the disease; the fear born out of fake news and\nrumors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nsame fake-news tradition was followed by the Indian \u2018sarkar\u2019 on 29th<\/sup>\nSeptember 2019 when it claimed that it had made surgical strikes deep into\nPakistan Administered area of Azad Kashmir. The BBC sent its reporters to visit\nthe area where all this \u2018so-called\u2019 surgical strikes were claimed to have taken\nplace. The reporters said in their report, Despite the use of the term\n\u2018surgical strikes\u2019 the Indians definitely did not airdrop commandos to hit\n\u2018launching pads of militants\u2019 inside Pakistani-held territory, or conduct\nground assaults deep into the Pakistan-administered side. A similar advance by the Indians in the\nDudhnial area of Neelum valley further north was beaten back by the Pakistanis. Indian troops could not have hit a target\nand returned alive as the climb required was too steep.\u201d The reporters said that they could not get\nany confirmation of the Indian media reports that Lashkar-e-Taiba camps in the\nKhairati Bagh village of Leepa valley and the western end of Dudhnial village\nin Neelum valley had been hit on 29 September. But unfortunately, during all\nthose days, the Indian media and Mr. Modi both had been drumming louder and\nlouder the song of India\u2019s successful surgical strikes on Pakistan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The\nDisinfoLab says India has been spreading fake-news with the help of different\nbogus media outlets for the last fifteen years but the fact of the matter is\nthat India is playing this childish game for the last 73 years. Moreover its\ntargets are not only Pakistan, China or EU; almost all it neighboring countries\nincluding Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar are its targets. So a\nfriendly suggestion for the EU is that it must not feel lonely. However, after\nthe report of the EU DisinfoLab, the world would no doubt look towards the\ncountries which have since long been dealing, treating, supporting, honoring\nand favoring India on the basis of her claim of being the Largest Democracy. Certainly,\nthe report of the EU DisinfoLab gives us a lot of food for thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ALI SUKHANVER It was really a marvelous addition to my knowledge that sometimes the dead also attend conferences and participate in discussions; this horrible reality was revealed upon me when I was going through a report of the EU DisinfoLab. This Brussels-based NGO is an organization working to combat disinformation against the European Union. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ali-sukhanver"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109891"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109891\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}