Al-Qalam By Ebrahim Rasool (Former ambassador to the U.S)
Recently, I shared a platform with Prof. Sayed Muhammad Marandi, hosted by the Foreign Policy Community of Indonesia. Prof. Marandi is a compelling voice for Iran as it remains under attack from the United States and Israel. While indeed bombs and missiles, fighter planes and bombers, aircraft carriers and frigates, are all the conductors of physical and human destruction, the age we are in – the era of deception – means that war and conflict are pre-emptively conducted through Disinformation, Mass Manipulation, and the Distortion of Truth.
Our era, I argued, has a strategy to distort reality as a prelude and accompaniment to war and conflict: lying, distorting, and manipulating are intentional as truth is subverted, facts distorted, and people manipulated through the dehumanisation of the ‘other’ to be attacked and towards whom fears are engendered. Such means of narrative war are meant to bypass both human sympathy and logic, and to blind people to the obvious truths about who are the victims and aggressors – most often through inverting the two.
This is most obvious, I demonstrated, in the 2 most prominent conflicts: firstly, in presenting the start of history in the occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel as October 7, 2023, and not earlier, so as to find a moment of both post-facto justification for a history of oppression, as well as a priori consent to finish the job of eliminating Palestine and its peoples. Secondly, the extravagant lies in prosecuting the war on Iran – from nuclear weapons to regime change, from obliteration of such weapons to the 40 imminent defeats of Iran – are so palpably deceptive, but illustrate that we need to look for the armies and weapons of war beyond the armed personnel and the exploding weaponry.
The era of deception has an army of influencers ranging from opinion-makers who peddle fears, warnings and scenarios about imminent danger and the virtues of immediate war against the source of fear, to intermediaries in news channels, whose principles of objectivity mean finding necessarily the midpoint between the obvious truth and the blatant lie, often ending up with false reasons with real war narratives that sell news while appeasing the liars.
The era of deception also has an arsenal of weapons deployed: the guilt-trip (we owe Israel a free pass because we allowed the European holocaust); the gas-lighting (don’t believe your eyes about Israel’s genocide); playing the victim (the aggressors – USA and Israel – are actually the victims of Iran and Hamas, despite the sheer disproportionately in fire-power and deaths); projection (Iran has nuclear ambitions while Israel maintains silence on its nuclear stockpile); and then the famous double-down (either by flooding the zone with lies or repeating the lie often enough to make people immune to their own sensibility).
These armies and arsenals become especially effective as journalism declines (mostly by suicide) and the digital era spawns the good and the bad: citizen journalists communicating a genocide from their devices; while deepfakes employ generative AI to create an alternative ’truth’ through fake content, face-swapping and voice cloning. The outcome of such campaigns of Disinformation and Mass Manipulation is that institutional legitimacy declines and social polarisation intensifies, and any middle ground is eroded. For the time being, it will be a battle of numbers – whose ‘truth’ will be believed by more people.
The tide that gave us Trump, Netanyahu and Orban; that threatened with Le Pen, AFD in Germany and Wilders in the Netherlands; and that produced local populists across the world – that tide ebbs and flows. But we do have some hope that the era of deception is capable of being pierced. In the USA, Pew tells us that 60% of Americans have a negative view of Israel and Gallup shows far greater sympathy for the Palestinians. The University of Maryland’s Institute for Global Affairs shows that over 60% of Americans disapprove of the war on Iran, while even Fox News reports that 71% believe the war to be without a plan or strategy.
These signs should encourage us to contest the space, utilize the technology, and remain tenaciously committed to truth.
*Ebrahim Rasool is the former ambassador to the US and former Premier of the Western Cape.
