Foreign Powers Weaponize Divisions Among The West’s Minorities

It first appeared to observers that the recent internal strife in the West was merely incidental to the Hamas attacks on Israel, but it’s now vividly clear that a second front inside Western democracies was part of a larger plan – a plan beyond the scope of Hamas or even Iran. At American college campuses Jewish students suddenly need bodyguards while attending Shabbat. Across Europe incessant street demonstrations turn violent, synagogues are threatened and an Islamist gunman shoots Swedish tourists in Belgium – among other ongoing incidents. On social media the West’s ethnic and religious minorities attack each other furiously, often goaded by bot-like anonymous provocateurs. It should come as no surprise that the frictions all too often arise from flash-points around the world where Russia has proxies and interests: Ukraine, the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East. The most salient interest is the overarching one: to destabilize and distract the West with internal divisions while Moscow prosecutes its imperial ambitions.

Currently, the friction in Western cities is centered on the Arab-Israeli conflict but it threatens to morph into Muslims vs the West for largely supporting the Israeli side. Frictions in the Balkans, the Mideast, and the Caucasus all have Islamic dimensions. The influence struggle over Ukraine vs Russia has divided the highest levels of American politics. This kind of thing is not new of course. During the Balkan wars of the 1990’s, Canada’s sizeable Serbian population tried to undermine the Canadian government’s pro-Bosnian stance. During WW2, the German-heritage US community successfully delayed America’s entry into the war. But these days, with the help of social media disinformation, instabilities of this kind can be provoked continuously and at any time in newly Western populations with long histories of enmity in their source regions.

Most recently, an Israeli counter-disinformation company, Cyabra, found that some %25 of social media accounts pumping info on the Gaza conflict were fake. They’d been pre-prepared and lain dormant, coming to life almost immediately after Hamas launched its attacks. Something like 162,000 fake accounts aimed for global consumption. The scale and stealth and co-ordination required – surely only Moscow has the expertise for that kind of operation.

It has been the custom of this column to utter unspoken concerns in the geo-strategic area, unspoken either because hitherto obscure regions have become important like the ‘Stans or because nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room. In this case it’s about how we in the West have, over many years, supinely allowed a critical exposed flank to develop for Moscow to suddenly exploit. Because the most dramatic impact has been the unrest in Western cities among minority populations.

We have only ourselves to blame for decades of paralysis over who migrates through our borders, in what amounts, and with what hostile views to our traditions – most especially with hostile views about other groups. The US, in particular, has functioned consciously as a kind of lifeboat for the persecuted of other lands and yet Americans have not been allowed to control the numbers or safeguard order on the lifeboat by filtering out those who would persecute others. We now face not handfuls of dangerous individuals but a rival superpower deploying subversive ‘political technology’ to mobilize hatreds in much larger numbers than before with deliberate geo-strategic planning. Having won the Cold War and the War on Terror, America and its allies are effectively being destabilized from a combined resurgence of both.

Quite rightly we do not judge any ethnic or religious minority as a whole because of bad individuals within it. But the equation changes when the behavior dynamics are group vs group. In these days of instant communication with the old country, emigrating to the West does not wholly westernize, and factional hatreds can persist. And stretch into the highest corridors of power. Immigrant blocs tend to develop political clout where they elect their own reps to legislatures (as indeed they should in democracies). In Germany, both Kurds and Turks have influence in government where their mutual antagonisms don’t get put aside. In Europe as a whole, recently emigrated Russians have constantly belabored other emigres on the street that they detect as Ukrainian. Source countries, these days, often actively encourage these divisions, such as when Erdogan polemicizes the seven million Turks in Germany to advance his brutish policies abroad. Russia, more than any other country, has a broad geo-strategic sweep in provoking cracks in these western societal fault-lines we have allowed to develop, not least because of its sophisticated information warfare capabilities.

Moscow has always resented the West’s ability to keep an even keel while allowing freedom of expression to flourish. The nightmare scenario of the West’s freedoms weaponized against itself is one dreamt up in the Kremlin, the social fabric tearing apart as the hostility between rival minorities spills onto the streets constantly. It’s an unequal contest for the West because autocratic regimes like Putin’s operate with impunity as they rigidly control their own information space and right to assemble, freeing them to interfere abroad. Provokatsiya and dezinformatsiya, a standard part of the Soviets’ subversive armory against rivals, came of age in the post-Cold War era as the West relaxed its defenses and re-embraced a fatal kind of naivete in the face of palpable threats. Easily exploited age-old antagonisms, amplified by social media, have migrated from source countries to open societies. The tragedy is that many of the individuals and groups who harbor such intolerance fled abroad to escape it in their home regions, above all to escape strife and find a zone of stability and peace. The West has differed from the rest in being able to offer such peaceful conditions. It is less and less able to do so.