#influence campaign

by Melanie Phillips

More and more information is surfacing to reveal that the Islamic holy war against the West isn’t just being waged on the battleground of the Middle East.

Even more significantly, it’s also being waged through a trillion-dollar influence campaign to colonize and subvert the Western mind, organized by extremists from the Islamic world.

These have tunneled into the West through a vast civic infrastructure whose real purpose and sources of funding have been as well concealed, and in their own way are just as deadly as the subterranean genocide factories in Gaza and Lebanon.

To those with eyes to see, it was obvious from the start that the hate marches springing into existence after Oct. 7, 2023—even while the Hamas-led atrocities were still going on—weren’t spontaneous protests against Israel.

They were instead a globally coordinated campaign to turn gullible Westerners into the unwitting army of Islamic jihad through support for the Palestinian cause.

An important new report by NGO Monitor shows that this post-Oct. 7 protest infrastructure in Britain has used the signature liberal causes of humanitarianism and human rights to launder the Islamic jihad against the West.

The report found that, through a series of concentric circles, just six groups have been involved in more than 80% of the major protests.

In the innermost circle sit the states hostile to the West: Iran, China, Russia and Qatar; terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Al-Qaeda; and extremist religious-political movements like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Lapping around them are charities, campaign groups, protest movements and advocacy organizations that provide legitimacy for these hostile forces, amplify their propaganda and transmit extremism to society.

Out of 40 organizations mapped in the report, at least 11 have links to extremist groups or officials who have cooperated with Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Charges accusing a woman of trying to build bridges between the Russian government and American political leaders via the National Rifle Association have delivered a breakthrough in understanding one aspect of the attack on the 2016 election: "infiltration."

After months of questions and speculation as to how or whether the NRA connection might have worked, prosecutors proffered an answer on Monday: The Russian woman, Maria Butina, was the intermediary between Russian government officials and Americans, both in the NRA and elsewhere in politics, according to court documents.

The government says she was acting as a foreign agent without registering. Her attorney called the charges overblown, as NPR's Carrie Johnson reported.

A grand jury in Washington D.C. returned an indictment against Butina on Tuesday afternoon.

Butina allegedly serves or served as the deputy to someone identified in court papers only as a "Russian official," who is probably Alexander Torshin, a now-sanctioned Kremlin official who cultivated relationships with American political leaders and the NRA over several years.

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According to Simpson, Russia's active measures sought to target not only the NRA but also "various conservative organizations, religious and otherwise."

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Butina has been in the United States on a student visa since August 2016, but her role in the story traces back to at least the preceding March. That was when, according to court documents, she relied on relationships with at least one key American connected to the NRA to begin building the foundation for what prosecutors allege was her illegal work as a foreign agent.

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The Trump campaign aides who ultimately received this pitch did not agree to a formal meeting, but Torshin did meet the candidate's son Donald Trump Jr. briefly at an NRA convention in 2016.

Later in the year, Butina and Torshin discussed whether she should take a page from his playbook and serve as an "election observer" on behalf of Russia inside the United States.

Torshin had been an "election observer" in Tennessee in 2012 as part of a riposte by the Russian government to criticisms about its elections by the United States. He credited the political relationships he had formed with the NRA in gaining entrée to American election sites, as NPR's Tim Mak reported.

But the changed circumstances four years later prompted Torshin and Butina to conclude she should continue to lie low: "Only incognito!" she wrote, according to court documents. "Right now everything has to be quiet and careful."

July 17, 20185:00 AM ET Heard on All Things Considered PHILIP EWING

Aug. 9, 2024, 8:26 AM MST

By Brandy Zadrozny

Iran is stepping up its influence campaign aimed at the U.S., researchers at Microsoft said in a new report, adding to the ongoing efforts by Russia and China to sway American public opinion before the presidential election.