You may have already heard the story of Canadian journalist and GamerGate opponent Veerender Jubbal, misidentified in the media as one of the Paris terrorists after trolls took a bathroom selfie of his, photoshopped to make it look as though he was wearing a suicide bomber vest and holding a Koran, and spread it around labeled as a photo posted by one of the Paris suicide bombers shortly before Friday’s deadly attacks.
The photoshopped pic of Jubbal, a Sikh, was reported as authentic by major media outlets in Italy and Spain; one newspaper put Jubbal’s face on its cover as one of the Paris terrorists.
While the photo has been debunked now by more media outlets than originally reported it as real, this is the kind of smear that never really goes away; Jubbal will forever be tarnished by his imaginary connection to a terrible act of mass murder.
GamerGaters at first denied they had anything to do with the smear job — the standard GG response whenever one of their own does something utterly appalling — but Vice has now conclusively proven that the people responsible for creating and spreading around the photoshopped selfie were longtime GamerGaters.
Initially, even as GamerGaters were denying any connection to the photoshopped pic, more than a few of them were saying that Jubbal deserved the smear because of his criticisms of the alleged “ethics” movement; others, as Vice notes, concocted and spread fake Tweets allegedly from Jubbal to cement the false notion that he was a terrorist.
The GamerGate panderers over at Breitbart added fuel to the fire with a sneering “report” on the smear that was clearly designed to embarrass Jubbal further. “[A] large majority of the internet has found the situation hilarious,” regular BreitbartTech contributor Charlie Nash wrote,
especially due to the irony of Jubbal’s previous comments that have painted entire innocent communities as terrorists and hate-mongers.
In other words, he was asking for it. And it gets worse:
Luckily for Jubbal, there are many women that love serial killers and the foulest dregs of society serving life sentences, so an online reputation as a suicide bomber should be more than enough to earn him the female company that so far has eluded him.
The whole shameful affair tells us a lot about what GamerGate has become more than a year into its sordid existence.
Let’s start off by looking at what Vice uncovered.
First, the doctored photo of Jubbal-as-terrorist was whipped up by someone called @turd_wartsniff back in August. This lovely fellow, Vice writer Rich Stanton reveals,
is also responsible for a series of images, Photoshopped and otherwise, attacking Gamergate opponents. Among this individual’s favourite targets are Arthur Chu, Anita Sarkeesian and Zoë Quinn – all of whom have spoken out against Gamergate harassment. The account also posted images containing the Gamergate logo, a purple and green “GG” badge, and the Gamergate cartoon character Vivian James.
After the Paris attacks, a colleague of the photoshopper who goes by the name of blacktric reposted it, claiming that Jubbal was one of the terrorists. As Stanton notes,
Gamergate members have insisted that blacktric has no association with the group, but that is contradicted by his posting on the GG subreddit KIA*, jolly back-and-forths with Gamergate’s “based lawyer” Mike Cernovich, and his history of commenting on stories about the group. Astonishingly, amongst the evidence offered by Gamergate that blacktric has no association with them is a tweet where he refers to GG as “us”.
Short of a stamp from a Notary Public confirming the smear job as an official GamerGate production, this is about as conclusive as it gets.
After Vice posted its story, one of the mods on Reddit’s KotokuInAction subreddit, one of GamerGate’s main online hubs, deleted blacktric’s KIA comment in what seems to have been a crude attempt at a cover-up.
The mod later explained that he deleted the comment “to fuck with the [Vice] author ‘smoking gun’, meh.”
Apparently destroying evidence in an attempt to exonerate the guilty is … ethics?
Vice’s Stanton suggests that maybe, just maybe, GamerGate’s
linking an innocent man with one of the most despicable terror attacks on European soil, within hours of it happening, will be what brings Gamergate to an end.
I’m not quite so hopeful. While the smearing of Jubbal is, admittedly, a new low for GamerGate, the phony “ethics” movement has been morally and ethically bankrupt from the start.
But it will likely drag on as a sort of roving harassment squad for some time, bolstered by its enablers at Breitbart, on YouTube, and within the American Enterprise Institute, even as more and more GamerGaters give up even the pretense of giving a shit about media ethics or even basic human decency.
In other words, expect more of this crap. And more denials.
EDIT: Added a quote from the KIA mod, which I found linked to on GamerGhazi.
Gotta love how ‘Gaters are all about solidarity and how they are this uprising of people with one voice….until one of their own does something too stupid and/or evil for most people to ignore and they get called out on it. THEN the purity tests begin and the sap is now persona non grata.
You’d think that anybody who is part of a movement that will turn so fast and attempt to purge them out of the rolls (while more than likely having encouraged them to do said stupid/evil thing) would think twice about it. Then again, I suppose it jsut never dawns on any of them that they could be the next pariah until it’s too late.
@ fnoicby “What still has me flabbergasted is that none of these media outlets had red flags go off when seeing a man in a Sikh turban holding the Koran???”
Still stranger, it seems nobody was surprised that ornate Korans have inbuilt cameras.
(Oh, and the power outlets you can see are not European-style, but that’s a much more nerdy point).
As for attempts at justifying the thing that they definitely did not do, and have tried to cover up doing, the argument that – identifying someone as the most despicable kind of person there is could be doing them a favour because a lot of girls really like the kind of people everybody hates – takes the biscuit, the biscuit store and the entire biscuit factory.
(Oh, and if there were any kudos in being a suicide bomber, wouldn’t not being dead kind of undermine it? Or am I logicking too much?)
But could it be that this is some of what is behind the GamerGaters’ behaviour: the belief that girls like the most despicable kind of person in the world, so they’d better make sure they make themselves the most despicable people in the world.
Also good on Vice. They have lots you can criticize them for and they have a lot of bigoted and GG type readers but they consistently defy them, they always seem to write what they want regardless of any possible backlash.
John Scalzi had a rather good post about the Paris attacks, including his take on this “Muslims need to publically condemn ISIS but I don’t need to condemnt he KKK” schtik. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2015/11/14/paris/
Who were the media outlets that reported the slipshod photoshop as authentic in the first place? I actually want to look them up out of curiosity. Clearly they don’t believe in fact checking. Also, there are some big giveaways that this is fake. First hint….Koran’s don’t make great Selfie cameras; how did they think he took a selfie photo without a camera device? Second big hint…Sikh, not Muslim; not all brown people are Muslim, racist dipshits.
Also, this won’t kill GamerGate. GamerGate is standing against a made-up injustice and that’s not even enough to kill it. At this point I’m pretty sure the only thing that will kill GamerGate is time. Unfortunately, it looks like the most fervent members of GamerGate have nothing but time to waste….soooo, we may be here for a while.
@kazei5 @Johanna Roberts
Shortly after this broke, ‘Gators started telling everyone that he’s a racist who hates women and everyone who isn’t Sikh.
When pressed for proof, all that was presented was a link to his twitter feed, saying “go read all of this because he says bad things in it.”
They really have no sense of decency, and even when caught red-handed attempt to smear innocent people.
By the way, the 42 year old teacher who was critically injured in the Trollhättan attack has been awake this week for the first time since the attack almost a month ago. He has been able to communicate with his wife, and he can move his arm slightly.
“especially due to the irony of Jubbal’s previous comments that have painted entire innocent communities as terrorists and hate-mongers.”
Would love to know what this is really based on. like did dude say something mean (read:true) about actual U.S. racist terrorists or something?
@andrew692andrew
I think its important to study each religion separately and determine the values of each separately. They do not all share the same exact values. Jainism for example has non-violence as its principle tenant, many would say to an extreme. Some Jains wear a cloth over their mouths and noses to observe the non-violence principle. So lets not kid ourselves that all religions are equally benign. At the same time, in today’s world, peace loving followers of religions that are not rooted in such a benign history have either ignored or re-interpreted the more violent aspects of their texts. That’s totally legit as religion is created by humans and we are free to ignore or interpret any religious text as we see fit. Our religions can, and do, evolve right along with us.
There is also no harm in mixing and matching, which is what I always tell followers of more problematic religions to do. Don’t follow the old violent texts to the letter. Erase those parts and replace them peaceful texts from other religions, or just create your own.
News sites these days will resort to pulling stuff off of blogs and social media. The Daily Mail is especially prone to this. I’ll never forget the day I looked at one of their “news” “stories” and saw photos from my Tumblr.
Why is this not legally defamation of character? I should think there would be large punitives in this.
“Second big hint…Sikh, not Muslim; not all brown people are Muslim, racist dipshits.”
And not all Sikhs or Muslims are brown. And Sikhi was practically created to fight the (not all) Muslims in India. But the problem with the “Don’t Freak, I’m a Sikh” campaign is that it can be misconstrued to mean, “Don’t target me, target the Muslim over there”. What we need now is dialogue about which, if any, religions should be look to as harbingers of peace in this day and age. Can we chuck the iffy parts of the more aggressive ones and replace them with the peaceful parts of the more chillaxed ones? I say we can. We can also invent entirely new religions.
I’m surprised they didn’t question the obvious dildo that was put in the background.
How on Earth could European media believe that photo was real and “taken in Paris shortly before the attacks” in the first place? The huge electrical outlet that’s almost more conspicuous than the subject’s face gives it away as taken in the Americas. European electrical outlets have round holes instead of vertical slots, and that’s something you see everywhere, all the time.
@Wetherby, SFHC, etc: I expect it from Joe Schmo, but not major media publications. They really should know better.
@Virtually @Andrew
What. The. Actual. Fuck. How the fuck do you ask a French person who had to deal with the shock, grief and subsequent double problem of dealing with the aftermath of the attack and racist reactions – which he just fucking told you, as well as “Let’s be clear, the Muslim community belongs to France”, that question? “Well, how do you explain then that all Muslims in France didn’t know about these guys? You sure know each other, right”? Also, I’m German, and nobody has gotten the ludicrous idea in their heads to ask me why I didn’t stop the NSU from murdering ten people over the course of ten years and living large on bank robberies with the (at least indirect) support of German intelligence services without anybody in the “German community” ratting them out.
@kale
I can already see people defending journalists with “well, you know, because of the Internet, you have to publish fast, you can’t check anything, the editorial staff has been cut down, blablabla”, but the thing is: if you don’t have enough general knowledge about the world to look at a picture of a brown person implicated by some asshole on twitter and think “well, not all brown people are muslims, and the turban isn’t really a muslim headdress, and also, this doesn’t look like a turban, maybe I’ll check first” (I mean, far be it from me to expect journalists to recognize one of the not-too-small religions out there), then you sure as hell don’t belong in that editorial room.
He called #GamerGate a hate group in a couple of tweets. Seriously. That’s it.
” I’m German, and nobody has gotten the ludicrous idea in their heads to ask me why I didn’t stop the NSU from murdering ten people over the course of ten years and living large on bank robberies with the (at least indirect) support of German intelligence services without anybody in the “German community” ratting them out.”
But there is still a correlation in many peoples minds of German = Nazi sympathizer, to this very day.
Its not morally right, logical or factually accurate, but there it is.
I think something positive can come out of all of this, and that is, a serious sit-down review of global cultures and religions and the tweaking of the same. Or maybe I’m just being too optimistic.
And of course GG are all over the comments in the Vice article. “It wasn’t us! It wasn’t!”
If GG wasn’t an ongoing harassment campaign there would be a lot more insomniacs in the world because GGers would be laying awake at night wondering why so many people are against ethics in gaming journalism…
@SFHC I am kicking myself right now. Of course, so obvious.
No true GamerGater.
“But there is still a correlation in many peoples minds of German = Nazi sympathizer, to this very day.”
Obviously not right or smart to think that but it makes a bit more sense to me that people do. you go to Germany and you will meet Holocaust deniers /minimizers, you’ll meet bigots ie bars were certain races aren’t allowed, you visit a camp in the middle of a village with all sorts of remnants of the war and it’s hard not to start being really distrustful of Germans as a whole because it seems like a whole culture facilitated Nazism even when you know how many Germans died resisting it and how scared they were. but the ISIS situation seems so much different to me, esp the Paris attack, where it really was just a handful of men, you know?
@Virtually
I have to say, as a German and an antifascist who has researched and written about the far right in Germany: that stereotype is not too far from the truth. There is a German sociologist who over ten years (2002-2011) did a long term study on the attitudes of ordinary Germans, and each year he published the newest findings – they had an annual questionnaire they send out. It regularly showed that around 50% of Germans would:
– like a “strong leader” instead of parliamentary democracy
– thought that “many Jews” took advantage of the past and let Germans pay for it
– thought that there were “too many foreigners” in Germany and that they were a burden on the social safety net (while other studies have consistently shown that immigrants give more in taxes to the state than they take, as a group, from it)
– 30% thought that the “many Muslims” in the country made them feel like strangers in their own home.
These attitudes weren’t dependent on political affiliation. Particularly Antisemitism is still pervasive in Germany
A more recent study (2014) showed a slight decline in these attitudes, but that was before Pegida and the anti-American, pro-Russion conspiracy theorists’ manifestations.
The only problem I have with the stereotype is that it’s not just Germans who are this authoritarian and racist.
@Bernardo
Actually there is no excuse whatsoever because it is basic (real, not GG style lol) Journalism ethics that if you can’t confirm a story you don’t print it. We don’t print rumors and guesses.
A *real* journalist would have gone to the police department, if the man was a suspect already the PD could tell them, OR if the PD doesn’t know about the guy they should be able to investigate this as a tip.
They also should have contacted the original poster, even tried to contact the “suspect” himself.
It’s really simple procedural stuff they should have learned in school or in training and we are talking about at least two people -reporter and editor – who fucked up.
To me that is very deliberate.
I am a very small time reporter and I know better, as do so many non-Journos here, so no excuse.
*by deliberate to be clear I mean I think they knew damn well they were risking hurting an innocent man or at least knew they were skipping all their due diligence