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.
@Bernardo that study doesn’t sound too different from America, and America has blood on our hands too 🙁
@kale:
totally agreed, what I wrote is just what I often hear people say as an excuse, but I don’t accept that either. I’ve worked as a journalist, too, and I’ve actually lived through a change in our editorial room where the new executive editor didn’t care about ethics in the slightest, as long as he could report the newest scandal. People left in protest. But even working under this asshole, who wanted me to print all kinds of unconfirmed stuff, I checked my sources. Also, in this case, I think you wouldn’t even have to call the PD if you were a decent enough person to not automatically equate a brown dude with being Muslim, and also a terrorist.
@kale
agreed on the America thing, too. It’s certaily not just Germans who think that way.
The famous 1943 Berkeley “Authoritarian Personality” study done by, among others, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer was done in America to show that fascism was a possibility in most advanced capitalist countries.
Well yea, exactly, I’m just saying that there’s so much diligence you would have to do to print that story ethically as a cover that there’s no way they could be excused, you know? Obviously the FIRST check should have been enough before you even went to that far of a step, I mean the outlets, the Sikh turban, the bathroom selfie pose, it just makes no sense to be suckered into declaring this random photo of a dude a terrorist from the get-go. One thing I learned in my work was that a lot of the bigger more respected outlets didn’t do the level of diligence a small time rookie like me did. ie publishing a figure from a random member of a union whereas I took the time to find the head of the union and see the official records.
Re:Sikhs
I can’t help but think that the way pop culture portrays Sikhs (or rather, doesn’t) contributes to these misconceptions. I’ve only seen Sikh characters come up maybe twice in movies, and both times, it was so they could get tackled by the cops while yelling “I’m not a Muslim!”
Kale and Bernardo, interesting comments. Well then perhaps it can be concluded that there are in fact certain patterns that develop in cultures. Even more of a reason to analyse and deconstruct each culture and religion, take note of the patterns and commence with tweaking where needed.
Voot a lot of this is human – well actually, animal – nature; greed, hate, fear… Add some socialization and presto – assholes abound lol
Terrabeau, “I can’t help but think that the way pop culture portrays Sikhs (or rather, doesn’t) contributes to these misconceptions. I’ve only seen Sikh characters come up maybe twice in movies, and both times, it was so they could get tackled by the cops while yelling “I’m not a Muslim!”
In the UK Sikhs are more prevalant in the population and generally seen in a positive light. But its funny that in the US they get conflated with Muslims given Sikh-Muslim history.
Bernardo, this is for you
That’s an interesting point. This is super speculative, but from my experience (small town paper), the people you wrote about were relatively close to you or your editor or the owner, so if you didn’t check everything you wrote about them, you’d be in trouble. A paper the size and national coverage of the Daily Mail, however, is a power in and of itself – powerful people try to get on the good side of Murdoch’s papers, not the other way round. And the way that tabloids have used this to their advantage (Murdoch’s rags or, in Germany, the Bild-Zeitung). They straight up lie knowingly and have enough lawyer power and money to deal with the fallout. And other, more respected papers have adapted, at least partly.
@VooT
Thanks, that is ridiculously funny! I’m looking trough YT-clips of that show now.
Honestly, I think there are really two tweaks needed, no matter what religion: the idea that you can force others to follow your interpretation of your religion, either through law or violence (sort of the same thing, although different in practice and effects); and the idea that your interpretation of your religion is the only correct interpretation of your religion, and anyone who doesn’t follow your interpretation is not a true (insert religious identification here).
Maybe Anonymous should be targeting these creeps too? Perverting the course of justice in the investigation of a terrorist attack that caused them to target IS sounds like it puts this well within their self-proclaimed remit. That really would be hilarious.
“Honestly, I think there are really two tweaks needed, no matter what religion: the idea that you can force others to follow your interpretation of your religion, either through law or violence (sort of the same thing, although different in practice and effects)”
– Not all religions have that idea.
“; and the idea that your interpretation of your religion is the only correct interpretation of your religion, and anyone who doesn’t follow your interpretation is not a true (insert religious identification here).”
– Again, NARALT. In fact there are some that contain the exact opposite of the above ideas.
This is why each has to be analysed according to its own principles and then compared and contrasted against others with same, similar or opposite ideas.
Bernardo Soares | November 18, 2015 at 2:31 pm
@VooT
Thanks, that is ridiculously funny! I’m looking trough YT-clips of that show now.
_____
Yep! One of the highest rated comedy shows in the UK. A Christian comes knocking on a Hindu’s door with the “good news”…
“Smear an innocent man by shopping his face on a terrorist, and have the photo shown on the media, Ethics!!”
-Pukes black tar-
The sickening thing is that these assranchers are not going away anytime soon…
Watch the first few minutes of this one. The first clip covers cops, crime, victim blaming, racial stereotypes (“they’re always walking their dogs” LoL) and more.
I didn’t mean to imply that every religion deals with those problems in equal amounts.
However, I think no matter how prevalent those ideas are in any particular religion, the important thing is that we fight those particular ideas — not the religions themselves.
But how do you know what a religion’s principles are? Principles vary widely among both Christians and Muslims, for example. Are you going to be the final arbiter of what does and does not represent each religion?
Why can’t we just say that a) imposing your religion’s principles on others, through law or violence, is incompatible with a democratic society and coexistence, b) coexistence will be of increasing importance for humanity as the world grows smaller, and c) deciding yourself to be the arbiter of who can claim to be a follower of the religion you follow, is rather problematic?
Once you start down the paths of “Well, this text says this, therefore all followers of this religion must believe it …” and “my religion is objectively less harmful than yours” — nothing good comes of that. Would it not be far easier to convince theocrats that their religions are compatible with secular values, than to convert them whole cloth to another religion?
The problem of theocratic Christians and theocratic Muslims, be they terrorists or not, is not that they have a false interpretation of their religion, nor is it that they have the correct one. The problem is that they believe that it is okay to force others to live by the principles of their religion.
“But how do you know what a religion’s principles are?”
Read the texts for starters. An interesting study in extreme contrasts is the Torah, Old Testament and Quran read congruently with Jain texts. But even the former books can be salvaged by editing out violent edicts for a “kinder, gentler” version of the Abrahmic faiths. And like I said before, many religious people tend to either ignore or re-interpret the really bad stuff anyway. The problem is with those who don’t. And their numbers aren’t as miniscule as I once thought.
@bernardo – agreed. If you havent already look into the histort of Breitbart and the doc Outfoxed and you will see it in action.
Weren’t the terrorist in Paris European Nationalist or was I just having a bad reading week??
Nice try, but this is demonstrably false. Especially so because the Vice article which you use as conclusive evidence misquotes and falsely attributes stuff to GamerGate because of one guy who hates GamerGate, and has said so repeatedly, posted the photoshopped image.
Not to mention you can just check with the guy who actually made the original photoshop https://archive.is/conZT
But, let’s be honest here. Doesn’t matter who made the image or who they were affiliated with. The press fucked up. They fucked up HARD. They didn’t verify anything and spent days circulating an image of a Sikh man talking a selfie with a book, and none of them even noticed the giant dildo in the background.
Doesn’t matter how much you hate GamerGate or how badly you want GamerGate to be the bad guy. GamerGate doesn’t control the damned press and GamerGate didn’t publish all the “look at this terrorist!” articles because they saw a single tweet that claimed it was a picture of one of the terrorists.
VOoP: I’m pretty confident I’m speaking for the majority here when I say that nobody wants to hear your opinions about religion.
Hot Potato: That’s because Gamergate’s entire reason for existing is to cheer on assholes, then whine how unfair it is they they get the blame when those assholes cross the line.
Be more specific. Besides, hating a hate movement doesn’t necessarily imply bias. Just common human decency.
Looks like the first No True Scotsman and an obvious liar and fraud in hot potato. His link goes to an archive of a fraudulent account – one where a lowercase L has been substituted by an uppercase I. Typical Gamergate liar, found to be lying. 2/10