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.
@SYFOB
My thoughts exactly. Oh, Hotwheels moved to the Philippines? Guess your little club shouldn’t have been tampering with an INTERNATIONAL terrorist investigation. Now it shouldn’t matter WHERE they are. The FBI etc, just need to buckle down and do their damn jobs.
Looks like we not only have a No True Scotsman from hot potato but also evidence of a lying scumbag – the cited link is an archive page of a fraudulent Twitter account. The giveaway is the URL, where a lowercase L has been substituted by an uppercase I. Typical Gamergate mendacity, 2/10.
@Xanthë
LOL! Good catch. That’s so blatantly dishonest and stupid.
@HotPotato
You say this guy hates GamerGate and has said so repeatedly. But then you just link an archive where he says no one would believe him if he described his involvement. That’s not a denouncement.
Meanwhile that twitter account is deleted but a quick Google search finds it was plenty active with the usual GamerGate bullshit at least as recently as the end of September. For example, here is a link where he talks about excising the SJWs from the GamerGate movement he clearly considers himself a part of,
https://archive.is/2IxB7
So not only does his worldview match up 100% perfectly with the typical Gator but he seems to have his finger into every single GamerGate pie and repeatedly refers to himself as one.
Apologies for the double-post – after a reload failed to show it, I thought my first post was irretrievably lost, so retyped it from scratch. The fake account no longer exists but has been deleted (the person’s real account does, and is protected), and it is only on the “strength” of this faked-up archive page of a deleted account that Twitterers are currently claiming that the supposed owner of the fake account was responsible for photoshopping Veerender Jubbal.
That’s Gamergate, people. Ethics. In. Lying. And. Defamation. Of. Character.
@Faint Praise
FYI it might not be deleted, but renamed. Twitter let’s you do this. Came up in a convo about the fake doxers, particularly the one who apparently pulled their account but was not suspended. Rename, different URL.
Hi bvh, I did try to check that. Those tweets are not currently searchable as text. I suppose the account could have been private, rather than the account having been deleted or suspended. Anyway, point is… there is a real person in the world named Alex, and his proper account exists and is spelled the correct way with a lowercase L as the second letter. The fraudulent account uses an uppercase I for the purpose of concealment – and appears to have been used to attempt defamation of character. Pretty open and shut as far as Twitter goes.
It totally wasn’t gamergate, but even if it was, it’s all the media’s fault for believing us!
Your denials would’ve been a bit more credible if you hadn’t decided to add this little bit of blame deflection. If you really thought an anti-gamergater had done it, you wouldn’t have tried to shift blame.
How about this? Gamergate and irresponsible journalism are both terrible!
@Xanthë
Fair enough.
You can set your watch by how long it takes a Gator to show up to defend something done by Gators.
Oh, I didn’t explicitly say HP was a Gator. I just observed that they lied like a Gator, employed smoke and mirrors to deflect the blame like a Gator, and appeared to be pushing the familiar No True Scotsman trope… exactly like a Gator. 😉
Just when you think GG can’t sink any lower… One of them tries to frame Alex Lifschitz, Zoe Quinn’s boyfriend and fellow victim of GG harassment, for making the photoshop.
@Hyatt:
Link?
The French Rat – we’ve only been talking about this for the last fifteen comments! Alex Lifschitz is the person who has been impersonated. The link to the archived impersonation account “twitter.com/aiexlifschitz” (note the spelling) is up there in the first comment on this page, by the liar HotPotato.
Classy, Breitbart. Bunch a scumbags…
French rat, it’s the link from HotPotato.
ninjaed!
“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.”
– Jubbal needs to sue all of them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sat Sri Akal, Jubbal. Wahe Guru.
SIGH
This whole thing pissed me off. There’s so much damage done to Jubbal that just can’t be undone. Hopefully it fades, but it certainly won’t ever totally go away.
I wish I could give Jubbal a hug and some cookies.
Katz — yeah, just fucking yesterday I rather politely (for me) told Virtually to knock it off with “my religion is best religion” assuming their vast number of “Buddhism is the only solution” meant they’re a Buddhist. Today it’s Jainism.
Unsurprisingly, I was ignored.
But yeah, I remember the mass disaster of the religion thread ages ago, and I don’t want that to happen again.
Oh and best case for Jubbal at this point? Either he manages to sue GG for enough money to not worry about working (not gonna fucking happen since who exactly would he sue, and just how much could he actually get from a bunch of losers?), or, and this is my hope, when future employers google him and find this shitstorm, they’ll be “oh, you pissed off gators? Good for you, we need people like you!”
Also unlikely, but not outside the realm of possibility.
As most of the worst Gamergate offenders are sociopathic, they will be excited about the exposure they are receiving; not deterred. It just means the stakes have been raised which will excite them greatly, not deter them.
These guys are going to be here for a long time to come, but they will eventually be stripped back to what they really are and written off as just another cult, hell bent on winning at all costs, and destroying their enemy.
I’m sure they already have their own death squad members, who would/will kill in the name of what they believe in.
Also, unfortunately when there is a conspiracy ‘to-be-had’ it tends to attract people who suffer with mental illness…most notably psychosis (schizophrenia), as it plays well into the fantasies that their brain concocts.
These guys will continue to do damage, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they become some form of small-time online terrorist organisation, or just another online beast that the authorities will have to regulate. (ie. install this software to block Gamergaters).
These people feed off each other and close themselves off to the world which is a dangerous mix. Expect this to get a lost wore before it gets better.
ye Ive seen GG use the L – I trick to harass people on twitter before. Their fatal error is that everything they do is already documented and public.
@ljy2008 you have no evidnece that GGrs are schizophrenic or whatever, and that sort of assumption is prejudice against people with mental illnesses. Writing their bad behavior off as an illness abdicates responsibility.bYou dont have to have an illness to think irrationally, be incorrect, or be cruel.
Your comment is also a violation of the comment policy. We dont speculate on mental illness here.
Real psychologists will say they xannot diagonose a patient they havent met. Much less a layperson.
So please dont speculate on mental illness. A lot of people here on the side of equality have mental illnesses as do many of the victims of GG.
@ljy2008
Slow your roll, they aren’t a terrorist organization with “death squad members”. Everything you wrote is untrue cartoonish hyperbole that actually plays to the Gators’ cartoonish persecution complex.
Seriously, I don’t know why you’re so sure of this ridiculous baseless claim.
I don’t remember the “authorities” handing out blocking software or anyone suggesting they do.
It would fucking surprise me.