What Happened Today: January 18, 2022
Red flags in Texas; America's big breakup; Joe Rogan vs. The Doctors
The Big Story
Malik Faisal Akram, 44, the British national who took four people hostage in a Texas synagogue on Saturday while demanding the release of a convicted terrorist, had a criminal record in the United Kingdom and was the subject of a 2020 investigation by domestic intelligence service MI5. The picture that has emerged suggests that U.S. security officials missed numerous red flags when allowing Akram to enter the United States and misled the public by initially saying that the targeted attack on the synagogue was “not directly connected to the Jewish community”—a statement that the FBI subsequently retracted. Reports that Akram stayed at a local homeless shelter in the vicinity of the synagogue he targeted, and was dropped off there by people who appeared to know him, point to the possibility of a broader network assisting his attack on the synagogue. If that does turn out to be the case, it would fit an established pattern in which events that are initially attributed to “lone wolf” terrorists turn out to involve larger groups of planners and facilitators. Akram’s record of disturbing behavior goes back at least two decades. In 2001 he was banned from a British court for being a “menace” to magistrates and saying that he wished he had died on one of the planes used in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Despite that background, Akram, who also had a history of mental health issues, was able to obtain a visa to enter the United States and arrived at JFK airport in New York shortly before New Year’s Day. Roughly two weeks later he would be shot and killed by law enforcement. The roughly 11-hour standoff at the Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, began when the congregation’s rabbi, Charlie Cytron-Walker, let him into the building, believing that he was a homeless man in need of assistance, and ended when Cytron-Walker threw a chair at Akram, allowing him and the remaining two hostages to escape.
Read it here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/18/mi5-investigated-texas-synagogue-hostage-taker-malik-faisal-akram-in-2020
Today's Back Pages: The Doctor’s Plot Against Joe Rogan
The Rest
→ With tens of thousands of Russian troops still massed on the Ukrainian border, the United Kingdom has started shipping tactical weapons into Ukraine, along with roughly 100 British soldiers to act as trainers. “We have taken the decision to supply Ukraine with light anti-armor defensive weapon systems,” British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace announced in Parliament Monday. Wallace also made clear that Britain would not send troops to Ukraine in the event of war, declining to hold out a promise of assistance that he termed “false hope.” Anti-tank weapons could slow but not stop a concerted Russian military drive into Ukraine, but the question occupying European security officials at the moment is what Russia’s aim would be if it did invade. Vladimir Putin has shown no interest in occupying or fully annexing Ukraine—a massive and long-term undertaking with a high level of risk and little strategic upside. It’s more likely that Russia would continue to use the threat of invasion as leverage in negotiations while planning an attack that inflicts punishment on Ukraine using “hybrid warfare” tactics that avoid overcommitting forces.
→ At least 20 people were killed Monday night by a Saudi-led coalition air strike in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The attack was one of the deadliest in years in Yemen’s long-running proxy war between Saudi- and Iranian-backed forces and was apparently launched in retaliation for another drone strike Monday on a target in the United Arab Emirates, a Saudi ally, carried out by Houthi forces backed by Iran.
→ Israeli police used spyware secretly installed in phones to spy on civilians, including sitting mayors and leaders of protests against former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a major investigation published Tuesday in the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist. The phone hacking, which was done without any warrant or judicial oversight, used surveillance software called Pegasus that was developed by the Israeli company, NSO. A report last November from watchdog group Citizen Lab documented how the spyware, which NSO sold to foreign governments ostensibly to be used for crime-fighting purposes, had been used to hack the phones of political dissidents, journalists, and activists.
→ Given Texas hostage-taker Malik Akram’s ability to get a visa and enter the United States with no hassle despite his checkered past, maybe it’s worth asking whether the billions of dollars spent on having people form lines and take off their shoes at airports is having the desired effect.
HOW THE MONEY GETS SPENT: Homeland Security Edition
$76.15 billion — Total authorized budget for the Department of Homeland Security in fiscal year 2022
$8.6 billion — The budget for the Transportation and Security Administration (TSA)
47,493 — The number of transportation security officers working for the TSA
$127.1 million — Funding for the Secure Flight Program that uses a “risk-based, intelligence-driven watch-list-matching capability to identify potential threats” so those people can be designated for enhanced screening or prevented from flying
→ The CDC has yet again updated its mask policy on Friday, this time by acknowledging that cloth masks offer the lowest level of protection against the novel coronavirus, which is spread via aerosol droplets, compared to other kinds of masks. This follows the CDC’s endorsement of cloth masks, which followed the CDC’s initial guidance in the early days of the pandemic that ordinary people should not wear masks at all. Last August, Sen. Rand Paul was suspended by YouTube for a week for saying that most over-the-counter masks, particularly those made of cloth, don’t work to prevent infections—a true statement that violated the company’s misinformation policy.
Read more: https://news.wttw.com/2022/01/17/cdc-updates-guidance-face-masks
→ Preliminary results from Israel’s experiment with giving citizens a fourth booster shot have proved to be ineffective at stopping the transmission of the Omicron variant of the novel coronavirus, despite boosting antibodies. “We know by now that the level of antibodies needed to protect and not to get infected from Omicron is probably too high for the vaccine, even if it’s a good vaccine,” said Gili Regev-Yochay, director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the Sheba Medical Center, who led a trial studying the effect of a fourth vaccine dose using both Pfizer and Moderna booster shots.
Read more: https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-trial-worlds-first-finds-4th-dose-not-good-enough-against-omicron/
→ The Big Breakup: A new Gallup poll reveals a dramatic loss in support for Democrats over the past year. Democrats started off with a nine-point advantage among voters in the first quarter of 2021 and ended the year with Republicans holding a five-point advantage in the fourth quarter. The poll doesn’t say anything about why people’s political preferences shifted so dramatically, but the clues are there in local races that saw partisan swings. In the high-profile governor’s race in Virginia, for instance, it wasn’t the Democrats’ support for critical race theory in curricula that most bothered people but their support for extended school lockdowns.
→ A new book by a Canadian author speculates that Anne Frank and her family were discovered by the Nazis after their location was revealed by Arnold van den Bergh, a Jewish businessman attempting to save his own family. Evidence for those claims, published in the Dutch media on Tuesday, include an anonymous letter sent to Frank’s father after the war that names van den Bergh, who died in 1950.
→ How strange that the people in control of the art world’s leading institutions are so disdainful of art. British journalist Ed West draws our attention to the new style of museum curatorship.
The Doctor’s Plot Against Joe Rogan
The question for all of us living through the lockdowns of the information age is this: What poses the greater risk, propaganda or misinformation?
Propaganda uses state power to integrate all the different parts of the modern bureaucratic machinery in shaping public opinion. The popular image of propaganda solely as the sinister tool of authoritarian regimes mischaracterizes a phenomenon that is a universal feature of all modern technological societies, including democracies. In his seminal study of the subject, “Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes,” the French philosopher Jacques Ellul described it this way: “In the midst of increasing mechanization and technological organization, propaganda is simply the means used to prevent these things from being felt as too oppressive and to persuade man to submit with good grace.” Ellul was a Christian anarchist who fought in the French Resistance during World War II and was named as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem—which is to say that he did not come to the subject lightly or without a full awareness of its implications.
Misinformation, on the other hand, is a term of more recent vintage. It refers to a distributed, bottom-up assault on reality that comes from the proliferation of false facts and tidbits of information that imitate the truth while misrepresenting it. The more coordinated forms of misinformation or deliberate campaigns of disinformation led by governments and spy agencies are real but relatively rare compared to the ever-expanding universe of fake news.
In an ideal world, of course, we’d rather have less of both, but for now there is still a choice to be made that boils down to the question of where political and moral agency should reside. The pro-propaganda position accepts the risks of repression and censorship because it entrusts authorities—mostly nonelected ones—to decide what is too harmful for people to see and hear. Conversely, the pro-misinformation side says that while lies and distortions can be dangerous, especially when they touch on matters of grave importance like medicine or national security, it is still preferable to allow ordinary people to decide for themselves what is true. This is “the wisdom of the crowds,” as it were.
Now, let’s see this little drama of abstractions come to life.
Did you see the headlines about how “270 doctors” had signed a letter denouncing Joe Rogan for being a danger to public health? An analysis of the letter by the independent journalist Jordan Schachtel suggests that many of its signatories aren’t actually medical doctors: “Only around 100 of the 270+ signatories to the letter are people with qualified medical degrees. And a large chunk of that 100 or so medical doctors are MDs employed at universities who are not in fact practitioners of medicine.” The rest of the letter signers, according to Schachtel, are “50 PhD academics, around 60 college professors, 29 nurses, 10 students, 4 medical residents, and even a handful of … science podcasters.”
For the record, I am a Rogan partisan and am happy to forgive him for being both an irrepressible asshole and at times an incredibly naive person because he is also admirably curious, a quality that these days requires bravery. I am in solidarity with his mission of wild self-discovery, which I recognize as an expression of America’s national genius. Huck Finn was also kind of a fool, you know.
But Rogan is hated as few people in American life are because he has the power and independence to resist the censors. He is rich enough to openly defy the propaganda, and if in the course of doing so he occasionally spouts some misinformation, a stylized word for what might otherwise be seen as human error, I consider that a fair trade.
Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.