To trace the Russian intrusions over the months that followed that first Women’s March is to witness a persistent effort to make all of them worse. (via nytimes)
In the meantime, another, far more effective line of messaging was developing.As one of the four co-chairs of the Women’s March, Sarsour came with a track record — and with baggage.
The news that Sarsour was among the leaders of the Women’s March, said Lancman, a Democrat, struck him as “heartbreaking — that’s the word — that antisemitism is tolerated and rationalized in progressive spaces.” Some of these posts found a large audience. At 7 p.m. Jan. 21, an Internet Research Agency account posing as @TEN_GOP, a fictional right-wing American from the South, tweeted that Sarsour favored imposing Shariah in the United States, playing into a popular anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that Trump had helped to popularize on the campaign trail.
Things were changing on the ground in New York. At the Arab American Association of New York, the nonprofit immigrant advocacy organization Sarsour ran in Brooklyn, hate mail began to pour in — postcards, handwritten screeds on notebook paper, her photo printed out and defaced with red X’s. “Linda Sarsour is a Shariah-loving, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating, ticking time bomb of progressive horror,” Yiannopoulos told the crowd.
Her graduation speech passed without incident. Then the trolls waited, it seems, for her to say or do something divisive. And that happened in early July, when, emboldened after her CUNY appearance, she urged a Muslim audience outside Chicago to push back against unjust government policies, calling it “the best form of jihad.”
It is maddeningly difficult to say with any certainty what effect Russian influence operations have had on the United States, because when they took hold they piggybacked on real social divisions. Once pumped into American discourse, the Russian trace vanishes, like water that has been added to a swimming pool.
And discomfort with Sarsour had dampened enthusiasm among some Jewish progressives, said Rachel Timoner, senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn. Mallory grew up in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, where many viewed the Nation of Islam and its founder positively, as crusaders against urban violence. Pressured to disavow Farrakhan, she refused, though she said she did not share his antisemitic views. After her son’s father was killed, she explained, “it was the women of the Nation of Islam who supported me.”After that, the fabric of the coalition tore, slowly and painfully.
Russia’s exploitation of Sarsour as a wedge figure should be understood as part of the history of the Women’s March, said Shireen Mitchell, a technology analyst who has studied Russian interference in Black online discourse. “I can’t remember all the negative stories; I just remember that there were so many of them,” said Jennifer Taylor-Skinner, a Seattle woman who, after the 2017 march, quit her job at Microsoft and founded “The Electorette,” a podcast geared toward progressive women. She hasn’t ever recaptured that feeling of unity.
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