Remember Neville Roy Singham, the American born Sri Lankan-Cuban, at the centre of the NewsClick controversy? He is alleged to have funded journalists associated with the aforementioned website to publish pro-China and anti-India propaganda pieces, a charge he denies. A hard-core Marxist millionaire, he lives in Shanghai. Not too long ago, the New York Times named Singham as the man behind China’s “lavishly funded influence campaign” in the West and other places, including India. According to the NYT, Singham not only works closely with the Chinese government’s “media machine” but also funds its propaganda worldwide. He promotes far left causes on behalf of the Chinese government, according to the NYT. Singham is back in the news this week for allegedly funding the major anti-Israel protests that are shaking up the West, according to the Free Press, a US media organisation. For those searching for the Chinese hand behind the Hamas attack and the subsequent protests, at least one of which was organised by a Singham connected group, The People’s Forum, on 8 October, the day after the Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October, this could offer a clue into how insidious China’s influence operations can be. It is a different matter that Singham denies all such allegations.
Experts say that the huge pro Palestine, including pro Hamas protests across the West are a manifestation of China’s entropic warfare, where cohesive units including societies fall apart because of pulls and pressures from within. The dictionary meaning of entropy is the “lack of order or predictability”, a “gradual decline into disorder”. A kinetic conflict requires the countries involved to shed blood, but China prefers to win without firing a bullet, the reason why an entropic warfare works in China’s favour. And in the Israel-Hamas war, it is the advanced, western/NATO countries that are the target—economically and militarily powerful nations that can take on China and so must be “entropied”. It is interesting that such protests are not visible in the Arab-Muslim world, but only in the West, where the streets are being owned by muscle-flexing mobs, often sporting Hamas headgear, shouting anti-Semitic slogans, spreading fear in the face of a weak response from the law and order machinery—and all in the name of freedom to protest. It is a case of misusing democratic norms and values to achieve results that stand against democracy, freedom and co-existence—a classic Communist Chinese technique when dealing with other countries.
One of the results of this dissipation from within is the return of anti-Semitism in the West. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the Jews are fearful of their lives. There are reports of firebomb attacks on Jewish places of worship, videos of Jewish students being taunted or attacked by fellow students. Videos are viral about ultra-left and Wahhabi minded men and women tearing posters of those who have been kidnapped by the Hamas. Even two Indians of the ultra-left variety were spotted tearing posters in a US city. There is genuine shock in the West that premier institutes like the Harvard will have several students’ organisations supporting the Hamas. In this battle of perceptions, the noise being made over Israel’s attack on Gaza is seeking to drown out the voices that speak of atrocities committed by the Hamas. The mob is not thinking for once that the men they are supporting are actually rapists, murderers and baby killers. The victim vs oppressor narrative has been spun in a manner that for these protesters, Israel can never be the victim, but always the oppressor, so must be eliminated, where the end justifies the Hamas’ brutal means. And it is not just a particular religious demography that is participating in the protests. The West is horrified that many young westerners are seeking death to Israel. Some young people—like the “progressive” section of Joe Biden’s Democratic party—see supporting Palestinians, as well as Hamas, as being “liberal” and “progressive”. It’s a case of the woke philosophy gone wrong; a breakdown of societal values; an inability to differentiate between the right and the wrong. It is a case of the loss of moral compass—of entropy, where the West is getting hollowed out from the inside, while a malign power from the East is rising.
And then as if to make the Chinese hand more apparent, comes the news of the short video-making Chinese platform TikTok being used as a propaganda tool for the Hamas. Several thousand pro Hamas videos have flooded TikTok. Recently, Republican politician Chris Christie said TikTok was “polluting” American minds with “anti Semitic, horrible stuff that their algorithms were pushing out at a gargantuan rate.” Democrat Josh Gottheimer said that the Justice Department should “monitor China’s use of TikTok as a propaganda machine to influence Americans.”
As if this was not bad enough, the West, particularly the US is suffering from a fentanyl induced crisis, where 70,000 youngsters are believed to have died in a year from a fentanyl overdose—the synthetic opioid that makes its way to the US courtesy the Chinese narcotics cartels. China produces at least 70% of the world’s fentanyl. The matter has become serious enough for Joe Biden to push for a deal with Xi Jinping on imposing curbs on fentanyl, when they meet on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in San Francisco. The opioid is designed to weaken the US from within, by hitting at its youth, and is assuming the proportions of a crisis.Given China’s entropic warfare against the US, perhaps Biden is asking the arsonist to be the firefighter.