Brickgate-linked former Eagle staffer swapped emails about ‘collaborative efforts’ with Israel govt

After ‘Stop Funding Fake News’ anti-left smear campaign, Imran Ahmed’s CCDH exposed in collusion in anti-Palestinian propaganda

Leaked emails uncovered by the Grayzone reveal that Imran ‘Imi’ Ahmed, the former Angela Eagle staffer and anti-left smear coordinator who set up the so-called ‘Centre for Countering Digital Hate’ (CCDH) in the US after trying to shut down left-wing news sites, courted Israeli diplomats and ‘philanthropists’ for cash to fund anti-Palestine censorship.

CCDH’s express aim is to defund and shut down any site containing what it defines as ‘hate’ – but the emails, sent during Israel’s genocide in Gaza of more than two hundred thousand Palestinians, mostly women and children, suggest there is a clear focus on supporters of Palestinian rights and the left. They show Ahmed, who has been accused of working for or with UK intelligence services, corresponding with Israeli officials and embassy propagandists seeking:

support [for] our strategic, proven and impactful solutions [and] meetings with your Hill team and your California teams working on social media company relations

and telling them that:

I would like to emphasize the importance of our collaborative efforts in combating hate and lies online. As we are all aware, the spread of hate and the lies that underpin hate can have serious consequences, dividing communities, undermining trust, as well as impacting real-world events.

The emails showed Ahmed giving the Israeli embassy advance sight of a CCDH report addressed to Facebook owners Meta, that he asked Israeli officials:

Please do not distribute it outside the [Israeli] Government, as this is embargoed for public consumption until Wednesday.

The CCDH report demanded mass censorship of pro-Palestine groups and pages, claiming that group admins were:

camouflaging their antisemitism by cynically adopting pro-Palestinian or human rights language and themes to inculcate hatred against Jewish people.

Facebook has been exposed heavily censoring Palestinian and pro-Palestinian speech and information.

Imran Ahmed has a long history as an anti-left and anti-Corbyn agitator. He was Angela Eagle’s communications director at the time of the ‘Brickgate’ scam in which left-wing members were accused of putting a brick through Eagle’s ‘office window’ – the window wasn’t in her office and there was no brick, but the press didn’t let that get in the way of a good smear. Ahmed was also exposed at the heart of the party machine’s move to suspend the local Labour party – as it did with others who threatened the tenure of favoured MPs – to prevent members from voting to replace Eagle as their candidate, after they were falsely accused of making homophobic slurs to Angela Eagle at a meeting she did not even attend.

He also ran, along with the ‘Labour Together’ faction of Morgan McSweeney, now running Keir Starmer’s office, in the smear campaign that called itself ‘Stop Funding Fake News’ (SFFN), which targeted left-wing sites that generate income through ads by contacting advertisers with accusations of antisemitism and boasted of forcing the Canary to downsize – Skwawkbox was targeted in other ways by right-wing groups, but was immune to SFFN because it carries no ads and runs entirely on reader support.

Running with his theme of targeting inconvenient information as ‘fake news’ or ‘hate’, Ahmed then went on to found the so-called CCDH, which had already been accused of taking large amounts of ‘dark money’ to fund its censorship operation. Now it seems clear that at least some of those funds came from Israel or from the hugely-rich ‘philanthropists’ who bankroll many of its operations, including at least one who donated heavily to Keir Starmer’s Labour leadership campaign – another link between the Israel lobby and the ‘Labour’ saboteurs who brought down Jeremy Corbyn and condemned millions in the UK to poverty, suffering and even death under the Tories.

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