Gold, AI Surveillance & Gulf Power in the Shadows | Dr. Andreas Krieg UNFILTERED

They've built the perfect surveillance state. What we say about China, what we say about Russia or North Korea applies also to the UAE. It's a country where you enter as a tourist and you become immediately a glass visitor. Everything you have, all your personal data, everything is immediately checked.

Welcome to the tea, where we break down the stories behind the headlines and unpack the power plays shaping our world. I'm your host, Miriam Hoswa. Before we get into this episode, I just want to take a tiny moment to ask you to do one thing for me, and that is to hit that subscribe button now. We're a small independent team. No big networks here, no corporate backing, just a handful of people who care deeply about having honest conversations and shining a light on what often goes unseen or unheard. So, if our work does resonate with you too, then subscribe now on YouTube and join us on Patreon. Link in our bio.

This week we are joined by Dr. Andreas, security analyst, author, and one of the sharpest minds dissecting the shadow wars of our era. From Sudan's battlefields to the boardrooms of Abu Dhabi, Andreas has tracked how states weaponize not just drones and dollars, but information itself. In Sudan, where over 12 million people have been displaced and the world's largest humanitarian crisis ever recorded is unfolding, the war isn't just fought with bullets. It's waged in the digital trenches. Fake news, AI-generated content, and total internet blackouts have become weapons of war, distorting reality and silencing millions. And now the US and Gulf states are pouring billions into AI and grossly magnifying the capabilities of tools of surveillance and manipulation, turning them into arms of mass deception. But this isn't just an Arab world story, guys. The same technologies and tactics are then being redeployed in Western democracies, threatening civil liberties everywhere. So, how do we defend truth and freedom in a world where information is weaponized? And what can Sudan's crisis teach us about the future of information warfare? Grab your cup and join us as we unravel the digital battlefields of today.

Andreas, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me.

Thank you for being with us. Now, you spent a significant amount of time living and working across the Gulf and the Middle East more broadly. What sparked your interest in the region and and kind of what motivates your work there today?

I always was kind of uh very closely associated or I've wanted to associate myself with the romantic idea of the Orient and so you know even as a as a teenager I thought you know Damascus the old the golden age of Islam you know I liked history that sort of stuff was always something that really sparked my interest and I thought also strategically when I was 18 19 I thought okay what gives me an edge you know in the early 2000s on the job market is like you know learning Arabic going out there becoming you know understanding the region as well uh And that's kind of how I ended up in Syria in 2006, learning Arabic, living there. And um that kind of is my sort of entry into the Middle East, which is now nearly 20 years ago.

So you sort of refer to yourself as a classical orientalist initially. Did your time in Damascus in Syria change how you thought about the Middle East? And and were there any preconceptions about the region that you had maybe growing up as a as a Westerner that changed once you lived and worked there?

Oh, absolutely. Um, so you know I grew up as a teenager in the post 9/11 era. So I was kind of bombarded with the narratives about the problem of Islam, the Arab world, you know, counter-strike and you know it's always the terrorists somewhere Osama bin Laden all these kind of preconceptions and um I grew up in Germany which is a country anyway very much isolated from global discourse. It's always kind of 5 to 10 years behind the rest of the world. We see that now in Palestine as well. Um but and then you go out into the region and you see a completely different world. I mean I guess the post 9/11 era confronted us with such profound racism at the heart of our societies right for many Muslims and and Arab people living in the west it was a really scary time actually because you were being targeted and you know broad brush strokes the media was constantly representing Islams and Muslims as as really dangerous and I think obviously that continues to be a dominant narrative today.

Um, how would you say that your work contributes to challenging that? Um, and and where sort of what is it about your expertise that puts you in a good position to do that?

I don't know if I'm, you know, I might be too ambitious to say I could actually change that. I think what is important is first of all understanding the world around us through the lens of narratives, right? Everything everything that we discuss is wrapped in a narrative. Any sort of information that we exchange now is wrapped in a story, right? Um much of the debate is about disinformation where people say, "Oh, there's a threat of disinformation." I I disagree with that. I think it's not factually wrong information. It's the the spin of that fact that makes the problem. So I think some of the work so how I got into writing this book on subversion information operations was looking at discourse in the Middle East post the Arab Spring um and seeing how this is being portrayed in the region how it's being portrayed out of the region particularly in Europe and the United States um and then also understanding that there isn't it's not about an objective truth because I don't think that exists and it's also not about facts or non-facts it's about what are the different narratives understanding the different narratives and also dissecting the narratives what motivates people to spin certain facts in a certain way in order to achieve what end. And I think that's kind of the kind of the minimal contribution of that book is really trying to more reflectively understand our cognitive predispositions vis-à-vis that region, vis-à-vis the Arab world, vis-à-vis Islam. Um, and unpacking that and understanding why we end up adopting certain narratives. And are we doing this organically or are we being manipulated from outside to actually think in a certain way and obviously it's a bit of both. Um but I think we're we're now in a very different era in terms of the information vis-à-vis the 2000s post 9/11 in the way that we have we are more aware uh we have a lot more access to information. Governments find it more difficult to actually tell us untruth or spin particular narratives. But now the problem is every single person is in a position to spin a narrative, right? I mean there is everyone outside on the street has the ability now to spin their narrative and if they want to go viral, build followership and then push this into the public domain. That's a completely different threat obviously.

And so I want to take us back to 2010 and the so-called Arab uprisings. Now until that period we were told that you know this is a narrative obviously that Arabs was just not ready for democracy. you know that this you know it was this sort of notion of western superiority that we were advanced and could handle open societies but you know these people could not and the Arab uprising I think for many people was the first time that they saw so many people you know thousands of people tens of thousands I guess maybe even millions across the region taking to the streets demanding the things that I guess everybody wants you know freedom economic freedom political freedom some sort of autonomy over your life. Um, and since then we have not seen any similar forms of public uprisings in the region. So for people unfamiliar with it, Andreas, run us through the narrative that was dominant until then and what has happened since then. Is it just that the people of the region don't want those things anymore?

First of all, I think it was about dignity more than anything. It was about social economic security. It was about, you know, have being able to pay for bread, for food, living a dignified life rather than one where you're suppressed, where you're just a playing ball of greater powers and a playing ball of your authoritarian tyrant regimes in the area in in in the region. Um, there is also this element of, you know, I'm not a great fan of saying democracy is a sort of social political form of organization that fits everyone in every society. And I think we shouldn't have that ambition of saying, oh, everyone needs to be ready to be a liberal democracy. I think that's a very it's an experience that is built on hundreds of years of a unique trajectory in Europe and the the western world if you will um that you can't just copy and paste into the rest of the world.

Are you suggesting that there are other forms of uh societal organization that could be equally uh sort of open accountable and free but that just do not mimic that particular model?

Yeah. I think because democracy mostly is about the ballot box and that's you know the Assads of the world were saying oh we have elections Russia has elections Putin has elections so it's not about how you what you need you find need to find a what you need is a level of inclusion tolerance in a society where everyone is included where you have a way to speak directly to those in in power so you need a civil society I think civil society even in in our liberal democracies here in the UK um is probably more powerful to actually change the direction of policy than your action of going to the ballot box and casting your vote. Um, and so you need civil society and I think that's fundamental in a terms of in terms of holding those in power to account and and basically preventing tyranny. That's very important.

Um, so on the question of the Gulf, which is uh a region that you've worked on extensively, you've also lived in the Gulf. A lot of people might think of the Gulf States as being all very similar and I think those of us who know the region a little bit know that that's not the case. But for people who are unfamiliar with it, could you give us like a sort of very brief beginner's intro into kind of understanding the differences between those states? They take different forms, don't they?

Yeah. So from an outsers' perspective, so when I I came first to the Gulf in 2011, I think it's the first time I went to the Gulf, I thought, you know, coming from the Levant, having lived in Syria and in Lebanon and Palestine, Israel, coming to the Gulf for the very first time, I thought, you know, this is all kind of the same, right? They're the same tribes, the same language, mostly Sunni Muslims, very homogeneous actually. Uh then I went to live there in 2013, lived in in Qatar for a couple of years, and then you realize actually there's a huge difference between these countries. They have very different strategic cultures. They have very different heritage, different values as well in terms of how they see themselves and different historic trajectories as well. I mean, you've got Oman, which has, you know, hundreds of years of an empire that reached all the way down to the southern tip of Africa and the Indian Ocean. But what they all have in common, they're all tribal monarchies, which means they are they're monarchies. They're not democratic or constitutional monarchies. Some of them have parliament, some of them don't. Um, but some of them are repressive and some of them are not. All of them are autocratic but not all of them are authoritarian. I think that's very important. So all of them are autocratic in the way that there is a monarchical leader but that there are still checks and balances onto that leadership even if they're not formalized. They might be informal but some of them have more of these checks and balances than others. I'd say the UAE on one end of the spectrum where there is no check. It's an authoritarian country. Saudis probably also more toward what's that end of the spectrum. Then you've got Kuwait and Qatar on the other end of the spectrum. Oman also on the other end of that spectrum where there is more of an inclusive society and direct access to power.

So what's ironic about what you're saying is that I think most people's perceptions is that the UAE in particular would be somewhere very free. I mean come on Andreas, it's where we go to, you know, flash and wear our bikinis on the beach and drive luxury cars and it's where all the influencers are at. So it must be a free society, you know.

Yeah. No, I mean that's not where I take my bikini. But the thing is just because you're wearing a bikini and you're drinking your alcohol on the beach, you know, that's the sort of liberalism that the West loves, right? That's the sort of liberalism that we advocate for in the West where we're saying, you know, that's what a good Muslim and a good Muslim country is one that is liberal enough to allow our western vice to completely unfold as we see fit here in our western societies. Um, and I think for most influencers, most people who re, you know, on a social media, they see the glitz and glamour of of Dubai, which is very shallow. Um, but they think, okay, that that that's a place I can go for a holiday because you don't have to wear a burka, you don't have to wear an abaya, you can wear your bikini, you can drink alcohol. Um, no, that's obviously not the case. The UAE is a country of seven emirates, all of very different heritage. They used to be a crucial state. They used to be um protectorates of the United Kingdom. So there's a very strong relationship to the UK. Um but all of them have a have different most of them have different royal families. So Dubai is very different from Abu Dhabi is very different from Ras Al Khaimah and so on and so forth. Um but and all of them have different laws. So you might be very you have quite a lot of social liberties when it comes to this drinking and wearing your bikini in Dubai but that might not apply to Abu Dhabi or Ras Al Khaimah or some of the northern Emirates. So huge distinction there. Um but they are certainly as I said one of the most repressive countries in this part of the world in terms of they've built the perfect surveillance state. What we say about China, uh what we say about Russia, um or North Korea applies also to the UAE. It's a country where you enter as a tourist and you become immediately a a glass not a glass citizen but a glass visitor. Everything you have all your personal data everything is immediately checked. Everything is open for grabs. Um there is no free social media discourse. Anyone who posts anything about Dubai as an influencer has a license from the government to do so. So there is no such thing as you know free to people going out there on holiday. Most of the people you see there in their bikinis have been paid there on a pre-trip have been licensed by the government to push this. So you're falling into the trap of becoming a somewhat useful idiot for uh you know for a media campaign to promote the UAE and um promote what they stand for.

and and what do they stand for?

Um because Andreas, I guess you mentioned there this sort of aggressive campaign to recruit influencers. I note that projections show that nearly 97 million was spent uh will be spent by 2030 uh by the UAE recruiting western influencers. Um they'll be offered luxury trips, you know, paid collabs, 10-year golden visas. I see them all over my feed telling me, "Ah, Dubai is amazing. move out here, tax-free life, luxury, come girl." Um, but at the same time, as somebody who actually like cares about expressing political opinions without ending up in prison, I do note that the country criminalizes basic expression online, right? It's ranked not free with a score of 30 out of 100 in the 2023 Freedom of the Net Report. So, you know, are we being sold a an illusion of what this country actually is about? And why are they presenting this image of a sort of free society when they are deeply unfree? I guess maybe is that the point?

Well, that is there's an element of whitewashing there. Obviously, whitewashing that authoritarian image, but beyond I think the Emiratis are now at a point where they don't care that much. They don't want to even appear in any way liberal. They're quite happy to say yes, we authoritarian. We we're a security country. We're a police state. Security comes first. And a lot of the criticism has now been reverse engineered where they're saying, "Oh, look what happens in London on the streets where people go grab your phone. That would never happen in Dubai. That's safe. You can leave everything out." A lot of influencers are taking that narrative and that line, which is true, but then at the same time, it's so arbitrary where you say the wrong thing, post the wrong thing, and not only are you being then investigated, they just snatch you off the street and you disappear. I mean, even British citizens, American citizens have disappeared, have been uh, you know, have been tortured, uh, put in jail for very minor offenses or no offenses whatsoever. They've they have the most restrictive cyber laws anywhere in the world. So, you you come to the UAE, you know, when I speak to journalists as well, you know, we talk about the UAE and they're like, "Oh, I'm going for some interviews." I'm always saying, "You got to be careful. you take your burner phone because that phone if all your data on that phone will be property of the UAE and they will can just take it and without you even knowing they're going to hack it. They take your data and if they arrest you they will use it against you. Um and I also say be very careful who you meet and where you meet them because if you have the wrong meeting with the wrong person saying the wrong thing um you might not be allowed to leave the country. And so the good thing that happened to a lot of Gulf analysts, include myself, um, is that you're on a you're on a on a blacklist and you can't enter. You arrive at the airport and they tell you, "Sorry, you can't come here and you go back." That's fine. I mean, it's bad enough. Happened to a lot of colleagues of mine. But then I had other colleagues who were in doing their research and they were never allowed to leave and were then tortured for 6 months. So that sort of stuff is very unique to the to the UAE. That doesn't happen in Saudi, that doesn't happen in I mean it happens for Saudis in Saudi Arabia, but it doesn't happen to foreigners. The UAE don't make a distinction there. They say, "We're a security state. If you're if you do not comply with our narrative of what we consider to be safe and unsafe, we going to take any action. It doesn't matter what kind of passport you have." So, they are very authoritarian, very openly authoritarian about it. But at the same time, they're saying, you know, we have, we've got all these other beautiful things. You can have, you know, your parties, your alcohol, your bikinis, and your influences, but we have to pay them to come here because most of them would not voluntarily come here. Although I would say I think they have been establishing an organic movement now where people people do come organically there because of these influences where they get for example uh free accommodation not just flights but also free accommodation to stay there and there was a campaign two years ago where you had particular French, German, British and American influences suddenly all moving to the UAE moving to Dubai out of a sudden coincidence. Obviously not coincidence all paid towards a campaign with the government. Um but I think what you it's a very smart move because it's a worked approach right so back in the day you had to pay a PR company to push certain ads doesn't h you know it doesn't happen organically here you've got people who use their private experience on the beach you know in their bikini saying oh it's so amazing here and these are people that the younger generations Gen Z associate with these are people you look up to and they're like oh yeah Dubai is amazing tax-free look you live in an insecure country like the UK where you get robbed where you have to pay taxes why didn't you come here um And so and you don't have just one person doing it, you've got hundreds of them doing it. So it's an echo chamber in itself that they created. Cost a lot of money, but in comparison to the tens of millions of dollars that they spend on PR companies, it's fairly cheap.

And just to clarify, the main reason that they are doing this is part of their transition away from oil, which the entire region is confronted with, right? By about 20 in 50 years from now, they're saying that oil will pretty much run out.

In the region. So everyone's sort of thinking about the backup plan, and the part of the UAE's plan is, you know, tourism, which is apparently at a record high there now. Um, and entertainment. This is true for the whole Gulf. I mean, the Gulf in itself. I mean, I think we're experiencing a Gulf moment. So anybody on social media now cannot—it's not just the UAE—cannot avoid golf stuff right on your feed, your algorithms. Um, and you don't have to be Muslim, you don't have to be Arab, you don't have to be from a minority background, to be shown influences or ads showing, "Come to Qatar, come to Saudi, come to—come to Oman even now, come to Oman." So we are experiencing a Gulf moment. The moment is now. The Gulf now is in a very unique position of stability that they haven't been in forever. And so it's a kind of an island of security amid a very insecure environment in the West, but also an insecure environment in the Mina region. So people are saying, "Why shouldn't we go there?" And it's, as you rightly say, this is about diversification of their economy. You want to get people to come there.

The UAE are miles ahead of everyone else because they're saying, "We don't care who you are. If you want to bring your money, you can bring your money. It doesn't care if you're a drug baron, whether you are a commodity trader that is trading in illicitly mined diamonds and gold, you can come here. If you want to do kind of shady business in the crypto sphere, you can come here. You want to experiment with AI, you can come here. We have no regulations." Because what the Emirati—the ultimate goal of Emirati statecraft—is kind of creating weaponized interdependence, where they're saying, "We want to create codependence; essentially, we want you to become dependent on us." And that's the same thing with many of these influences; they go out there, they start living a lifestyle where they don't have to pay taxes, where they have disposable income, and then suddenly they are basically trapped because you can't leave, right? Going back to the UK means, even if you make a lot of money there, you'll suddenly have to be taxed 40, 45%, if you come back to the UK. So you kind of want to stay there, and that kind of creates a dependency on the UAE, and the UAE could—they can play with that. They can say, "Listen, if you want to stay here, we want you to do—and you want to have your—you want to retain your license to do content on social media, then make sure you do X, Y, and Z," and this is how it works. It kind of—they create a coercive environment where people are then—or a compulsive environment where people tow the line pro-UAE because they don't want to lose that privilege, the privileged position that they're in.

It's really interesting, Andreas, because I sort of look at the UAE as being almost like a sped-up version of what we're all being confronted with, which is almost a choice between, um, you know, being happy consumers or having political rights. It's almost as if, you know, you can choose to live in these wealthy authoritarian settings, but you lose your political freedoms, or you can live here in the West and have your political freedoms but struggle to feed your kids. Yeah. Is that a trend that you see happening on a wider scale? I think there—it's—it's—it's obviously not a binary choice in that way, but I think even other non-Gulf authoritarian countries are playing with that idea. You know, you have Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, all of them sort of promoting, saying, "You can live here. You've got to get a—you don't need a golden visa, but you can get residency here. You can establish your company, and then you can live here, and you live a much better lifestyle than you do in the West," which is probably, unfortunately, true, particularly for Gen Z people, right? You come from university, you're a graduate, it looks dim out here in—even in London, right? I mean, even if you have a job, yeah, can you earn enough to actually make a living? No, you can't.

I do want to ask you about your book, *Subversion*, which—the title *Subversion: The Strategic Weaponization of Narratives*. So we're talking about narratives here. We talked a little bit about sort of the narrative that the UAE is using to sort of whitewash its identity and attract investment to a country which is deeply authoritarian but is sort of presenting itself as a beacon of freedom and—and—and actually achieving that, uh, perception, I would say quite effectively. Um, in the book you focused on Russia's interference in Western public discourse and the UAE's demonization of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization. So, can you talk us through how these campaigns work in the virtual world, and what are some of the real-world consequences of them, using those examples? Look, the—we always reduce them to the virtual world, including a lot of the professionals who work in this space. They think, "Oh, this is an issue on—in the cyber space, in the information environment." It isn't, because all of it has real-world physical consequences for people on the street, on policy debate, on policymaking, on decision-making for the civil service and so on. The way it works is, you know, the idea has to—we have to go back to the 1920s, to the Russians at the time. It kind of looks like—it sounds like some Jedi stuff from *Star Wars*, right? Where you're kind of using mind games to influence someone to do something they otherwise wouldn't want to do. But they did a lot of research into—called—into a theory of cybernetics. It's about how you can control systems. How can you—how do you control social systems and communities? And they came up with this sort of idea—what some people call reflexive control. So reflexive control is—I'm trying to get you to do something that you actually don't want to do, but that is predetermined by me, and you're doing it voluntarily without you reflecting upon it and saying, "Why did I actually do it?" Like I said, it sounds like Jedi stuff. Um, but a good information operation is changing consensus in a community, in a debate, and thereby allows people to draw to that new equilibrium of consensus and thereby changing the way they think about certain things. And that's what information operations are trying to do, with the ultimate goal of mobilizing or demobilizing civil society. So—NOS's—anybody—anybody's—we're all part of civil society, aren't we? And if we can get—if we can shift the boundaries of discourse, right, what can and cannot be said, that in itself is—is a major achievement. Um, I think we've seen a lot of this in the ongoing debate between Israel and Palestine, right? How—what we can say has shifted over the last two years, right? So basically these—these information campaigns serve to kind of change the way that we can talk about things.

Can you give us an example of how that—those campaigns have operated, uh, when it comes to Russia, Russian interference in Western democracies, which we hear about constantly? So if you have a network—what is a network?—because it—it's basically nodes that are connected, and they're usually horizontally connected rather than vertical, right? It's not a hierarchy. So, they're information networks. The way that they work is they basically disseminate information around a horizontal line where everyone has an equal input. Um, and so what the Russians have done is—what they do is they look at grievances that really exist, right? We all have grievances. There's social grievances, personal grievances, things that we really care strongly about. They look at the grievances and say, "Okay, here's a community that's aggrieved. How can we manipulate that grievance to kind of disrupt social discourse and potentially social cohesion?" That's what it's all about. It's about disrupting how societies work. They want to make our societies dysfunctional. So, let's say we had grievances around equality between men and women, feminism, around trans rights, around race, around social inequalities, then that would—then be exploited to divide our societies, for example. But aren't those already divisive issues? Dividing society. So what you do is you amplify. Let me give you an example of very—a real-life example. So in 2023, there was a dude in Sweden, far-right Islamophobe, who started burning Qurans. I—I always like to use that sort of—um—that—that story because it kind of exemplifies how this works. This guy wanted to burn Qurans anyway. It's not—But then he—at some point he stopped, and then he was approached by an intermediary from the Russians and said, "I'm going to pay you to burn a little bit more of the Qurans and do it every week and do it consecutively." And so he did. Obviously that caused outrage. The Swedish government said, "Okay, that's freedom of speech. We have to accept that." And so it continued, caused outrage in the Muslim world, all over the Muslim world, me included. I probably was, you know, maybe I was a useful idiot for that campaign as well, because I said, you know, "I'm against any burning of any book, of any holy book." Um, and then the Turkish government at the time was saying, you know, "As we will not tolerate this," and that was at a time when the Swedes wanted to join NATO, which is something that the Russians wanted to prevent at all costs. Okay. Turkey is a NATO—So the Turkish government said, "We will block any accession of Sweden to NATO unless they clamp down on this burning of Qurans." So what—so it's a very—that's exactly what I mean. So it's a very small thing that, you know, through social media outreach has been amplified to an extent that it changed political discourse and therefore policymaking, and it needs a lot of intermediaries for it to actually succeed. Wow. Okay. Mind blown because that's one person being paid to be an idiot impacting geopolitical decisions.

I can give you another example. Please do—another Russian one. So after the 7th of October, we've seen, um, Stars of David being sprayed on Parisian doors of Jewish families in Paris. Turns out it was—I think a couple from Bulgaria, again paid for by the Russians to do that, to kind of—at that time—amplify fear, anger among the Jewish community and saying, "Oh my god, look, we're not only being targeted in Israel, but we're also now being targeted in France," thereby creating a further rift. So that comes on top of—so the—the Quran thing, Islamophobia is real. You don't need the Russians to do it. All they need to do is amplify it. Um, the same way antisemitism is real. All you need to do is amplify it. And that's what they do because that leads to more division and heightened division as well. I should probably add that the Turks probably weren't super keen on Sweden's position on the PKK as well. Of course, there are a lot of intervening variables. Probably a few other variables as well.

The last example I want to ask you about is almost like an opposite example, which is that, you know, uh, the—the Muslim Brotherhood has become, in the public mind in the West, the ultimate bogeyman, right? If you want to try and delegitimize anyone, just say you are the Muslim Brotherhood, and I can wager that 99% of people who say this or hear it have no idea who the Muslim Brotherhood actually are. They're just scary brown men with big beards, Muslims. So, let me ask you this. You know, whether you like or dislike the Muslim Brotherhood is almost irrelevant to this discussion, but what has been the use of the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a narrative? Like, what—what use has this narrative around them served? What purpose has a narrative around the Muslim Brotherhood served? And what does it continue to serve today? I don't know if your audience is familiar with McCarthy, 1950s. So the Americans at the time—Cold War—communism versus capitalism, and the Americans were saying, "Everyone who's—you know, who's a communist is an enemy of the state." So they were looking for communists, saying, "Ah, this guy is a communist, this guy is a communist," and that basically happened the same way—trying to silence critics—anybody who had any dissenting views was silenced or fired and so on, and that isn't happened in a liberal democracy like the United States. So that is common practice. In the same way antisemitism has been used to kind of say, "This guy's canceled, this guy's fired because he's an antisemite." Calling someone a Muslim Brotherhood, a Muslim Brother, is another way of silencing people, right? It's a way—it's a trope that's been used to say, "This guy is a terrorist." The interesting thing is, as you rightly say, what is the Muslim Brotherhood even? I mean, yes, the Muslim Brotherhood is an organization—came about in Egypt. It is—it is an organization, and it—it's a party in Egypt. But as a movement as such, it's very ambiguous. It's, you know, it's—it's more like a—it's an ideology more than anything, right? And so people can subscribe to different ideologies, and people do. Um, but the idea that there is a Muslim Brotherhood—"You are the Muslim Brotherhood"—there is no Muslim Brotherhood in the UK. There isn't one in France. There isn't one in Europe. Um, let's say there are certainly Muslims in our societies who have sympathy towards the Muslim Brotherhood. Yeah. And what do they sympathize with—when basically the Muslim Brotherhood—you know, some of the things they were about—social justice, they were about, you know, inclusion, you know, they were about an Islamic form of democracy—these sort of values for a Muslim—that's something most Muslims can associate with. Yeah. But that doesn't mean they associate with some of the more radical ideas that came out also through the Muslim Brotherhood that are maybe not mainstream, which is advocating for, uh, jihad and—and that sort of stuff. Yeah. But here's the thing. So the UAE is a country that had their own offshoot of those—of an opposition force or opposition group, the al-Islah party, which are associated with this very same ideology. Um, but they were really not talking—speaking about political violence or violence or anything. They just wanted reform in the UAE. And can we just clarify? Most of the groups that were what we call Ikhwani or Muslim Brotherhood sort of inspired don't advocate violence, right? Most of them are essentially saying that they want a fairer distribution of resources. They want a society in which everyone's needs are met, and they tend to be more in favor of a democratic-inspired form of political governance. Would that be fair? Yeah. Very different from your jihadists, you know, and most of them have—they're not ISIS, right? No, absolutely not. And they're also a political party—where they are a political party, they very much integrate into the political system and work within the system. So they're not trying to usurp or undermine the system. They were once compared to the Christian Democrats. I believe there was a time where people would say they're basically just another—obviously in the Muslim world where, you know, Islam is the majority religion. There are people who are inspired by their religion to think about the policies that should govern their states, just as Christian Democrats are inspired by Christianity to think about their states. But so this is—this is a very weird sort of, um, you know, paradoxical way of looking at it, because on the one hand you have people in America who use religion to justify their politics, and then they're telling—but the Muslims are not allowed to merge their religion with their politics. I mean, it's absurd, but this is basically where we are. And the same is true in Europe, especially in France, where they made a very clear-cut between religion and state. And the UAE is another country that has realized—actually, it's a very good narrative because we don't like the opposition group. Remember, it's a very repressive country. So, what can we do? We basically say the state is always right. Any sort of opposition is wrong. And when you now merge religious discourse in the mosque with a political agenda, that is a threat to the regime. So what we're going to do—we need to not just outlaw them in the UAE, we need to outlaw them across the Arab world. So this campaign started by the UAE was then exported during the Arab Spring to Libya, to Egypt, to Yemen, to now all parts of Africa, even Sudan, even Somalia, um, where they were advocating for, uh, the dismantlement of any sort of group that was an opposition group that mixed religion with politics, which is—as you say—if you're a Muslim like a Christian Democrat, you mix politics with religion, and so immediately you were first framed as an Islamist, then you were framed as a Muslim Brother, and then you were framed as a terrorist. So here's the theory that the UAE are using, which is a complete bonkers theory—it's what I would call disinformation, right?—is they're saying it's an assembly-line sort of theory where—they're saying you start off as a moderate Muslim Brother, and there is a direct linear trajectory for you to become al-Qaeda and die. Oh, it's a slippery slope out here, is it? Yeah. So, it's very simplistic. Yeah. And that's something—if they do that internally—bad enough, but they've been promoting that ridiculous idea across channels of, you know, CVE experts. So, these are experts who deal with extremism in the West, white people most of the time. Either they're disgruntled Muslims who feel like, oh, you know, "Islam needs to be reformed so that we can all drink alcohol and wear bikinis," um, or most of the time they're actually white non-Muslims who became experts in Islam and have then—then became experts in the Muslim Brotherhood and then have been—this is all research paid for by the UAE most of the time, either directly or indirectly, and they've then come out and said, "The Muslim Brotherhood is a threat," and they've been promoting this in the West; they've been promoting it in the UK. So it became a trope. And so this trope, if I'm hearing you correctly, has essentially served to delegitimize any form of political opposition in the Arab world. First in the Arab world. Yeah. It was first there to basically undermine the Arab revolutions of the Arab Spring, transforming the Arab Spring to an Arab winter basically, where you had a counterrevolution that—and this is basically what happened, right? 2013, the UAE helped Sisi into power also through a major weaponized, uh, campaign to promote, you know, narratives against the Muslim Brotherhood and basically any sort of mobilization that leads to mass protest on the street, financing, uh, different social media campaigns, different media campaigns, financing people on the ground physically to come out and protest. And that kind of created a pretext that the Egyptian military in 2013 then used to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a military dictatorship. That's the beginning of the counterrevolution for the Emiratis. And every single time the counterrevolutionaries, which were backed by the UAE, would say, "We're fighting Islamism and political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood." So, it became a way of delegitimizing any political opposition. And like I said, the worst part of it, it has now arrived on our shores in the UK, where any sort of—any Muslim or even non-Muslim—that's the absurdity of it—the UAE campaign in 2023 that was revealed showed that the UAE were using, um, I think it was a company in Geneva that was saying, you know, "We are delegitimizing Muslims and non-Muslims who are critical of the UAE, and we basically frame them as Muslim Brothers," and so that is—that is—I think this sort of external interference that we're talking about, right, uh, where you're saying, "You're critical of the UAE; we're going to frame you as a terrorist; we're going to frame you as a Muslim Brother." That's actually really scary because it means that today many of the people who oppose their governments in the Arab world—so these are just normal people in the Arab world who don't agree with the autocratic leaders who have often been placed there by our Western governments to serve our interests, Western interests—anytime they speak up, they can just be treated as terrorists by virtue of this Muslim Brotherhood label, when actually in many ways they are fighting for their people's freedom. It may not be how other people in the West might think of freedom, or it may not be articulated how they might think of freedom because it's expressed in the idiom of the region, but basically that's what they're advocating for. Yeah. Um, and so you say that's kind of come back, uh, here. What has been the impact of the use of that narrative here? I mean, I know that, for example, in France, it's used constantly against, um, you know, public Muslims who express any criticism of the government, of the government's approach to, uh, the Muslim community, to the regulation of Islam as a religion—like automatically it's like, "You're a Muslim Brotherhood member." Um, and you know, I think it was done to—to tar Ramadan, uh, ad nauseam, and to many others. So what has been the impact of that, would you say, here in Europe? I think in particular—

Where there are Islamophobic tendencies, these far-right groups—and I shouldn't just say far-right because there's a lot of generally conservatives who don't like Islam, who fear Islam, uh, who are also racist towards Muslims—because phobia suggests that someone has is in fear of Islam. I think these are people who are racist towards Muslims. Um, and so these people now feel empowered. The far-right is now being empowered by these narratives that the UAE is pushing, and they're saying, "Oh, here's a Muslim country. The UAE is, after all, a Muslim country. They are using this narrative, so they must be right." So, it's a beautiful confirmation bias for the far-right to actually legitimize and justify their clampdown on Muslim civil society.

And that's basically something that is extremely problematic when Muslims are more than 10% of some societies in Europe. And when these people are not allowed to basically organize themselves in a political way, speak out about political issues without being framed as a Muslim brother. So it basically undermines Muslim civil society. And um, there was a few years ago now where I think it was the Emirati foreign minister gave a speech basically uh admonishing western governments for being, you know, too liberal with the Muslims. You know, "we'll teach you," this country that is basically ranked as one of the least free in the world, "we'll teach you how to deal with your minorities." Um, that speech continues to be recirculated every few months on the internet.

Um, what do you make of that speech and and the way it continues to sort of be re, you know, returned to the front of um, policy makers' minds all over X, almost like a reminder like the UAE warned you if you didn't clamp down on your Muslims, this is what happened, they might call for freedoms. The Tea is a fully independent, nonpartisan production. No corporate ties here, just a small, dedicated team working hard to bring you honest, impactful conversations. If you believe in our work, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Just click on that subscribe button now and join us as a Patreon. You'll find the link in our bio.

So whenever we have an attack that is associated with Islam, I mean, thank god we don't have many in this country. Um, but or anywhere else in Europe, people will pull this out, especially the far-right Islamop folks will pull it out and say, "Remember what they said." I think at this interview is from 2016 when Abdullah Benzak was basically saying um, you know, and he was asked in Arabic and then he said, "Let me say this in English," because that was clearly a message not to domestic audiences but to western audiences of saying, "Look, we're the model for freedom and security and so on, you're not, because you're failing, because if you allow these Muslims to organize you'll end up a caliphate," that's kind of the theory, which is exactly the theory that far-right groups in this country—I was going to say sounds very, very familiar.

Um, now I mean I guess the the the tragedy for us in free societies is that we don't really want to clamp down on free speech, right? And so, you know, you talk about uh, you know, in in your book the the sort of weaponization of narratives, but how do we balance in free societies the need for information to be, you know, freely shared and the ways in which nefarious forces, foreign governments are exploiting that freedom to manipulate us um, and and effectively bring about, you know, often quite dark consequences. I mean, you talked about the rise of the far-right. Arguably, you know, Brexit would fit under that. No, we definitely see that during the Brexit vote, the Russians were amplifying these sort of anti-European narratives in the UK, which has served us very poorly in this country. 2021 in the United States, a lot of that mobilization for Trump was also pushed by Russian accounts. So certainly something that we see there as well.

You know what the biggest—like I said, I don't think I mentioned that because it's network-centric, it relies on people like you and me, anybody in civil society as a surrogate or proxy of these campaigns for them to succeed, and it does rely on organic grievances that do exist, right? I mean, there, you know, in the same way I would say the pro-Palestine movement is—these are genuine concerns that can be amplified and can be manipulated and weaponized by external actors to bring about more polarization. Um, and so when you clamp down on this, you cannot clamp down on the grievances that people have, and you cannot clamp down obviously on the freedom of speech of people to express their views, even if these views then play into the hands of the Russians, the Chinese, the Emiratis and whatnot. Uh, and so for us liberal democracies, we're a bit more in a pickle than an authoritarian country because in the UAE any information is potentially subversive. Any information is potentially a threat. That's not the case. That's not the approach we take here. So I think that that we have to draw the line somewhere. So um, and by the way, it's not just the far-right. I think there is on the far-left, the cancel culture that happened there is equally problematic. Right. I personally think that's equally problematic. But when you say problematic, do you mean that you believe that that was part of a uh funded network campaign? No. Is it still a threat to freedom of speech?

So the UAE has had a very long relationship with the warlord that runs the RSF today, which is his name is Hemeti. Um, he is from Darfur. He has been implicated in the genocide of Darfur in the early 2000s. Um, and so he's been around since then as a warlord, as a leader. He's an extremely wealthy man. He controls a lot of gold mines in Sudan. And so his relationship with the UAE is one of things that the UAE do quite a lot and we don't necessarily understand very well is that they they're a small state, right? The UAE of a million people. They need force multipliers for them to actually have influence anywhere. So they look for influences that they can use, people who have who give them that force multiplication. And they kind of build a rapport with the family of Hemeti back in 2013, 2014. At the time the guy was already a warlord. He was a leader. Again, it's the same period the UAE reaching out to Egypt to build the military dictatorship there, reaching out to Libya, building a dictatorship there. Um, Hmeti was interesting because he wanted to make money. And he needed a way to get his gold to market, some of it illegally mined and so on. And the UAE offered him the whole infrastructure. He said, "You can set up a business here. You can launder your gold and come and build that rapport." So, you set up businesses there. Had a lot of his private cash in the UAE.

And then comes 2015 when the RSF, which is, you know, is basically a thuggish sort of um organization. Not really, I wouldn't call them a a fighting force as such. I mean, they're rebels uh in in, you know, they're a violent non-state actor. Um, would you compare them to a mafia? They are, because there is there Yes. because there are certain elements of profiteering that are ongoing which is very sort of um like a criminal cartel if you will uh run by one family, which as I said, the Hemeti family um, and they're basically thugs, many of them implicated in genocide already in in Darfur, and they used the UAE as a hub to get access to to to to you know the free market. And in 2015 the Emiratis were looking for mercenaries to fight their wars in southern uh Yemen, and they said the RSF is there. We know Hemeti. He's got a couple of thousand guys who are willing to fight. And so that relationship was built with further with Hemeti saying, "Can you send us a couple of guys for us to fight in Yemen?" So he did. He provided the mercenaries. So deeper integration. Those of them who fought in Yemen went back to Sudan taking a lot of the weaponry back, really boosting the RSF into a much bigger, much more potent force. And when the revolution came in Sudan, you had a non-state actor, which was a kind of sub-state actor, the RSF, that was there as a contender of power, that was competing for power. And the UAE kept on backing them because they thought, "Hang on a minute. This guy is potentially a leader for Sudan. We actually, if we have him in power, again, goes back to dependence, right? Here's a guy who has all his finances and money in the UAE, and he's now the leader potentially of a very powerful African state. That gives us influence." So they kept on backing him since.

So the Sudan revolution occurs when there's a popular uprising against the end of the rule of Omar al-Bashir, who was what, a military dictator who'd been in power for decades. And I guess there's a lot of hope around that period. A lot of people might have seen the videos circulating of, you know, women standing on top of cars, you know, making addresses to crowds. I mean, there was a a sort of abolition around that period that I think a lot of us felt really hopeful for Sudan and what might come about. And so what you're saying is during that period that the UAE basically see it as their opportunity to once again subvert a popular uprising as they done in Egypt and elsewhere to install somebody in power who will serve not the interests of the Sudanese people—quite the opposite clearly—but the interests of the Emirates. Yes. And and we should also add, so Bashir was someone who—the dictator that was ousted—who was on the Islamist end of the spectrum. So Hemeti since then has been using the same Emirati narrative of saying, "I'm fighting political Islam. I'm fighting terrorism. So hence, you know, I wish I could give you the revolution, but I can't because there are too many terrorists here. We need to really uh eliminate them, and hence I have to stay in power." Well, I would love to talk more about the story of Omar al-Bashir because it's a very interesting one, but maybe for another podcast.

Um, now let me ask you this. So every time I go on socials, I am fed a video of, "Oh my god, the souk in Dubai is amazing. Come and get your cheap gold." The UAE doesn't actually have any gold mines. And it became the second largest global exporter of gold in the world. It trades over 20%, 20% of global trade worldwide. Where's the gold coming from? Africa. So mostly Africa. I mean, now it's like I said, Dubai is a global hub for gold trade um, but it's mostly from Africa, and what is interesting is that also artisan mining, which is mining that is not uh you know done by a legitimate company, but it's done by you know through child labor and all that sort of stuff, illicitly mined gold also ends up in Dubai. The beauty about Dubai is you can literally, and this is what's happening, people use gold nuggets that they wash out of the ground, put them in a suitcase, sometimes a whole full suitcase full of gold, bring it through uh through customs in Dubai, no, no questions asked. You bring it, sell it in Dubai, they give you cash for it. They don't ask where the gold is coming from. And then they melt it down, and you never know where it's coming from. And the gold smelters themselves, some of them are in on it as well, um, basically make it impossible to trace that gold. But these are billions and billions of dollars that are being laundered. And obviously in Africa, the gold trade is controlled by elites that are close to the political leadership. So not only does it give the UAE access to these economic elites, but also to political elites, it gives them leverage uh and strategic depth, if you will, in Africa. And this is basically why Dubai now has become not just for economic reasons a gold hub. It's a it's a it's an element of statecraft and political power. So Sudan alone exported 39 tons of gold to the UAE worth over $2 billion uh in 2022, and that doesn't even count what was passed through smuggling routes via Chad or Ethiopia.

Now, is this being smuggled out by rebel groups, by militias, and if it's not being sort of uh legally brought out as it were by the government, you know, the government extracting it, selling it, and you know, in many cases sadly using it for elites, not for the people of those countries, but it you know, in this case it's not even doing that, right? These are militias funded by external powers like the UAE in this case in Sudan who are bypassing the governments completely, right? Yeah. So I mean it's just theft. It is theft obviously because nobody pays any taxes domestically, that none of that value that is being generated in Sudan stays in Sudan or comes back into Sudan. The way it works, it ends up in a bank account in the UAE, and then with that money, what they do, buy with it is arms and weapons and services. Because remind you, I mean, you you mentioned that the Sudan civil war right now is one of the deadliest, bloodiest, and it's probably the worst humanitarian crisis, at a time when we got a terrible humanitarian crisis going on in Gaza, we still have to say this is probably the worst humanitarian crisis, and to fund a war like this, which is very expensive, gold is an instrumental part of that, and how does the RSF—as I said, there were thugs on pickup trucks—how are they able to fight a war against a military that has an air force, that has tanks, armor brigades and so on? They need they need to buy tech and capability somewhere. They need to have logistics from somewhere. Where do they get it from? They use that gold and buy all of this on the market in the UAE. The UAE has the readymade infrastructure for you to wage a war. So you can buy your mercenaries, you can buy your cargo planes, you can or rent or lease the cargo planes to ship things from anywhere from A to B within Africa or from the UAE to Africa. You can uh, you know, you hire information warfare capabilities. So Hemeti, for example, uses a lot of that gold for um PR companies that are based in the UAE to kind of brush up his image domestically in Sudan. So it's the whole package deal. Not only are you bringing in the gold to the UAE, but you're able to then translate that into a value chain that allows you to fight a war.

Um, so speaking of PR firms, um, the UAE has hired PR firms to rebrand Hemeti and the RSF, running social media campaigns and arranging meetings with world leaders to present them as legitimate political actors and sort of sanitize their crimes in the middle of this ongoing genocide that they're committing. Um, but we've seen these tactics used before, have we not? Um, uh, Israel uses very similar tactics of sort of, uh, using PR-like tactics to brand itself and and and sort of try and bamboozle, um, you know, even news readers who are suddenly kind of scared of being called anti-Semitic or being called Hamas or whatever, so they avoid any deep questioning. Is this kind of image building now a modern tool of information warfare? And um, to what extent are some of the lessons being shared between the UAE and Israel on these tactics? First of all, I think PR, public diplomacy, every government, most governments today do this. Most governments have a PR link where they do strategic communication which is about advocating for you know whether it's investments, trade, tourism, that sort of stuff. Um, and that's not what he is obviously doing. I mean, Hemeti is very aggressively using political communication to whitewash his image and kind of present that image to the international community that he's a legitimate character despite the fact that he's been involved in 20 years of war crimes and genocide. Um, so but I think it's not going anywhere and it's not very sophisticated because you can't polish a turd basically, right?

Um, when it comes to Israel though, it's far more sophisticated. I mean, Israel's Hasbara—being the sort of—it means in Hebrew, "laser"—means to explain; Hasbara is just the great explainer. Uh, and it's about—it used—it started as a public diplomacy effort by saying, "Let's call—let's speak out on behalf of Israel." Um, it's not—it wasn't necessarily initially done to whitewash war crimes or anything. It was just about, "Let's get our message out," because they always failed. Well, the Israelis always failed. The Palestinians had a much better way of presenting themselves and presenting their victimhood and and their cause. If you are if you are following the conflict, you obviously know that's not true, but that's the perception in Israel. So, the Israelis said, "How can we even this out?" And that's around 20, 25 years ago. They're like, "We need to do this in a more, you know, not only hire PR companies, but we have to have a whole directorate that basically does public communication for the prime minister, but also for the state of Israel," mobilizing networks overseas to advocate for us. So not just having a spokesperson in front of a lectern saying, "Oh, Israel didn't do this, and Israel is great," because that has very little credibility, but having people who seemingly have are not associated with Israel using their voice to initially speak out on behalf of Israel. But that has been usurped by the government and particularly by the prime minister's office of Netanyahu to become not just an advocacy network for Israel but an advocacy network for far-right, you know, genocidal politics that are being advocated by Likud, by Netanyahu and and and this particular government, and this is the part of the problem because a lot of people are doing what they're doing because they firmly believe they're advocating on behalf of Israel that's under threat, and they're actually what they're doing, they're becoming instruments of keeping a guy in power who fundamentally goes against even Israeli interests. All right? I mean, let's leave the Palestinian—leave all that ethical—to you—issues, legal issues to one side. From an Israeli point of view, doing this, advocating for this guy who is an authoritarian who completely has destroyed any sort of reputation Israel might have had, advocating for him is certainly not in the interest of Israel.

And is that why we're seeing the Hasbara fail so badly? I mean, there is definitely a video that's viral on Instagram and variations of it right now that's like, you know, "If you're having a bad day, just remember that $150 million worth of propaganda didn't work on you, you're still human." Exactly. Sometimes I'm like, "Well, that's kind of fair." Yeah. No, it's fair. I look at the images from Gaza and I'm thinking like, "It doesn't matter if you're Muslim or Jewish or Christian, if you're pro-Israel, anti-Israel, they are being—women and children are being slaughtered," right? As a human, if you have a heart, if you have any empathy, you should say that's wrong. Civilians are being slaughtered, starved, bombed, starved, everything. And how can some people still go out and say, "Oh, actually, no, it's Hamas's fault." I mean, there is a cognitive dissonance going on in the Hasbara networks of saying, "No, but it is Hamas." There's still people out there after what, 20 months now saying, "But Hamas, right?" But, but is this not because they're so convinced that they have complete control over the narrative? I mean, what I think I'm observing is people who have for so long had such a tight grip on the narrative, who've almost become bloated and arrogant about their ability to control it, who are now malfunctioning when it's not working. They're just like, "Hold on, wait, what? I'm supposed to say Hamas, and you're supposed to just go, 'Oh my god, yes, yes, yes. Long live Israel.'" And you know what you see is a lot of these advocates now, you know, they're raising their voice. They're shouting. And this is quite interesting. So, I lived in Israel, right? um, between 2008 and 2010, and I I took part in some of these Hasbaras, right? Because that's what they do to students who come out there. It's like, "How do you advocate for Israel?" And I thought it was very interesting and you know and and you do and you get insights into how they work, and some of these people are now being manipulated into you know saying, thinking that they're doing this for Israel, but they're doing it actually for the PM's office. Um, and they suddenly realizing, "Hold on a minute, there is an audience out there that doesn't want to be fed this anymore." Right? And obviously over the last 20 years, the Hasbara—it's being radicalized—has dehumanized people to an extent that was even even impossible in Israel 20 years ago. Um, and there's still people out there who, you know, there's a competition. Is a race to the bottom where everyone wants to outdo the other sort of advocate to be get even more radical statements out about, "No, no, we need to slaughter—they're all terrorists—we know—we need to kill all of the Palestinians—put them up on fire."

And so on, and you see there are more and more videos where these people get, you know, they they these advocates get so um antagonized that they start raising their voice. And 20 years ago you would see a lot of people in the pro-Palestine camp becoming very emotional, shouting, and so for a western audience they're like, I've got this, you know, western-looking Zionist who says who speaks very well, very calm, advocating for Israel but doing because they are western. Yeah. Because they are western. And then you have an Arab Palestinian who is shouting because he's, you know, he lost his house, they've taken his land, blah blah blah blah blah. And the the Western audience goes and looks at and says, "Yeah, I I side with a western-looking white calm guy." Shocking.

Everything has reversed now though where I think the pro-Palestine crowd, you know, the Palestinian here in this country, Palestinian ambassador speaks very calmly, you know, very rationally based on facts, you doesn't need to shout. And on the other side you've got an Israeli pro-Israeli advocate who's shouting, who's screaming, is like, "How dare you not taking my narrative?" And so the tides have completely turned. Have you noticed this trend that has popped up on X in particular, but also now on Instagram, of Emirati influencers who suddenly have, law, had a revelation that there is a new Quranic interpretation that says that Israel, the people, the Jews in Israel are bani Is, and so we misunderstood the Quran, guys, all the way till now, but they've got it. And and like I've I've noticed these guys sort of getting more and more traction, and I'm just wondering, "Why have these guys popped up, Andreas? And where do they fit into the disinformation uh kind of picture that the UAE and Israel are both engaged in?"

Okay. And it's not about disinformation. It's about the narrative that they're pushing, and that narrative that the Bani Israel is basically uh based on, you know, revelation that came from the Quran and hence we need to embrace Israel because it's a it it already the Quran is talking about Israel. So we should accept Israel and the existence of the state of Israel. But this is something that is based on, and I think it became very prominent just around the when the Emiratis coincidentally were negotiating the Abraham Accords; that's when we started these sort of Arab Zionism Zionists to say they just organically emerged at the same time as the Abraham Accords, coincidental which were what for those who are not familiar with the Abraham Accords. So the Abraham Accords were basically the first time in in decades that an Arab country was normalizing—first the UAE normalizing relations with Israel—and then kind of forced their the regimes that were aligned with the UAE in Sudan at the time, in Morocco, and in Bahrain to also follow the UAE lead. But this is very much a UAE sort of uh deals, and obviously normalizing with Israel now with what Israel is doing in Gaza has been ex- not just controversial. I mean, the Arab world is up in arms. I mean, the vast majority, we wish they were up in arms, but well, they're not up in arms, but they're up in whatever you want to call it. They're mobilized, and people feel very very passionate about it. The Palestinian cause is right on the top of the agenda for everyone in the Arab world, even if they're not picking up arms. Um, but they they're certainly and many of them supporting resistance in the resistance narrative. Uh, and so for the Emiratis, they're now suddenly are seen as being on the wrong side of history with the Abraham Accords. And so these Arab Zionists are very good at kind of advocating for and justifying why having a relationship with Israel is great, why this is good and beneficial because it is beneficial for the UAE for the most part. It's money. No, it's not just money. I think it's an out-of-jail card for the UAE and the United States. Every time the Emiratis do something bad in Sudan or in Somalia, uh whenever they help the Russians hide their money or help the Chinese get access to AI technology, whenever they do something the US doesn't like, there's a congressman who will come out or a congresswoman will say, "Yes, we know that's wrong what the UAE are doing, but they normalized with Israel." So, I think it's an out-of-jail card, and that I think a very powerful one. That's the primary reason why the UAE did it. But it's obviously very unpopular at home, very popular in the unpopular in the Islamic and Muslim world and Arab world as well. So you need to have these Arab Zionists to kind of just brush over it.

So the UAE consorts with all of the enemies of the West, I mean at least the official ones, Russia, China, North Korea, and then when it gets called out on that, it can simply say, "But we believe in Israel's right to exist." You have no—so you know when I speak to policymakers in the US or here in the UK or in Europe about the issues of the UAE and how they work, you know, with these oligarchs who who left us, how they help the Russians evade the sanctions, how they're helping Chinese tech firms to basically cultivate ecosystems for AI in the UAE in a place where Western tech companies are based as well, where there's a lot of Chinese espionage on on western technology, all these things, there's always someone who says, "Yeah, no that's a problem. But let's not forget, I mean, the UAE are very progressive because they have a relationship with Israel." So, I think it does work. It is it's been a very very powerful thing.

And I want to ask you about a huge, you know, billion-dollar deal being signed between the Gulf States and Trump. A lot of this is driven by uh data and the idea that these are now going to become data centers. Um, we have seen in the US um, you know, Palantir essentially now offering up their data to the uh US uh uh government so that essentially they can now speed up deportations using data that was probably shared actually confidentially in like some sort of a medical setting. Um, are you not concerned that actually what we're seeing now with this huge sort of drive towards AI and and data in the Gulf region that these are very authoritarian settings where now there will be very opaque uh bodies in control of vast amounts of our data? And so in a region where descent is not massively tolerated, you know, is this the direction of travel?

Yes, unfortunately this is. I think the new, you know, we we talked about back in the day, we used to talk about oil as being the new sort of um, you know, the the the the power-defining commodity that everyone was after. The commodity everyone is after now is data, right? And so who controls the data flows, the data centers, they are going to be the next superpower. um and everything is happening so rapidly. I mean, I so in in my company, in my research, I do use AI quite a lot in terms of organizing data because I have massive data sets. So AI is a beautiful support tool. Um, so I'm not I'm not one of these skeptics who think AI is terrible. The problem though with it, for AI to work, it needs to feed like a crack and more data, more data, more data. And you're here in countries, particularly, we're going back to the UAE. The reason the UAE is working so well as an authoritarian state, why they're so more sophisticated than let's say the Iranians or the North Koreans is they have the ability—they buy Israeli tech that can infiltrate your phone even if you're not in the UAE, even overseas. They got your number, your SIM card, they can access your phone without you knowing it. The most infamous was the the Pegasus program where they hacked senior politicians and and and basically took the data away. Um, this is only possible because the Israelis have now exported that research that they used and tested upon Palestinians—have now exported this to the world for every anyone to buy. Um, and my concern is generally that whoever holds the data and stores our data, and this is another problem. This is an ecosystem, right? Data centers are connected, and so you have a data center in the Saudi or in the UAE or in Israel. I mean, Israel, Google right now is building a massive data center in uh in in Israel as well that the governments of these countries have access to that data. And just because you're based in the UK, you upload or your data is fed into the Google ecosystem, it might end up in a data center somewhere else. And who is going to feed through that data? You don't know that. And that is something that I am concerned about because it gives your enemies—and I'm talking about authoritarians—sort of a heads up about who you are, how you move, and they can prepare to hit you when it hurts you the most.

You know this billion-dollar deal in, you know, between Trump and the Gulf and the impact of sort of AI and the drive towards sort of data mining, which is what a lot of this is going to be about and and data being the currency not even of the future—it is our our current currency. um what are some of the risks that we should be alert to as this progresses? Because I want to just give you one example of something that's happening in Sudan at a much less sophisticated level in terms of the technology that was used, but it's still pretty sophisticated. So voice cloning technology was reportedly used to impersonate the uh ousted former president Omar Bashir on TikTok, spreading a fake audio recording that contributed to misinformation and deepened uh public confusion during a volatile uh period. You know, what do you think are going to be some of the long-term consequences of deploying AI-driven disinformation during periods of armed conflict or not? you know, during periods of, you know, peace like we have now or kind of peace. I would call this I would call this—we're in a constant state of unpeace. It's neither war nor peace. It's somewhat gray zone, and and these operations are not war-centric. They happen at they have no beginning and no end, and we'll have to continuously fight this information war against these weaponized narratives whether we're at war or not at war. Um, so that is not going to go away. I think what it leads to is an—and we're already getting there—in what I call an infopocalypse where you're overwhelmed with information and data and narratives where people either completely retreat from discourse and debate because they say it's overwhelming, I can't deal with it, or they kind of retreat in their their own little echo chambers um where they say, you know, you know, I just want to be surrounded by people who think alike, look alike, and I don't care about the rest um and I think in times of conflict obviously it's extremely dangerous; fake deepfakes are extremely dangerous. But I think we we're underestimating the younger generations. People who grow up on social media have an ingrown sort of skepticism towards information anyway. I mean, people who are in their 20s, maybe early 30s now have grown up with a skepticism and cynicism about information that even our generation of, you know, millennials and and and also of certainly boomers don't have. You see that disinformation works most effectively among boomers, people in their 40s, 50s, 60s because they they think it's on Facebook, must be real. Um, and so I think they don't have that sort of ingrown skepticism.

But isn't cynicism also part of the problem? Because at that point you just don't believe anything from anyone and therefore you just check out. You become apolitical, right? Which is also uh if we look at the models of these very authoritarian Disneylands—exactly what they want. Want. Yeah. So you—and this is what they've done. So you first you—I mean they've done it through repression by basically pushing people out of the public space or completely destroying the public space and then saying, "You are hap—if you want you can still use social media. You can talk about sports and football. You can talk about entertainment. Uh, you can talk about Andrew Tate uh and that sort of stuff but stay away from social issues. Stay away from political issues." I do fear that's where we're going in the west as well because people are checking out, and that's terrible for a democracy because people are not no longer participating in public discourse, and it's a really particularly bad time to do it because the global expenditure on the military is reaching 2.72 trillion in 2024. That's a 9.4% increase and the highest annual jump since the Cold War. It feels like the world is revving up for war. We keep hearing about the need to increase military spending. We were hearing at one point about a possible draft, right, which was initially going to be optional, and a lot of Europeans were like, "Hell no, we are not going to fight a war in Ukraine or anywhere else." Um, it feels on one hand like the governments around the world are revving up for war, desperate for war, hungry for war. War is profitable for governments, many of them. Um, and at the same time I think there is a growing generation of people, young and not so young, who are just desperate for prosperity and peace, you know, tired of all the conflict.

Already given what we've discussed today, given the networks that you're aware of, given the expansion of of AI and and data uh driven forms of control, how optimistic are you that the voice of the people can push through and make itself heard even in democratic societies, and what would you advise people to do at this time?

Well, my outlook is probably more dystopian than utopian. Um, unfortunately, so I mean there are different phases, right? Nothing is ever like I said, we don't live—network times are never binary times. Everything is possible. You can have live in time of peace and war at the same time. Um, I think everything is blurry. Everything will remain blurry. I think the greatest threat is AI in terms of—we have a whole generation of people who will compete with machines, and these are not the blue-collar jobs. These are the white-collar jobs. People who go work in banks, insurance companies, you know, people went to university will find it very difficult to find jobs, especially paying jobs that pay for them to actually sustain their livelihood. That I think in the west is a problem. Prosperity is the number one threat. Maintaining levels of prosperity, and unfortunately I I'm very pessimistic that we will be able to solve that issue. I mean, I don't know where the silver bullet is to to solve that issue. So we all have to live with less and have to go, you know, and but what we need is more equity uh as and and more equality as well. So there is enough money in the market, there is enough money in society, but we need to just find a way to more justifiably and more more more justly u kind of distributing the wealth. That's I think a key challenge which I I again I don't see any of the governments in the west being able to really tackle it. We have a Labour government. Don't think that we're able to to to to deal with this. I do also think that we will live in times where stability in the way that our parents uh, you know, the boomers have been used to or the stability that we grew up in in the in the '90s, that these sort of stability we don't go—we won't go back to that. Um, when it comes to the dystopia—so we initially about social media, we talked about liberation technology that was like, "Wow, democratization, that's great," right? We were super hopeful, super hopeful; now we're going into a phase of thinking, "Oh my god, it's the opposite"—liberation technology is repressive technology, dictatorships 2.0, authoritarianism 2.0, you know, it's true. Um, but I think it's—we're going from one extreme to another extreme. Every action has a reaction, and we kind of somewhere will find an equilibrium of working and dealing with the environment. There's one thing I can say is that the human race is extremely resilient. And yes, for the first time in human existence, we are competing with machines which are on an equal cognitive footing as we are um and potentially even more powerful than us. uh in in just about—not in a 100 years, not in a 50, not in 50 years. We're talking five to 10 years when things are radically going to change, but afterwards we always go back to an equilibrium of stability.

Well, on that note, Andreas, I'd like to thank you for your insights today. Thank you for your time on the tea. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you found today's conversation insightful. At the tea, we are committed to bringing you meaningful discussions that often go unheard. If you believe in independent content, we'd love your support. Hit that subscribe button now. Join us on Patreon and help keep these conversations alive. Until next time, stay informed, stay awake, and we'll see you soon for more tea. Thanks for watching the tea. Please remember to like and subscribe. And if you've made it this far, why not keep going and check out this