Paramus native fights back against neo-Nazi site that blamed him for Manchester bombing

Anyone who visited The Daily Stormer, an American neo-Nazi website, on June 1 may have read that a Muslim-American comedian and radio host from Paramus was behind the bombing days earlier at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.

The website fabricated tweets and images in a news article to support its false claim linking Dean Obeidallah to the bombing. Although outrageous, it was enough to spur a host of angry comments, including calls for the New Jersey comic to be lynched or shot.

As a Muslim-American public figure, Obeidallah said he has faced slurs and bigoted comments before. But the fake story was unlike anything he’d seen, he said, defaming him and even encouraging readers to “go confront” him.

“I‘ve read countless articles attacking me,” Obeidallah said in an interview at SiriusXM studios in Manhattan, where he hosts a daily radio show about politics. “No one has actually written an article saying I am a terrorist before. This was stunning, and when I looked at it, I honestly first thought, ‘Is this really going on?’ Then I saw the tweets.”

In August, Obeidallah sued The Daily Stormer and Andrew Anglin, the website's founder and the author of the story. The case has since stalled as lawyers try to locate Anglin, an Ohio native who has been in hiding from this and other lawsuits.

Obeidallah's lawsuit comes at a time when fake news stories are more rampant than ever, and are often widely shared online even when written by dubious sources making far-fetched claims. President Donald Trump himself shared fake and misleading anti-Muslim videos from a British white supremacist group on Twitter in November, sparking a furor in Britain and at home.

The videos were quickly debunked, but White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump’s actions, saying it did not matter that he shared fake news because “the threat is real.”

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But to Obeidallah and others who have been targeted by The Daily Stormer and websites like it, it certainly does matter. As history has proved, fake news has the power to cause real-world harm when it stokes violence against individuals or against groups of people.

‘Fake news,’ real danger

Born in New Jersey to a Palestinian father and a Sicilian mother, Obeidallah long had a love for comedy and left his job as a lawyer two decades ago to pursue his dream of making a living as a comedian. His comedy grew political after 9/11, as he used jokes to break down stereotypes about Muslims and Arabs in America.

Obeidallah has appeared on Comedy Central's "Axis of Evil" and co-founded the popular New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 15th year. He was a frequent guest commentator on news networks before starting his own radio show.

"The Dean Obeidallah Show" now airs five evenings a week on SiriusXM’s Progress station. Obeidallah also writes weekly for The Daily Beast and CNN.com's opinion section.

His frequent denouncements of Islamophobia and criticisms of Trump have stirred the ire of the far right, especially white nationalists. Still, he was stunned on June 1 when The Daily Stormer published an article titled “Dean Obeidallah, Mastermind Behind Manchester Bombing, Calls on Trump to Declare Whites the Real Terrorists.”

The article was posted a week after a suicide bomber set off an explosion inside the Manchester Arena, killing 22 people and injuring more than 100, moments after Grande finished her encore. The Islamic State group claimed credit for the bombing, the worst in Britain since 52 people were killed in a coordinated attack on London's subway system in July 2005.

The Daily Stormer story referred to Obeidallah as an “ISIS terrorist” and a “confessed terrorist” wanted by international authorities. It included images of tweets faked to look like they were posted to his account. He purportedly claimed in the doctored tweets that he was behind the attack, that he hoped more would die in the hospital and that he had fled to Syria.

Also included were fake “retweets,” “likes” and hashtags that Obeidallah has regularly used on his real Twitter account.

In comments on the article, Obeidallah saw a picture of a man holding a gun, and he read messages calling for him to be hanged and stating that “he better pray he dies of natural causes before we get there.”

It was troubling enough that he warned his bosses at The Daily Beast and at SiriusXM for security reasons.

“In today’s world, where outlandish comments can activate people to do horrible things, this couldn’t be dismissed,” said Obeidallah, who lives in Manhattan.

Outrageous, yet believed by some

The claim was far-fetched given Obeidallah’s public persona; he writes columns and is on the radio daily with guests who have included Sen. Bernie Sanders, the comedian Lewis Black and the actor Kal Penn.

He often introduces himself on radio as "your MBFF," or Muslim best friend forever. It's an apt description of a guy whose friends describe him as polite, friendly and kind.

"When this whole thing happened, it was the funniest thing I'd ever heard, because Dean is the most gentle man you'll ever meet," said Maysoon Zayid, an actress and comedian from Cliffside Park who described her longtime friend as an "old-school 1950s gentleman" and a "clean-cut Jersey boy."

Although she found it funny, she knows others might not see it the same way.

"I literally had friends of mine that I’ve been best friends with since we were 5 years old ask me if Obama was Muslim, so it's stunning to me that people really believe what they see on the Internet," she said. "If they can find one source, they believe it."

Obeidallah also worried that people would believe the lies being peddled about him.

“The readership of The Daily Stormer — they’re Nazis,” he said. “They’re literally Nazis. So right there, you’ve got something wrong with you if you’re a Nazi. And the fact that people who have read The Daily Stormer have committed acts of violence makes this not a game.”

The Daily Stormer, his lawsuit notes, is one of the most popular white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites in the world, visited millions of times each month.

And something outlandish and demonstrably false can still be dangerous. Obeidallah recalled another fake story that made the rounds online in fall 2016, claiming that a Washington, D.C., pizza restaurant harbored a child sex ring linked to a Hillary Clinton aide. A man upset over the so-called "Pizzagate" conspiracy opened fire in the restaurant in December 2016.

Obeidallah claims in his lawsuit that others have been inspired to commit violence because of what they’ve read on The Daily Stormer, including Dylann Roof, who fatally shot nine black parishioners in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Fans of The Daily Stormer also included Thomas Mair, the convicted murderer of British politician Jo Cox, and James Jackson, who allegedly stabbed a man in a racially motivated crime in Manhattan in March 2017.

“They’re told a drumbeat of hateful information and they’re told to act on it, and they do,” Obeidallah said. “To me, The Daily Stormer is no different than ISIS. They’re trying to radicalize people to commit acts of terror.”

Social media 'echo chambers'

False news stories and disinformation have been used throughout history as a tool of war and as part of nationalist campaigns — from lies about crimes by African-Americans to Nazi claims of Jews killing Christian children and the recent hate campaigns against Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar.

These days, the Internet amplifies such stories and gives them a boundless platform but few, if any, ways to stop it.

"Now misinformation can travel at the speed of light, especially in social media circles that act as echo chambers, because we rarely communicate with people who think, believe or vote differently than we do," said Julie Smith, a visiting professor at the School of Communications at Webster University near St. Louis.

Smith uses a fake tweet from Anglin, The Daily Stormer founder, as a case study in her media literacy class. The tweet, with an old photo of a white-sheeted Klansman hoisting a Confederate battle flag, falsely claimed the Ku Klux Klan had been rallying on the University of Missouri campus at a time of heightened racial tension. It could have been debunked with 30 seconds of research, she said; instead, it was promptly shared by outraged Twitter users.

People may share fake content because they are more interested in what they believe "than what is actually true," Smith said. Others share it "ironically," she said, or because they "legitimately believe what they see, if it affirms what they believe."

John Ehrenreich, a psychology professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, said people tend to trust reports that are consistent with their beliefs. For instance, if a person thinks Hillary Clinton is a terrible person, he or she might be more inclined to believe something like Pizzagate. People also are more inclined to believe what's shared by friends or by those important to them.

Despite its content, The Daily Stormer was booted by its Web hosting company, GoDaddy, only last summer after a post insulting Heather Heyer sparked outrage. Heyer, 32, was killed in a car attack during a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August. Her mother said she had to bury her in a secret location to protect her grave from desecration by neo-Nazis.

The Daily Stormer has bounced around among other Web hosts since the Charlottesville rally, while Anglin continues to hide from the courts.

Obeidallah hopes he will prevail in court so he can preserve his reputation. But he also wants to deter The Daily Stormer from going after other people.

“The goal of Nazis and white supremacists is to bully people of color and minorities to be silent,” he said. “This lawsuit is saying we’re not going to be silent. On behalf of every other Muslim, every African-American or Jew they demonized, none of us are going to be silent.”

Email: adely@northjersey.com