Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign

If you want a hot take about the Middle East, Raphael Badani is your man.

As a Newsmax “Insider” columnist, he has thoughts about how Iraq needs to rid itself of Iranian influence to attract investment and why Dubai is an oasis of stability in a turbulent region. His career as a “geopolitical risk consultant and interactive simulation designer” and an “international relations senior analyst” for the Department of Labor have given him plenty of insights about the Middle East. He’s printed those insights at a range of conservative outlets like the Washington Examiner, RealClear Markets, American Thinker, and The National Interest.

Unfortunately for the outlets who published his articles and the readers who believed them, Raphael Badani does not exist.

His profile photos are stolen from the blog of an unwitting San Diego startup founder. His LinkedIn profile, which described him as a graduate of George Washington and Georgetown, is equally fictitious.

Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon.

Following this article’s publication, the Washington Examiner removed its article written by “Badani,” leaving only an editor’s note: “This op-ed has been removed after an investigation into its provenance and authorship.” Spiked, a British libertarian site, added a note atop both its articles by a fake persona, saying the outlet “takes seriously any claim of questionable authorship.”

The National Interest, The Post Millennial, and The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, all deleted their articles without any statement. Newsmax deleted all articles by “Badani” and scrubbed his profile page listing him as an “insider”—all without any editor’s notes.

The network’s spree of hot takes targeted a range of publications and placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and The Post Millennial, founded by conservative writer Andy Ngo, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.

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