Dark PR is the ‘service’ the Swiss private investigative firm Alp Services SA offers its clients. Alp Services intentionally published rumors and false misleading information about individuals to discredit and ruin them. Austrian political scientist Professor Farid Hafez was on the receiving end of such a smear campaign. He has filed a lawsuit against George Washington University, Alp Services and others. Professor Hafez gave iGlobenews an exclusive interview to discuss his lawsuit and his quest for justice.
Diana Mautner Markhof
26 April 2024
Arabic version | Chinese version | German version | Spanish version
In March 2023, The New Yorker published an article, “The Dirty Secrets of a Smear Campaign,” revealing a large-scale systematic smear campaign that disseminated false allegations of purported links of European residents to Islamists with the aim of willfully destroying their reputation. The article discussed the case of US-Italian businessman Hazim Nada of Lord Energy SA. The Swiss private investigative firm Alp Services SA targeted Lord Energy because it was seen as an economic threat by the UAE and its state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co.
Alp Services identified Lord Energy as a front company to fund terrorist organizations and hired academics and journalists to write articles falsely accusing Lord Energy of links to the Muslim Brotherhood and funding terrorism.
According to The New Yorker, Alp Services intentionally published rumors, false and misleading information about Muslims in Europe to make millions of dollars from the UAE. Lists of alleged members of the Muslim Brotherhood were compiled and reports written to smear individuals, businesses, and institutions, causing irreparable harm. Documents obtained by Nada after his company’s bankruptcy in 2019 state that Alp Services pitched its services to the UAE in 2017 claiming it would employ “tested advanced confidential techniques in ‘dark PR’” to “discredit and embarrass key targets.”
In order to gather false narratives, Apl Services recruited scholars like Lorenzo Vidino, the director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism (GWU). Vidino not only leads the GWU-affiliated think tank, but also had multiple other relations with the UAE.
Professor Farid Hafez is an Austrian political scientist. He was on the receiving end of such a smear campaign. Hafez along with other POI were targeted in an Austrian police raid in 2020 known as Operation Luxor. Because the repercussions against him in Austria, he decided to leave Austria for the US. Ultimately Operation Luxor was deemed unlawful by the Austrian courts. The police’s terrorism charges against Hafez were eventually dropped. Although he was exonerated, he suffered lasting damage to his reputation.
Professor Hafez has now filed a USD 10 million lawsuit against GWU and Lorenzo Vidino. This is the second such case litigated in US courts this year, the first being the case of Hazim Nada. Professor Hafez gave iGlobenews an exclusive interview and discussed his motivation for filing the lawsuit and what he hopes to achieve.
Farid Hafez is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College and a non-resident Senior Researcher at Georgetown University’s The Bridge Initiative. In 2017, he was the Fulbright-Botstiber Visiting Professor of Austrian-American Studies at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. His latest publication is Politicizing Islam in Austria. The Far-Right Impact in the Twenty-First Century (with Reinhard Heinisch, Rutgers University Press).
iGlobenews: Could you elaborate on why you personally became the target of such a smear campaign? How did this affect you and your work?
Professor Hafez: As a trained political scientist with a focus on right-wing populism, Muslim minorities in the West, and racism, I became the target of Vidino and Alp Services. Vidino used his position at GWU as well as his hidden work for Alp Services to portray me as an enabler of Islamism, arguing that talking about ‘Islamophobia’ was a tool of the Islamists and later even subsuming me under the category of “known Islamist actors and supporters.” This had serious repercussions.
The Austrian State Prosecutor based on the intelligence service’s information – a highly contentious institution given its many scandals that have become public in recent years –used Vidino’s report 14 times in a search warrant that accused me of terrorism and Staatsfeindlichkeit (hostility against the state). Vidino also served three times as an expert witness in the terrorism investigation against me, trying to create a relationship between me and the Muslim Brotherhood, considered a terrorist organization by the Austrian State Prosecutor.
My continuous critique of the policies of the then ruling conversative coalition government which included my critique of nominating Vidino to the Documentation Center Political Islam, was to be halted by declaring me a suspect of terrorism. Beyond the trauma following the brutal intrusion of heavily weaponized police forces, my assets and bank accounts were closed, and my reputation destroyed, leaving me with few other options than to leave my country of origin and to start a new life in the United States, where I currently teach at Williams College as the Class of 1955 Distinguished Professor of International Studies, offering, i.a., courses on Islamophobia.
iGlobenews: What prompted you to file this USD 10 million lawsuit against GWU, Vidino and Alp Services?
Professor Hafez: Despite the GWU Program on Extremism’s tax-exempt not-for-profit status, which requires that all monies be spent in the furtherance of their academic mission and not for pecuniary gain or partisan purpose, and despite the GWU Program on Extremism’s Mission Statement, which would seem to assure academic integrity and independence, the Program was used as a platform for its Director Vidino to work for the United Arab Emirates’ goal of silencing and discrediting rivals and critics.
While I had always suspected shady networks to be behind the crackdown against me, I had never assumed that a private investigative firm like Alp Services would coordinate such a heinous attack, using prestigious academic institutions, scholars and selling its lies to a country that felt under attack by domestic opposition groups.
The investigative story by The New Yorker not only allowed me and others to get a better understanding of the real intentions and structures behind the hundreds of lives whose reputations were destroyed, it also allowed us to seek justice.
I filed a federal class action for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (“RICO”), on 24 March 2024. My lawsuit exposes Vidino, Alp Services and GWU’s Program on Extremism showing how they masterminded a scheme to defraud the public and take advantage of individuals like myself by casting me as a radical and extremist in order to secure undisclosed funding from the UAE.
iGlobenews: Filing a lawsuit against a prestigious university is not an easy move. What is motivating you?
Professor Hafez: Ultimately, on a personal level I want justice to be served, my reputation to be fully restored, and the material and psychological harm to be compensated. On a structural level, I hope that this case will show how cooperation of universities with third parties can be (mis)used, how journalists who are misled by disinformation tactics should become more skeptical vis-à-vis dubious people and their institutions and dig deeper so that innocent people cannot so easily become harmed.
