Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala said:
يأَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ اجْتَنِبُواْ كَثِيراً مِّنَ الظَّنِّ إِنَّ بَعْضَ الظَّنِّ إِثْمٌ وَلاَ تَجَسَّسُواْ وَلاَ يَغْتَب بَّعْضُكُم بَعْضاً أَيُحِبُّ أَحَدُكُمْ أَن يَأْكُلَ لَحْمَ أَخِيهِ مَيْتاً فَكَرِهْتُمُوهُ وَاتَّقُواْ اللَّهَ إِنَّ اللَّهَ تَوَّابٌ رَّحِيمٌ
Character assassination is very cheap and very easy, particularly in the era of computer hacking, digital editing, and internet anonymity. It is an effective tactic both for governments and individuals to use against their enemies.
Every country’s intelligence service functions, at least partly, as a blackmail machine; gathering information, fabricating evidence, threatening, intimidating, and often, ruining enemies of power. Sometimes what they use to blackmail is true, sometimes half-true, sometimes complete fiction. But that is the power of character assassination; authenticity barely matters. We can think of the suffering of Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia, for example.
For individuals, it is often the tactic of the cowardly and intellectually incompetent, who are incapable of debate, and feel threatened by the effectiveness of others.
The same way that a gun can make a weak man bold, so a coward can spew slanders and ghiba online with no fear. Some will listen, some will believe, and when the target of the malicious scandal-mongering begins to respond to allegations, some will listen, some will believe; but the objective is essentially accomplished: relevant issues are no longer being discussed, and the target of the attacks has been effectively neutralized.
But why does it work so well? Three reasons, I think.
First, because people tend to care about their reputations. It is important to them to maintain a good image, and they want people to think well of them. Thus, it is highly disturbing to them when they are slandered, insulted, publicly accused and so on.
Second, and this is something I have written about quite a bit; we always make the mistake of personifying ideas. In the public mind, the man becomes an incarnation of an idea, a principle, a cause, etc; and so, when he is attacked or publicly humiliated, his ideas are also discarded.
Third, it works because people tend to turn public figures into imaginary beings that have no shortcomings, make no mistakes, and are not entitled to privacy. Therefore, standard gossip becomes amplified and scandalous. Somehow it is believed that their personal lives have public impact
The attacks against me, and the basically obsessed campaign to discredit and embarrass me appears to be both an example of a classic state intelligence smear campaign, and also a petty personal vendetta against me that has been developing for many months.
Sadly, the most vicious and degraded and distorting tactics have not actually been those of state intelligence, but those undertaken by a fellow Islamist. This, I suppose is because, as Allah Subhanahu wa Ta’ala said:
وَقُل لِّعِبَادِى يَقُولُواْ الَّتِى هِىَ أَحْسَنُ إِنَّ الشَّيْطَـنَ يَنزَغُ بَيْنَهُمْ إِنَّ الشَّيْطَـنَ كَانَ لِلإِنْسَـنِ عَدُوًّا مُّبِينًا
And indeed, Shaytaan has created a level of destructive discord in this matter, from which no one benefits but our enemies.
Rather than being from people of the ayah:
وَإِذَا سَمِعُواْ اللَّغْوَ أَعْرَضُواْ عَنْهُ
Instead, he and his companions believe that it increases their honor to disgrace their brother.
Here’s the thing; I have already been slandered in the media for almost a decade, accused, been indicted on the basis of false evidence, betrayed, hated, shunned, stripped, tortured, beaten, electrocuted, locked in a concrete box, publicly humiliated, exiled from the country of my birth and lost my family.
I stopped having an ego to protect years ago.
I have not attacked this man, neither for his personal conduct (which is known to me and many), nor for his political rhetoric, though it would be easy to do both. His personal mistakes, like those of anyone, are not relevant to anyone but himself and his family, and I ask Allah to cover and forgive them. I will not retaliate. I have no interest in fighting between Muslims, scandal-mongering, gheebah and nameema.
And if I had any interest in my reputation, and saving myself from being attacked, I would never have written a word about Egypt. Because of the strategies I have advocated, though they have not been implemented entirely in accordance with my recommendations; the power structure has noticeably shaken. The power structure in Egypt, and the global power structure. For this, I know that attacks against me will not stop, whether from this man or from others. But I did not become involved in this struggle to be admired, I got involved in this struggle to be useful.