There has been a lot of reporting about threats phoned into to Jewish centers in the US.

They have become a sizable story, generated more fear and confusion in a public that already doesn’t quite know what to make of their new president. The fact that one person was arrested for threats doesn’t answer this industrial scale phone action. All of which means, the phone threats are a new story – literally – dialled in from abroad.

So I ask myself, could these calls to the Jewish centers across the United States, be carried out by the same Russian groups that have called in threats to schools across Australia and New Zealand? We’ve had these in a couple waves.

Could it be that they field-tested their technology and strategy in the Antipodes before moving on to a bigger target, the US? Could those phone calls also be linked with the same outfit that lit up the switch board for anti-Trump US rightwing blogger Erick Erickson during the US campaign?

See Erickson’s description there, from April 2016.

(This, by the way, was one of the reasons I was suspicious of Trump and Russia early in the election).

Thankfully, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has released the audio of one of the threats to the Jewish center, which makes for interesting listening. Perhaps someone with knowledge of non-native English speaking mistakes could glean something from the speaker’s mispronunciation.

This phenomenon of international phone threats has become something of a trend. Done the right way, it allows the aggressor to influence the news in the target country, which is a form of information war.

If it’s information war, naturally, I think of the lone information war superpower circa 2017, the one winning all the big battles. – Although I could be wrong.

It’s probably worth it for the authorities with the resources to compare notes on the nature of these calls to see if they have something in common.

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