By Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Artificial intelligence is not a tool for generating texts and images any more. It has grown far more unsettling, becoming capable of simulating voices and faces with chilling accuracy, fabricating videos, impersonating identities, and flooding the digital space with content in a few minutes.
Worse still, it has handed information warfare a near-fictional power, namely the ability to mimic human speech, distort facts, spin simultaneous competing narratives, study audiences in granular detail, and then speak to each group in the precise language, cultural references, religious symbols, and political instincts that move them most deeply.
When this capacity is fused with cyber intrusion, disinformation, and psychological targeting, society itself becomes the battlefield and human consciousness the most vulnerable and most decisive infrastructure under attack.
The true danger lies in the fact that the victim often never realises he/she is one. They passionately defend a carefully planted narrative that has taken root in their digital world, while simultaneously attacking the very truth that has been deliberately buried beneath a torrent of fabricated content, all designed to convince them that their convictions are entirely their own.
In Arab societies, where screens have become the primary window through which millions learn of war, politics, and the world beyond their borders, this reality carries a particular dread.
The digital arena risks turning into a silent war zone in which truth and falsehood become indistinguishable, and no one can any longer tell which ideas arose naturally within the community and which were deliberately injected from outside.
To bring this picture into sharper focus, consider some of the advanced strategic tools that have been used to exert pressure on Arab and Islamic countries … politically, economically, and in the realm of security.
Deepfake technology then enters the stage, unveiling highly realistic audio and video fabrications of statements that are attributed to Arab and Muslim leaders and designed to ignite crises between brotherly nations.
These manufactured scandals become instruments of blackmail, leveraged to extract political concessions, including normalisation, security agreements, or the quieting of public opinion.
Technology monopoly and security extortion follow. Israel’s advanced technology and security sector, most notably systems, such as the Pegasus spyware, create a dangerous dependency.
Once Arab countries adopt AI systems that incorporate Israeli subsystems in education, healthcare, or government administration, those systems can be disabled through hidden backdoors. Sensitive citisen data can then be leaked, turning digital infrastructure into a tool of coercion.
Arabic digital content itself is placed under siege. Pressure is applied on major technology platforms, many of which technologically aligned with Israeli interests, to alter algorithms so that Arabic and Islamic voices critical of Israeli policies are systematically isolated. The further threat is the withdrawal of AI features from local markets should anti-Zionist speech not be banned.
Economic leverage is applied with equal precision. AI algorithms that guide global financial markets and investment decisions can be fed poisoned data, producing inflated or misleading risk assessments of Arab economies. Capital flees, currencies weaken, and the resulting crisis becomes another bargaining chip for political gains.
Security systems are not immune. Adversarial attacks, including tiny, nearly invisible alterations to images, have already demonstrated the ability to deceive facial-recognition and intelligent surveillance systems.
Such techniques could trigger false terrorist alerts at Arab airports and border crossings or, conversely, cause real threats to be overlooked, leaving national security dependent on the very companies that supply the software.
Even more intimate forms of blackmail become possible: high-resolution audio or video recordings of an Arab leader appearing to insult Islamic holy sites or attack a neighbouring country.
These fabrications can be held in reserve in the pre-publication stage as leverage to force political or economic concessions, or released to sow chaos and distrust.
Infrastructure itself is vulnerable. Many Arab states rely on imported AI-driven systems for electricity grids, water management, and smart-city operations. The potential to poison the algorithms that control energy distribution means electricity or vital services could be disrupted at any moment as a form of political pressure.
Global investment funds and stock exchanges increasingly depend on sentiment-analysis algorithms that scan news and social media. Electronic warfare units can flood these channels with millions of automated posts suggesting economic instability or the imminent collapse of a bank or an entire country.
Investment algorithms pick up the signal, classify the nation as high-risk, and trigger immediate capital flight, followed by a sharp drop in the local currency. It is economic pressure exerted at a distance, silent and devastating.
Finally, even the visual sovereignty of Islam’s most sacred places is contested. By influencing the indexing and computer-vision algorithms of major technology companies, systems that power tools such as Midjourney, DALL·E, and global image search, search results for Jerusalem or Al-Aqsa Mosque can be made to appear under a distorted Jewish identity, while images of the Two Holy Mosques are linked to hostile political narratives. In this way, the religious symbolism of entire nations is quietly rewritten for millions of viewers around the world.
What emerges is not simply a technological contest, but a struggle over consciousness, identity, and sovereignty in the digital age, one in which the most powerful weapons are those that the target never quite realises are being used.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international
relations scholar
[email protected]
