Stripping Rohan Gunaratna Like an Onion: Propaganda, Bias and the Singapore Nexus

Rohan Gunaratna’s recent security analysis presented in Thuppahi represents a deeply biased, methodologically flawed interpretation of contemporary global conflict. In pulling back the layers of a self-proclaimed independent academic, we can see his deep ties to the Singaporean university establishment and, by extension, the state security apparatus. Rather than offering an objective exercise in counterterrorism, his work functions as a calculated piece of state-aligned propaganda designed to advance a specific pro-Israeli and pro-Western ideological agenda. Gunaratna frames a new “third stream of terrorism”—allegedly driven by Iranian state-sponsored propaganda—by weaponizing isolated incidents, such as the 1 March 2026 mass shooting in Austin, Texas, perpetrated by Ndiaga Diagne. His proposed solution relies on heavy-handed state surveillance and the aggressive censorship of social media platforms by tech conglomerates. However, this thesis fundamentally misreads history, utilizes language as a weapon of propaganda, and operates within a closed geopolitical vacuum that ignores the structural architectures under which Gunaratna himself operates.

Gunaratna uses language as a loaded weapon to assign moral culpability one-sidedly. He deploys highly charged, active verbs for hostile non-state actors—asserting that Iran, Hamas, and the IRGC “massacre,” “attack,” “kidnap,” and “incite hatred.” Conversely, state-sponsored violence from the West and Israel is sanitized through passive, euphemistic framing.

The most egregious example is his characterisation of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as an “overwhelming response.” To label a campaign that has systematically decimated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure—leveling schools, universities, hospitals, entire residential blocks, and vital utilities—an “overwhelming response” is a polite obfuscation of structural slaughter and genocide. By reducing the mass killing of over 80,000 Palestinians, primarily women and children, to a mere reactive measure, Gunaratna frames state violence as inherently defensive, lawful, and necessary. In other words, Gunaratna defends state terrorism against the legitimate resistance of a people living under occupation—a resistance that international frameworks, including the UN Charter, define as legal rather than terroristic.

Gunaratna’s methodology relies on a false chronological baseline. By explicitly tracing the current wave of global instability to 7 October 2023, he isolates the conflict from decades of prior history, illegal military occupation, suffocating blockades, and systemic human rights violations. This historical erasure prevents the reader from understanding the deep-seated structural grievances that drive regional resistance, falsely presenting anti-occupation movements as spontaneous outbursts of irrational religious extremism.

Furthermore, Gunaratna practices a highly politicised form of selective humanisation. He dedicates emotionally descriptive passages to the victims of the Austin shooting, detailing their ages, fraternity memberships, and personal ambitions to maximize emotional resonance. Yet, he enforces a total narrative blackout regarding the catastrophic civilian death toll in Gaza and the casualties resulting from the 2026 USA and Israeli military strikes inside Iran. By completely erasing these victims from the ledger, he deliberately obscures the widespread humanitarian distress and collective trauma that fundamentally fuel global protests and anti-imperialist mobilization.

Perhaps the most dangerous element of Gunaratna’s analysis is his deliberate conflation of mainstream political opposition with violent extremism. In his rigid, binary worldview, there is no room for legitimate political critique. He entirely ignores the fact that millions of global citizens, international legal experts, and human rights organizations condemn the policies of Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump on strictly humanitarian, diplomatic, and legal grounds.

By framing any vocal opposition to Israeli military operations as the direct product of “Iranian state propaganda” and online “radicalization,” Gunaratna attempts to delegitimize legal dissent. In his closed narrative, an individual is either entirely aligned with Western-Israeli security frameworks or they are a security threat. This false dichotomy serves a clear authoritarian purpose: it provides national security states with a blank check to surveil, monitor, and censor legitimate political speech under the guise of pre-emptive counter-terrorism.

Gunaratna’s failure to differentiate between legitimate resistance and terrorism ignores a well-documented historical pattern where dominant Western powers weaponize the “terrorist” label to criminalize liberation movements. Under international frameworks, including principles rooted in the United Nations Charter, indigenous populations and occupied peoples possess a recognized right to resist foreign occupation and fight for self-determination.

History routinely vindicates these movements while exposing the biases of contemporary security “experts”

– The African National Congress (ANC) and Nelson Mandela: Throughout the apartheid era, Nelson Mandela and the ANC were officially branded as dangerous terrorists by South Africa’s white minority regime—a designation fully endorsed by the United States, Great Britain, and Zionist Israel, who loathed everything Mandela stood for. Mandela remained on the U.S. terror watch list until 2008, just five years before Mandela’s death. For decades, the Israeli security establishment maintained a lucrative, highly secretive military and intelligence alliance with Pretoria. Israel acted as the apartheid regime’s primary arms supplier, provided operational intelligence to help combat the ANC, and even cooperated on clandestine nuclear weapons development. Yet, despite this massive state-sponsored effort to criminalise their liberation struggle, the global community now embraces Mandela and the ANC as historic freedom fighters and statesmen.

– The Australian Exception: While the United States, Great Britain, and Zionist Israel aligned with the apartheid security apparatus, successive Australian governments broke ranks. Prime Ministers Paukl Keating, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, and Bob Hawke uniformly rejected the “terrorist” application with open scorn, recognizing the ANC as a legitimate liberation movement. Australia led the Commonwealth in enforcing sports boycotts and financial sanctions that ultimately helped bring the apartheid state to its knees and secure Mandela’s release.  Today, Mandela is remembered as one of the great resistance leaders of our age, a great man, for whom the terrorist label was vulgar and absurd.

Gunaratna follows in the exact footsteps of the apartheid-era analysts who preceded him. By flattening complex, legally recognized struggles against foreign occupation into a simple matrix of “global terrorism,” he deliberately mislabels freedom fighters to preserve an oppressive status quo.

To understand the core bias of Gunaratna’s output, one must look at the geography of his career. Based primarily out of Singapore, Gunaratna operates within the exact geopolitical nexus that anchors Israeli intelligence operations in Southeast Asia. This context lends weight to critiques that dismiss him as an institutional proxy for Western and Israeli intelligence narratives.

The strategic alliance between Singapore and Israel is both deep and foundational. Following Singapore’s abrupt independence in 1965, Israel covertly dispatched military advisers—officially cloaked as “Mexican agricultural advisers”—to construct, train, and equip the Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) from the ground up. Because Singapore’s security and military architecture was modelled explicitly on the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), deeply integrated intelligence-sharing protocols were established at an institutional level—positioning Singapore is the base for Mossad operations in Southeast Asia.

This tight-knit security apparatus sets Singapore apart from its immediate neighbours, Malaysia and Indonesia. These Muslim-majority nations maintain no formal diplomatic ties with Israel and remain highly hostile to Israeli intelligence operations. Consequently, security analysts view Singapore as the primary safe haven and logistical launching pad for Mossad and Israeli state operations targeting regional networks. This intelligence footprint has repeatedly manifested in high-stakes operations across the border into Malaysia. Documented incidents include:

– The botched abduction of a Palestinian IT specialist by a Mossad-recruited local cell in Kuala Lumpur in September 2022, where the interrogation was conducted via a live video link by Mossad handlers.

– The targeted execution of Hamas-linked Palestinian academic and rocket-making expert Fadi al-Batsh, who was gunned down by a professional Mossad hit team on a motorcycle in Kuala Lumpur in April 2018.

–  The March 2024 apprehension of an armed 36-year-old Israeli national at a luxury hotel in Kuala Lumpur, carrying multiple fake passports and an arsenal of handguns. While officially prosecuted as an underworld syndicate hitman, the operation triggered a massive national security lock-down, with Malaysian intelligence remaining deeply suspicious that the mafia narrative served as a classic layer of plausible deniability for deep-cover state espionage. In other words, a Mossad operation.

Ultimately, Gunaratna’s credibility has been thoroughly ruined within international security communities. He is not a scholar in the pursuit of knowledge, but an academic propagandist nurtured within the Singapore university establishment. His historical track record is defined by sensationalized, thoroughly debunked assertions. Most notably, his 2003 claim that Al-Qaeda commanders were actively plotting operations from Australia was publicly and explicitly dismissed as completely baseless by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Furthermore, his aggressive, unauthorized methods have drawn severe state backlash, culminating in his formal deportation from Indonesia in September 2005 for conducting illicit espionage under the guise of ‘terrorism research’ in the volatile Maluku province.

Security circles in both Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta routinely reject his analyses for fabricating regional threats, misreading local political dynamics, and pushing for panoptic state surveillance models. In fact, his abrasive and unauthorized methods have long drawn quiet backlash across the region; insiders close to Gunaratna have disclosed that he was quietly expelled from Malaysia years before his behaviour triggered a more public diplomatic incident in Jakarta. This private disclosure matches a verified pattern of direct state intervention, which culminated in his formal, documented deportation by Indonesian authorities in September 2005 for the improper use of a visa while conducting illicit ‘terrorism research’ in the volatile Maluku province.  There is little doubt that the information he has collected, including tracking down the addresses of targets, has found its way into Mossad operations, which perhaps explains the improper visa use to deport him. Rather than offering a rigorous academic framework for understanding global security, Gunaratna’s work serves to manufacture consent for Western-Israeli military overreach. When his analytical failures are viewed alongside his operational base in Singapore, there is more than sufficient reason to conclude that Gunaratna functions essentially as an instrument of Israeli security narratives, wrapped in the guise of a neutral Sri Lankan academic.

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