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9/11 video hosting sites crash

All falls down
Monday, 22 September 2008, 13:11

IN AN IRONIC twist, an al Qaeda video celebrating the anniversary of 11 September only appeared on the interwibble eight days late on Friday 19 September after hosting sites crashed and suffered major technical failures.

The hour and a half long video, complete with footage of the deadly attacks and congratulatory messages from al Qaeda leaders, was partially aired on 8 September on Al Jazeera. But then it all went wrong for Al Qaeda, as the websites which usually host the militant videos and propaganda collapsed in spectacular fashion, with a couple remaining down even today.

The eight day delay in the video's release is being blamed on hackers and cyber intelligence units.

"The actual reasons for this are not known to me (and I would say that even if I actually knew what was going on)," Aaron Weisburd of Israeli counter cyber terrorism group, www.internet-haganah.com, told Reuters cynically.

Even when some sites did manage to get the video up, eager downloaders, impatient to see the last will of one of the hijackers, were given a false password. "May God bless you my brothers, but the password is wrong," fumed one irritated Jihadi.

Amongst all this Islamic site crashing, another online war smoldered, as a massive cyber attack took down about 300 Shi'ite sites over the weekend. The Iranian news agency Fars was quick to point the finger at Wahhabi Sunni hackers in the UAE.

Another group of Sunni hackers, by the name of Group XP, said they had also been busy defacing the website of Iraq’s highest Shi'ite authority, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. The defacement, rather ironically, meant visitors to the site could watch American stand up, Bill Maher, poking fun at the Shi'ite cleric, from clips previously posted on YouTube.

Inshalla, all this cyber sniping will keep the factions so busy they'll have no more time for real world troublemaking. µ

L’Inq
Reuters

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Pre-emptive counter flame comment

Several statements to clarify where I'm coming from...

The Haganah operated in the Levant from roughly 1920-ish until roughly 1950-ish. It's political antecedents go back to the 1800s in at least Europe. It was a paramilitary organization that encouraged local, non-Jewish residents of the Levant to leave. Usually some nominally fair payment for land was offered but the message was clear: leave. There is clear evidence that if a sale of assets was declined, the residents had to leave anyway.

The Haganah was not a reaction to the Holocaust. It predated the Holocaust by several decades. The Haganah had political and political-theoretical andecedents going back to the middle 1800's.

There is in some circles and cultures a bogy-word: zionism. It is not a bogy-word: it has solid reasons for existence. AFAICT zionism is/was nothing more than an expression in political terms with a program for it's achievement of the desire of European Jewery for a homeland where they would not be constantly subjected to pogroms. Pogroms in Europe have occurred dating hundreds of years into the past. Pogroms in Europe were often state sponsored. Pogroms in Europe have without doubt more than once rivaled the savagery of the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. Read the Wikipedia article on the term. Whatever you may think of Wikipedia, the article is fascinating, informative, and definitely not the 'history' that is taught in many western high schools. It is also heavily footnoted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haganah is as good an introduction to what was going on in the Levant and some Jewish circles in that era as any scholarly introduction to the subject I've read. I do not think that what Haganah was about was good, but I also know that Hanganah and friends are by no means unique in the history of humanity and it's many cultures.

*I* wrote the above reply and this follow up because I have a hard time getting past the fact that once the shoe was on the other foot, Israel - the state, not AFAICT some majority of citizens of that state - applied policies of paranoia and control to the Palestinian refugees that used to live in what is now Israel. 

To be a Palestinian refugee under Israeli control is a terrible life. To be an X refugee under Y control is terrible, it's not a specially Israeli/Palestinian thing. Several generations of Palestinains have lived in that condition now. 

IMNSHO it takes a callous person indeed to not see that victims of pogroms, or refugees, will start to fight for their human rights.

IMNSHO it takes an idiot to think that suppressing those rights will somehow solve the problem.

posted by : hoohoo, 23 September 2008 Complain about this comment
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