Wednesday, March 29, 2006

70 Years Ago - Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

I thought that this series of three contiguous articles in the Palestine Post from March 30, 1936 was interesting.

A Muslim sheikh spreading incitement against Jews?
Preventing Jews from visiting holy places purely because they are Jews?
An Arab found with explosives?

Good thing we have advanced since 1936, right?

Insane Muslim Protester of the Day 3/29

You would think that the people who claim to have created algebra would know how to add 1+1.

Jersey City, 8:20 AM

The Yahoo MB refugee bloggers

I've mentioned before that I used to spend inordinate amounts of time on the Yahoo! news message boards, arguing about Israel with Jew-hating morons, before I switched addictions and now spend inordinate amounts of time blogging.

I just wanted to point out a few blogs from fellow Yahoo! refugees that are updated regularly:

A March of Folly
The Atheist Jew
Eye on the World

And updated a little less regularly:
Callie is Chatty
Carl's Blog

One of these things is not like the other

Our friends the Saudis have been playing interesting games again.

(Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Washington Turki al-Faisal) called on Israel to disarm to create a nuclear-free Middle East. “We all know that Israel has atomic weapons and that’s why removing these threats from the Middle East on a uniform basis would serve Israel’s purpose as well as the rest of the countries in the area,” he said.

In Seattle, he said

The development of nuclear weapons by any Middle Eastern country is "totally unacceptable."

And finally:

BERLIN (AFP) - Saudi Arabia is working secretly on a nuclear programme, with help from Pakistani experts, a German magazine reports in its latest edition, citing Western security sources.

The German magazine Cicero says that during the Hajj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia in aircraft laid on by the oil-rich kingdom.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them took the opportunity to "disappear" from their hotel rooms, sometimes for up to three weeks, it quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998 thanks to the work of the now-disgraced Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Cicero, which will appear on newstands on Thursday, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan's nuclear weapons "because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear programme".

The magazine also said satellite images prove that Saudi Arabia has set up in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles.

Here's the Allah Fish!

Yes, a fish has been found in a British pet store that "clearly" has the Arabic words "Allah" and "Mohammed" marked on its sides. This is causing a stir in the Muslim 'ummah.

There is a video on the site as well that reverently describes the phenomenon, with awe-inspiring Arabic music.

Apparently, the fish has been sold. I hope it tasted good.

(Hat tip: LGF)

Saudi ambassador: Osirak bombing was a good thing

How funny is this?

Israel’s 1981 attack on Iraq’s nuclear reactor was “probably” fortunate, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington said.

Asked March 23 whether Saudis now welcomed the attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor, given Iraq’s subsequent aggression against Kuwait, Turki al-Faisal answered, “Probably, yes.” Faisal appeared caught off guard by the question, which came when he called on Israel to disarm to create a nuclear-free Middle East.

I'm sure that the clarifications and corrections are imminent...

Hamas: Let the world destroy Israel for us

Hamas has out-Arafated Arafat.

They realize that they do not have to lie. All they have to do is make sure that their spokesmen wear suits, use the word "peace" incessantly when even they will admit that their idea of peace means that Israel doesn't exist, and let the world do what it does best: pressure the Jewish state to make more and more concessions.

Of course, terror apologists like AFP are more than happy to play along, with headlines like:

Hamas ready for international Mideast peace push

...when even in the contents of the article it says

Hamas government was ready to talk to the international community to end the Middle East conflict but would not change its hardline stance on Israel.

But that is enough to call it a "peace push!"

And as AFP goes, so goes Europe.

When one side makes its red lines clear to begin with, the international community has no choice but to pressure the side that really has none.

Feds stop Israeli company purchase

Checkpoint, the Israeli company that makes the most popular firewall product worldwide, has been effectively stopped from buying an American company, Sourcefire. Sourcefire creates Snort, an open-source intrusion detection software, as well as some commercial products that build on Snort.

It was done by the same government panel that approved the Dubai ports deal.

Forbes reported in early March:

The company was told U.S. officials feared the transaction could endanger some of the government's most sensitive computer systems.

The objections by the FBI and Pentagon were partly over specialized intrusion detection software known as "Snort," which guards some classified U.S. military and intelligence computers.

The contrast between the administration's handling of the $6.8 billion Dubai ports deal and the Israeli company's $225 million technology purchase offers an uncommon glimpse into the U.S. government's choices to permit some deals but raise deep security concerns over others.

The 45-day investigation into the Israeli deal still under way is only the 26th ever conducted in 1,600 business transactions reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States. The panel, facing criticism by Congress about its scrutiny of the ports deal, judges the security risks of foreign companies buying or investing in American industry.

In private meetings between the panel and Check Point, officials from the FBI and Defense Department objected forcefully to permitting any foreign company to acquire some sensitive Sourcefire technology for preventing hacker break-ins and monitoring data traffic, an executive familiar with the discussions told The Associated Press. This executive spoke on condition of anonymity because government negotiations are supposed to remain confidential.

William Reinsch, a former senior U.S. official who participated in reviews under President Clinton, said the Israeli sale involves more dire security issues than the administration's recent approval for a Dubai-owned company to take over significant operations at six major American ports.

"This raises a lot more important issues," said Reinsch, a former Commerce Department undersecretary. "The most important case is where we're making an irrevocable technology transfer to a foreign party. Port operations raise security issues, but the ports are still in the United States."

Many things do not make sense about this:

Snort is open-source, meaning that the technology is completely open and transparent to the world. There is no additonal security risk to having Israel own the rights to the code that is already publicly known, even if the government is heavily using Snort. (The feds could take the open-source Snort and build new versions based on that, rather than use the new ones thast Checkpoint would come out with.)
The government already uses Checkpoint firewall software, and that in theory is far more problematic than intrusion detection software. For years, people who distrust Jews have spread rumors that Checkpoint put backdoors into the firewall software so they can break into computers at will. Of course it is untrue (the downside of having something like that discovered is so much worse than any perceived benefit as to make the idea ridiculous.)

Anyway, firewall software is in the critical path of data; intrusion detection systems are not. If the Israelis can be trusted with firewall code, there is no additional risk for IDS.
Anyone who thinks that trusting Arabs who support terror with port security makes more sense than trusting Israelis with perceived data security is insane.

So what's going on? Was it an overreaction to the criticism over Dubai? Was it latent anti-semitism in the FBI and Pentagon? Was it a complete misunderstanding of technology?

This is a bit troubling.

Pakistani military: Al Qaeda works with Jews and Hindus

In an astonishing display of how ingrained the Jew-hatred is in the real Muslim world, the Pakistani military dropped pamphlets on villages near the Afghan border, telling residents not to cooperate with "foreign terrorists" because they work together with Jews and Hindus. Knowing full well that the residents hate Jews and Hindus with a passion, they figure a little bigotry can be a useful tool.

And, of course, everyone knows that the Jews and Hindus are the real terrorists and that true Muslims are incapable of hurting a fly. I mean, duh.

TANK, Pakistan - Pakistan’s military airdropped pamphlets this week over towns in restive tribal regions near the Afghan border urging tribesmen to shun ”foreign terrorists”, saying they were part of a Hindu and Jewish plot.

The pamphlets were dropped over Wana, the main town in South Waziristan, and Miranshah in North Waziristan as part of a campaign to win support among tribesmen who have shown sympathy for both Taleban and remnants of Al Qaeda living among them.

A Reuters reporter in Tank, a town close to the boundary with the semi-autonomous tribal agency of South Waziristan, obtained one of the pamphlets, bearing the sign-off “Well Wishers, Pakistan’s Armed Forces”.

Titled “Warning”, the pamphlets said the foreign militants were fighting against Pakistan in connivance with “Jews and Hindus”, a term that would play on traditional prejudices among the region’s Muslim conservatives. (Notice that Reuters doesn't describe them as "militants" or "hardliners" or "bigots," but just as "conservatives.")

“This war is against foreign terrorists and their harbourers who are fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with Jews and Hindus against the state of Pakistan,” it added.