Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Friday, July 20, 2012

HuffPo writer insinuates Bulgaria was Israeli "false flag" operation

Sometimes you will run across a self-proclaimed "journalist" who will try to write halfway sober analyses for mainstream, leftist sites and go whole-hog crazy in the unfettered nutcase sites.

Meet Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich.

Her Huffington Post bio page says:

Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich has a Master's in Public Diplomacy from USC Annenberg for Communication. She is an independent researcher and writer with regular contributions to various online blogs. Soraya is a public speaker and political commentator.

While her articles at HuffPo are sympathetic to Iran, they don't show her crazy side.

Like this:

Netanyahu, one of the most dangerous Israeli leaders, is demanding another war so that he may continue the aggressive usurpation of Palestinian and Arab lands uninterrupted by public opinion and disregard for international laws. The thuggish Netanyahu came to Washington to demand surrender from its puppet master, America, like every other Israeli politician before him. He demands sacrifice from Americans in the firm belief that all sacrifice is justified having witnessed his own brother Yonatan Netanyahu get killed in a 1976 Israeli false flag operation in Entebbe, Uganda.

Lending support to his conviction is the American cover-up of US servicemen murdered by Israel. When the USS Liberty was attacked by Israelis and the servicemen deliberately massacred, the Johnson Administration’s cover-up of the tragic event send a clear message to Israel: American leaders have your back, even if you murder our citizens.

Or when she spouts bizarre conspiracy theories about the United States and Osama Bin Laden.

Or when she describes a secret Jewish conspiracy to fool Americans into loving Jews and Israel in the 1950s and 1960s:

Imperative data indicates that Anti-Semitism in the U.S. was at its peak at the end of WWII. ... One cannot erase from history the fact that the United States was so critical of the Jewish people that Woodrow Wilson was criticized for his nomination of Brandeis to the Supreme Court - he was not considered 'white'. In the 1920s there was widespread discrimination against the Jews including housing and "Christians Only" employment advertisements. What changed?

In the 1950s, during the Cold War, a widespread acceptance of the Jews came about. The change, a geo-political necessity, took place with the help of propaganda. In 1953, John Foster Dulles ...stated that "the world religious community has claims in Jerusalem which take precedence over the political claims of any particular nation." ( Dulles speech, June 1, 1953, Israel Relations (6), Subject Series, Papers of John Foster Dulles, box 10, Eisenhower Library ).

Israel bonded the Christian Americans with the geo-strategically vital oil-rich region. Americans 'ties' to Israel required a unity of religions with a strong sense of belief in the ' Holy Land '. Hollywood helped cement the bond with movies such as "Samson and Delilah" which promoted the Jewish male as strong and masculine and "The Ten Commandments", shown in the Knesset ( Moses and Ben-Gurion," Time, May 30, 1960 ) to cement the bond.

America 's most famous journalist, Edward Murrow (who went on to become the USIA Director in the Kennedy administration), led the way to promoting Jerusalem as the city where Jesus walked. Jerusalem as a territory gained importance, was connected to 20th century America and played in the psyche of the American people. Not long after, the tables were turned on Americans.

So it is not too surprising that this Iran-supporting, Jew-hating "journalist" is being quoted by Russia Today:

RT: But Israel is the victim in this case. Somebody bombed those buses. Do you think there is a legitimate concern that it could be Iran, or who else do you think could be possible suspects here?

SSU: I think many in your audience will know that Israel excels at false flag operations. And in fact in 2004, the New Zealand Herald revealed that Israelis tried to steal New Zealand passports in order to carry out assassinations. And they had stolen Canadian passports to kill members of the Jordanian political elite.

I can’t say for certainty that Israel was behind this or that this was a false flag attack, but I only look at who gains by this operation judging from their past behavior. And to me it does not make sense that Iran would want to carry out this operation.

How equivocal. She's only 98% sure that Israel bombed its own citizens.

(h/t Zach, Lori, and HuffPo Monitor had this as well)

Hamas blaming Egypt, PA for restricting fuel delivery

Ma'an reports:

Egyptian authorities have restricted the amount of Qatari fuel entering the Gaza Strip through an Egyptian crossing with Israel, an Egyptian source said Monday.

While the Al-Ouja crossing in Egypt's northern Sinai has the capacity for ten trucks of fuel per day, Egypt only permits six trucks to cross, the official said, noting that this amount cannot meet Gaza's energy needs.

And Hamas is now also blaming Egypt, not Israel, for the current fuel shortage, saying that it has documented Egyptian fuel trucks arriving late to the Al Ouja crossing while Israeli fuel trucks are waiting to receive it.

Hamas charges that Egypt comes up with new excuses every day for delays and problems, blaming transportation issues, or security issues, or a lack of vehicles. In a statement, Hamas said that it has heard many excuses from Egypt that all indicate that this is a deliberate policy to restrict the amount of fuel going to Gaza.

Moreover, Hamas charged that the amount of fuel that Egypt is claiming to be sending is not matching up with the amount that Israel says it is receiving and shipping to Gaza, demanding an investigation and implying that Egypt is skimming some of the fuel. Interestingly, Hamas is not blaming Israel for doing anything wrong.

The amount of fuel entering Gaza has not been enough to keep the power plants running at close to their capacity.

Another Hamas spokesman decided to blame the PA instead, saying that they are behind the power crisis and charging that they are stopping the implementation of agreements to build power lines to Gaza from Egypt.

Because of these issue, Hamas is bizarrely threatening to not accept fuel from Egypt altogether, presumably to pressure Cairo into opening up Rafah when the photos of Gaza kids with candles go over the wires.

US officials agree Iran behind attack; A'Jad gloats about it (UPDATES)

The NYT reports:

American officials on Thursday identified the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating Israel’s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.

One senior American official said the current American intelligence assessment was that the bomber, who struck Wednesday, killing five Israelis, had been “acting under broad guidance” to hit Israeli targets when opportunities presented themselves, and that the guidance had been given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by Iran, its primary sponsor. Two other American officials confirmed that Hezbollah was behind the bombing, but declined to provide additional details.

The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has blamed Israeli agents — an accusation that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. “This was tit for tat,” said the American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way.

A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the Burgas attack was part of an intensive wave of terrorist attacks around the world carried out by two different organizations, the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as by Hezbollah.

“They work together when necessary, and separately when not necessary,” the Israeli official told reporters on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss national security issues.

While the Burgas attack fit the modus operandi of Hezbollah, the Israeli official said, it was not clear whether the bomber intended to blow himself up or had suffered what the official called a “work accident,” adding, “We will never know.”

The bomber had a fake Michigan driver’s license, but there are no indications that he had any connection to the United States, the American official said, adding that there were no details yet about the bomber like his name or nationality. He also declined to describe what specific intelligence — intercepted communications, analysis of the bomber’s body parts or other details — that led analysts to conclude that the bomber belonged to Hezbollah.

“This looks like he was hanging out for a local target, and when this popped up he jumped on it,” the official said, referring to a bus carrying Israeli tourists outside the airport in Burgas.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a news conference on Thursday in Jerusalem that the attack in Burgas was carried out by “Hezbollah, the long arm of Iran.”

And Iran's president seems to admit it.

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad gloated publicly on Thursday over the deaths of Israelis in a terror bombing in Bulgaria, and hinted that Iran was responsible for the attack.

Speaking hours after Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly blamed the bombing Wednesday at Bulgaria’s Burgas airport on “Hezbollah, directed by Iran,” Ahmadinejad described the attack as “a response” to Israeli “blows against Iran.”

“The bitter enemies of the Iranian people and the Islamic Revolution have recruited most of their forces in order to harm us,” he said in a speech reported by Israel’s Channel 2 TV. “They have indeed succeeded in inflicting blows upon us more than once, but have been rewarded with a far stronger response.”

He added: “The enemy believes it can achieve its aims in a long, persistent struggle against the Iranian people, but in the end it will not. We are working to ensure that.

Ahmadinejad’s speech was interpreted in Israel as asserting that the Burgas bombing was a revenge attack for the killing of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has repeatedly blamed Israel.

His remarks contrasted with a condemnation of the Burgas bombing by the Iranian Foreign Ministry earlier Thursday.

(h/t Yoel)

UPDATE: The speech was mistranslated, according to the BBC:

Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was not gloating over the Burgas bombing in a speech Thursday in which he spoke of Iran’s enemies getting hit back with greater harm than they cause, the BBC’s Persian Service correspondent in New York said Sunday.

Bahman Kalbasi, a native Persian speaker who follows Ahmadinejad’s speeches closely, said any Persian speaker would confirm that the Iranian president “was in no way referring” to the previous day’s attack in Bulgaria in which five Israelis and a Bulgarian was killed, and which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had publicly blamed on Hezbollah and Iran just hours earlier.

Israel's Channel 2, according to this report, apparently mixed up the tense he was using in their translation of the speech.

Kalbasi said the key sentence was in the future tense, rather than the past — “And if anytime they harm us, we will harm them back. And usually the harm we cause is greater than the harm they cause” — and that Ahmadinejad has said “things like this” many times before.

However, while the description of the speech on the Iranian presidential website uses future tense, the official translation of the speech on the Iran presidential website uses present tense:

President Ahmadinejad said: “The enemy deals a blow to the Iranian nations step by step; but, in return, it receives a stronger, heavier blow."

It is not obvious that Ahmadinejad is talking about Burgas, but the fact that he made this speech the day after the bombing makes that interpretation a reasonable - if arguable - one. "Gloating" may be too strong a word - "strongly hinting" might be more accurate - but given that before Bugras there had been no major successful Iranian attacks against Israeli targets since the wave of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists (and Stuxnet,) I'm not sure how else to interpret the speech.

(h/t Hasbara Buster, Yoel)

Ha'aretz removes idiotic piece by Amira Hass (in English)

On Wednesday, Ha'aretz published a piece by one of their resident Israel-haters, Amira Hass, called "The Anti-Semitism that Goes Unreported:"

Here's a statistic that you won't see in research on anti-Semitism, no matter how meticulous the study is. In the first six months of the year, 154 anti-Semitic assaults have been recorded, 45 of them around one village alone.

...It's no accident that the diligent anti-Semitism researchers have left out this data. That's because they don't see it as relevant, since the Semites who were attacked live in villages with names like Jalud, Mughayer and At-Tuwani, Yanun and Beitilu. The daily dose of terrorizing (otherwise known as terrorism ) that is inflicted on these Semites isn't compiled into a neat statistical report, nor is it noticed by most of the Jewish population in Israel and around the world - even though the incidents resemble the stories told by our grandparents.

This is the especially dumb argument that has been used by anti-semites for years, purposefully ignoring the definition of anti-semitism and the history of the term. Helen Thomas is only one of the more recent morons to push this argument in order to push her own anti-semitic agenda.

Of course, Hass actually engaged in anti-semitism in the article itself, by saying that "They are grabbing as much land as possible, using pretexts and tricks made kosher by the High Court of Justice."

The weird thing is that while the piece was of course gleefully picked up by the usual Israel-haters, it has disappeared from Ha'aretz' website.

As stupid as the piece is, it is a wonder that this is what Ha'aretz decides crosses the line, after all the vicious invective in the newspaper over the years against Judaism, Israel and Zionism.

(h/t Warped Mirror)

UPDATE: :The article is still on the Hebrew Ha'aretz site. (h/t EOL)

The victims

Here are photos of the Israeli victims of the terror attack in Bugras:

The Jerusalem Post has details:

The Interior Ministry on Thursday released the names of the five Israelis : Itzik Colangi, 28, Amir Menashe, 28, Elior Price, 26, Maor Harosh, 25, and Kochava Shriki, 44.

Itzik Colangi and Amir Menashe were good friends from Petah Tikva. Colangi's wife GIlat gave birth to their first child, Noya, four months ago, and his birthday was two weeks ago. The couple decided to celebrate in Burgas with their friends Natalie and Amir Menashe, who have a ten-month-old son, Rom. Gilat was severely injured and Natalie was lightly injured from the terrorist attack, while Itzik and Amir were killed while packing their luggage onto the bus.

Colangi will be buried Friday at 10:30 a.m. at the Segula cemetery in Petah Tikva. Menashe will be buried at the same cemetery at 11:30 a.m. Harosh and Price will both be buried at Nahalat Asher cemetery next to Kefar Mecher at 12:00 p.m. and 15:00 p.m. respectively. Shriki will be buried at the old cemetery in Rishon Lezion at 12:30. Elior Price, a student, and Maor Harosh, an electrician, grew up together in Acre and went on vacation to Bulgaria with another close friend, Daniel Fahima. Harosh and Price were killed, while Fahima was severely injured.

Kochava Shriki of Rishon Lezion, was pregnant for the first time after years of fertility treatments. She gave her family the good news shortly before leaving for vacation in Bulgaria with her husband Yitzhak. After the attack, Yitzhak, who was injured, searched for Kochava in the rubble and in the hospital in Bulgaria, and learned of her death a day later.

"The children are ready" (video)

From Israel's Temple Institute, to commemorate the beginning of the Nine Days of mourning over the destruction of Jerusalem that starts tonight:

Too many Jews are ceding the holiest place in Judaism while the Muslims fight tooth and nail for it every hour of every day.

We need more videos like this.

(Plus, the idea that Islamists might see this and freak out makes it well worth posting.)

Meanwhile, the Im Tirtzu video that I created subtitles for last month now has an official English version:

Israel saving the world, again

From Israel21C:

“Monoclonal antibodies” may sound like a great name for a heavy-metal band, but actually they’re the basis of best-selling pharmaceuticals raking in about $50 billion dollars a year.

The two-year-old Israeli company Immune Pharmaceuticals is fast emerging as a leader in developing new ways to use these antibodies, which are found in drugs such as Herceptin for breast cancer, Remicade to treat autoimmune diseases and Erbitux for head, neck and colorectal cancer.

“We are building an Israel-based Center of Excellence for Monoclonal Antibody Drug Development with access to best-in-class novel technologies from world-class academic institutions including the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Weizmann Institute of Science,” says founder and CEO Daniel Teper. “We expect to initiate collaborative research programs with biotech and pharmaceutical companies later this year.”

Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science played a significant role in developing these drugs, which are prescribed selectively to patients likely to respond best. “This is a big step up from the 1990s, when everyone with a certain disease got the same drug,” says Teper.

Today’s monoclonal antibody drugs must be administered together with chemotherapy, which often is effective but can cause significant collateral damage.

At the recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago, the buzz was about new drugs combining the power of anti-cancer drugs with the targeting abilities of antibodies. The first generation of those drugs, antibody drug conjugates, is now being approved for resistant cases of Hodgkin’s disease and breast cancer.

Immune is going one step further, using nanotechnology and biotechnology to deliver existing and new cancer drugs more safely and effectively.

While currently only a few chemo pharmaceuticals can be attached to each antibody, Immune’s “guided missile” system “puts thousands of toxic drug molecules inside a nanoparticle like a spaceship, so it’s imprisoned until it gets to the cancerous tissue,” says Teper.

The method was developed by a team under Hebrew University Pharmacy School dean Shimon Benita, who chairs Immune’s scientific advisory board. Immune licensed it from the university’s technology transfer company.

“It has a double targeting mechanism — it goes through vessels into tissue, and the antibody gets it right into the cell. People are now saying the future of medicine, and specifically the future of treating cancer, is in the targeted missile.”

Shimon Peres and lots of Israelis wish Muslims a happy Ramadan

Muslims commenting on YouTube are not accepting these greetings very gracefully.

PLO "Boy Scouts" in Beirut singing of martyrdom

This video is from 2007 but just got posted to YouTube, from Vice Magazine:

(h/t Ishai)

Links

From Ian:

Bulgaria statements:
Peres: Israel will hit terror nests around world
PM Netanyahu
President Obama
Secretary of State Clinton
Candidate Romney
Foreign Secretary Hague
UNWatch: Reactions to Today's Terror Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria
Nothing yet from Navi Pillay or the UNHRC.

Video: IDF Medical Delegation Arrives at Bulgaria Following Terror Attack

Timeline: Attacks on Jewish and Israeli targets abroad

“Since the terrorist attack on Israel's Olympic team at the Munich games almost 40 years ago, some 300 people have been killed in strikes against Israeli and Jewish targets. A breakdown of terror attacks.”

Buenos Aires Bombing Remembered

IOC spurning of memory of murdered Israeli athletes should come as no surprise

"Today, the Palestine Olympic Committee is headed by Jibril Rajoub – himself no stranger to terrorism, having joined Fatah in his youth and been convicted of throwing a grenade at Israeli soldiers in 1970. Rajoub was released from prison in 1985 under the 'Jibril deal' prisoner exchange with the PFLP-GC."
“Neither does Rajoub steer clear of using his sports-related posts as leverage for his political agenda. In June 2012 he demanded that UEFA cancel Israel's hosting of the 2013 European Under-21 Championship and he was active in campaigning on behalf of Palestinian Islamic Jihad operative Mahmoud Sarsak.
As recently as May 2012, Rajoub volunteered to lead a campaign to have Israel expelled from all Olympic unions and committees and stated that he opposes any form of 'normalisation' with Israel, including in the field of sports.”

Anti-Semitism Sweeping France by Peter Martino

“If Europe fails to protect its Jews, it must be feared that soon Christians, too, will no longer feel safe in Europe. When the Jews are made to flee, it will not be long before others will have to flee as well.”

Jihadi Tourism Hits Europe by Soeren Kern

“European security officials are especially concerned about reports that al-Qaeda is recruiting and training Western operatives who have "clean" criminal records and have the ability to travel freely and blend in with European and American cultures.”

According to the BBC, Israel has no capital city

“Taxpayer's money once again funds the delegitimisation of Israel - this time via the Olympics”
“Israel is the only country listed, correct at the time of writing, that has no capital according to the BBC. Yet they bestow the honour of having East Jerusalem as a capital on the country of ‘Palestine’.”

(UPDATE: BBC changed it, but it is still problematic.

A reader emailed me:

The Israel and Palestine Olympics pages were somewhat changed now:The Israel page:
Key Facts section:They added:Seat of government: Jerusalem, though most foreign embassies are in Tel Aviv.
The Palestine page:Key Facts section:The word 'capital' was deleted. Instead they now write:Intended seat of government: East Jerusalem. )

Hizbullah Website Features Infographic On Closing The Strait Of Hormuz, Illustrates Iranian Attack On U.S. Aircraft Carrier

Murder Attempt in Hebron

“Late yestaerday afternoon an Arab terrorist threw a boulder at a sixty year old man from Kiryat Arba as he bathed in the Abraham spring at Tel Rumeida in Hebron.”

Islamic militants kill two Egyptian soldiers in Sinai

"Soldiers machine-gunned while patrolling on foot in town near Gaza border"

Banning circumcision in Germany

After district court bans circumcision Chancellor Merkel warns against becoming "only country in the world where Jews cannot practise their rituals"

Also, must read: "Jewish Blood Is Cheap" (Tablet)

Why the IOC refusal [to allow a minute of silence in memory of the Israeli Olympic athletes murdered in 1972]? The Olympic Committee’s official explanation is that the games are apolitical. The families were repeatedly told by long-time IOC President Juan Samaranch that the Olympic movement avoided political issues. He seemed to have forgotten that at the 1996 opening ceremony he spoke about the Bosnian war. Politics were also present at the 2002 games, which opened with a minute of silence for the victims of 9/11.

The families have also been told that a commemoration of this sort was inappropriate at the opening of such a celebratory event. However, the IOC has memorialized other athletes who died “in the line of duty.” At the 2010 winter games, for example, there was a moment of silence to commemorate an athlete who died in a training accident.

The IOC’s explanation is nothing more than a pathetic excuse. The athletes who were murdered were from Israel and were Jews—that is why they aren’t being remembered. The only conclusion one can draw is that Jewish blood is cheap, too cheap to risk upsetting a bloc of Arab nations and other countries that oppose Israel and its policies.

(h/t Yerushalimey)

Don't have time for a full post but read Legal Insurrection and Israellycool, plus the links to Wikipedia and The Long War Journal (2010) as well as The Weekly Standard from 2009.

UPDATE: Sweden's intelligence agency denies this.And so does Bulgaria. So this seems to have been just a Facebook rumor that got picked up by the media.

Bob Costas' minute of silence for the Olympics

From The Hollywood Reporter,

At the July 27 Opening Ceremony from London, Costas plans to call out the IOC for denying Israel's request for a moment of silence acknowledging the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches at the 1972 Games. On the 40th anniversary of Munich, it's a decision he finds "baffling." When the Israeli delegation enters the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium, Costas will stage his own protest: "I intend to note that the IOC denied the request," he says, modulating his voice as if he were on the air. "Many people find that denial more than puzzling but insensitive. Here's a minute of silence right now."

Honest Reporting comments:

An IOC-backed moment of remembrance is still the most appropriate way to mark the anniversary of the terrorist attack on Israel’s athletes. After all, it’s part of the Olympic history as much as any of the athletic events of that year. But if the IOC is turning a blind eye to its own legacy, having Bob Costas step in and rectify the issue in front of a massive audience of US Olympic watchers may well be the next best thing.

Who knows, maybe other members of the media will follow suit.

Here's an idea:

When the Israeli delegation enters the stadium, they should stop dead in their tracks and stand silently for exactly one minute.

Syrian rebels warn Assad with video of Qaddafi's corpse (graphic)

From Al Arabiya:

Syrian activists are circulating what they claimed to be the first video showing former Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi as a dead corpse.

Sami al-Hamwi, a Syrian activist, who tweeted the circulated video posted on YouTube, warned Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to remember what has happened to the Libyan dictator.

Previous posted videos on Qaddafi’s death, did not show him dead, but showed him alive when he was captured near Sirte.

In the new video, however, he was shown dead, bloody and waering nothing on the top. He was surrounded by rebels inside a van with its back doors open to transfer him to a stretcher.

There was an earlier video of Qaddafi's corpse, however, which ran on Al Jazeera:

New State Dept. anti-jihadi strategy: Trolling

From Wired/Danger Room:

In the decade since 9/11, the U.S. government has used a wide variety of tactics against terrorists. It’s invaded countries where they operated (and ones where they didn’t). It’s tried to win the backing of foreign populations in which the terrorists hide. And it’s sent commandos and deadly flying robots to kill them one by one.

One thing it hasn’t done, until now: troll them.

Within the State Department, a Silicon Valley veteran has quietly launched an improbable new initiative to annoy, frustrate and humiliate denizens of online extremist forums. It’s so new that it hasn’t fully taken shape: Even its architects concede it hasn’t fleshed out an actual strategy yet, and accordingly can’t point to any results it’s yielded. Its annual budget is a rounding error. The Pentagon will spend more in Afghanistan in the time it takes you to finish reading this sentence.

But it also represents, in the mind of its creator, a chance to discourage impressionable youth from becoming terrorists — all in an idiom they firmly understand. And if it actually works, it might stand a chance of cutting off al-Qaida’s ability to replenish its ranks at a time when it looks to be reeling.

The program, called Viral Peace, seeks to occupy the virtual space that extremists fill, one thread or Twitter exchange at a time. Shahed Amanullah, a senior technology adviser to the State Department and Viral Peace’s creator, tells Danger Room he wants to use “logic, humor, satire, [and] religious arguments, not just to confront [extremists], but to undermine and demoralize them.” Think of it as strategic trolling, in pursuit of geopolitical pwnage.

...Viral Peace doesn’t have a strategy yet. And to hear Amanullah and his colleagues tell it, the State Department won’t be the ones who come up with one. It’s better, they argue, to let Muslims in various foreign countries figure out which message boards to troll and how to properly troll them. Americans won’t know, say, the Tagalog-language Internet better than Filipinos; and as outsiders, they won’t have the credibility necessary to actually make an impact. The best the State Department can do is train good trolls — which Amanullah began to do this spring.

That means taking a big risk. If Viral Peace works as intended, with the trainees taking control of the program, Amanullah and the State Department will have little control over how the program actually trolls the terrorists. And the first wave of meetings in Muslim countries shows how far the program has to go.

...

In April, Amanullah dispatched two young associates, Humera Khan of the U.S.-based counter-radicalization think tank Muflehun and the playwright and essayist Wajahat Ali, to set the idea into practice. They took a quickie tour of Muslim nations to meet young local leaders who might be interested in confronting extremism. It was a pilot program for Viral Peace and a related program of Amanullah’s called Generation Change. The idea was to connect notable people — rising stars in the arts, business and culture fields, who had an online following — with one another and to people who focused on counterterrorism.

“You don’t need to teach this generation how to use social media. They know how to use Twitter. They know how to use Facebook,” says Khan, who participated in Viral Peace in her individual capacity. “The whole [Viral Peace] curriculum is about learning what strategy is.”

Except that the first wave of Viral Peace didn’t yield a strategy. In Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia — Ali went to Pakistan as well — the opening meetings brought together about 30 people per country, selected by the State Department and Amanullah’s own social networks, for sprawling brainstorming sessions. Some of them were just about how Muslim communities are perceived in their own countries. And some participants didn’t place counterterrorism at the top of their agendas.

“Yes, there were issues of extremism” discussed, Khan says. “But by and large, the people felt that if you could deal with economics, education, making sure the rights of the underprivileged were maintained, it would take care of a lot of the other problems.”

That may be, but it’s also far afield from trolling the trolls. Amanullah accepts that mission creep is a risk. But, he contends, if you want to get the most effective people denouncing jihadis online, it’s a risk worth accepting. And unlike the U.S. government, they stand the better chance of getting lurkers to think of them as “actually a cool group of people to be in,” as Amanullah puts it.

What’s more, Amanullah has basically no budget. Viral Peace, a global program, has mere thousands of dollars in annual seed money so far; the Obama administration is asking for about $85 billion for the Afghanistan war next year. Participants are staying connected via Facebook, with minimal U.S. government presence as a middleman; Amanullah wants to expand to more countries soon. But it’s not clear where Viral Peace fits in Obama’s broader counterterrorism strategy: White House officials declined repeated requests to comment for this story. Amanullah sees it as a supplement to existing counterterrorism efforts — not a replacement for, say, drone strikes in Yemen — and he also concedes that his project will take a long time before it starts to pay counterterrorism dividends.

But Amanullah doesn’t view that as an unconquerable obstacle. He thinks of counterterrorism like a venture capitalist might.

“I come from Silicon Valley, from the start-up environment. I want to prove you can do small, inexpensive, high-impact projects that don’t just talk about the problem but solve the problem,” he says. “And solve it the right way: not with the government’s heavy hand but by empowering local people to do what they already know to do but don’t know how.”

It is worth throwing a few bucks at; it certainly can't hurt and deflating jihadist egos is a fun thing to so.

(h/t Sasha)

Photo of Bulgarian suicide bomber, more updates (UPDATE: video of burning bus)

UPDATE 3: He was identified.

From Frog News, Bulgaria:

Some initial reports from eyewitnesses indicated it was a female suicide bomber, and it is easy to see why they thought so.

His backpack is large enough to hold a very powerful bomb.

JPost notes:

The man was filmed walking around the airport for an hour prior to the attack by security cameras on the premises, according to the report. His body sustained the most damage in the blast, leading investigators to believe that he set off a bomb located on his person when he boarded the bus.

An FBI check of the document's found on the man's body, including a passport identifying him as a Michigan resident, determined that they were counterfeit, according to the report.

Bulgaria site Novinite says the death toll has risen to eight, as an Israeli victim succumbed overnight as did the Bulgarian bus driver.

Algemeiner has photos of Zaka members recovering bodies from the scene. (Original photos at the Zaka site, some graphic.)

JPost has interviews with people who were on the bus.

One young woman, Gal Malka, who flew to Bulgaria on a vacation before being drafted into the IDF, told Channel two by phone from the scene, “We got on the bus. There were a lot of people on it... Suddenly someone got on there, and something exploded. We heard a boom. And we actually saw body parts. We tried to escape. The door was closed. But there was a hole in the side, through which me and my friend escaped.”

Malksa said there were bodies all around her, and that many people were screaming. She said she bandaged a man who was suffering heavy bleeding from his head.

After the earth-shattering blast, “I opened my eyes and saw that everything around me was fire,” Malka later told Ynet.