Iran announces success of space rocket | Jerusalem Post

Iran announces success of space rocket | Jerusalem Post

Now on YouTube: Iraqi insurgent propaganda | Jerusalem Post

Now on YouTube: Iraqi insurgent propaganda | Jerusalem Post

Soyinka deplores decline in free expression

Soyinka deplores decline in free expression

FBI Reports On Missing Laptops and Weapons - washingtonpost.com

FBI Reports On Missing Laptops and Weapons - washingtonpost.com

MEMRI TV

if the old saying goes an enemy's enemy is my best friend and every Arab country's friends of Israel

\MEMRI TV

Egyptian Parliament Member Mustafa Bakri: Iran Is an Enemy, Just Like the U.S. and Israel

Following are excerpts from an address by Egyptian MP Mustafa Bakri, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on January 4, 2007. Mustafa Bakri: Iran is an enemy, just like America and Israel. We should not be misled by slogans. What is happening now is a mark of shame on the forehead of all three – George Bush, Iran, and Israel. It is a mark of shame on the forehead of the Arab nation, which kept silent, and left Saddam to be slaughtered, just like the animal offered on the Feast of Sacrifice. This was a message of humiliation to the Muslims and Arabs: "We are slaughtering a lamb, just like you slaughter lambs." What humiliation and disgrace we suffer. Why are we afraid, and why do we continue to issue such worthless, despicable statements, which are more harmful to us than to others? What we need is a united Arab Islamic stand, before what happened in Iraq repeats itself in Egypt, in Sudan, in Syria, and in Saudi Arabia. The Arabs are being targeted, brothers. All the forces of evil are raging against us. Iran has its aspirations, the Zionists have their aspirations, and America has its plan for hegemony in the region. We must unite, and the Egyptian people must awaken from its slumber. Where is the Egyptian people? Where is the official Egyptian position? Where are the Arab rulers, who should have come to the aid of their brother, because their turn will come. Demonstrator: There is no god but Allah, and America is the enemy of Allah. Crowd: There is no god but Allah, and America is the enemy of Allah. Demonstrator: There is no god but Allah, and Israel is the enemy of Allah. Crowd: There is no god but Allah, and Israel is the enemy of Allah. Demonstrator: What is happening now in Iraq will happen tomorrow in Cairo. Crowd: What is happening now in Iraq will happen tomorrow in Cairo. Demonstrator: George Bush, you lowlife, Saddam's blood is not cheap. Crowd: George Bush, you lowlife, Saddam's blood is not cheap. Demonstrator: Oh Saddam, oh martyr, tomorrow we will bomb Tel Aviv. Crowd: Oh Saddam, oh martyr, tomorrow we will bomb Tel Aviv. Demonstrator: Resistance to the occupation is the response to the execution. Crowd: Resistance to the occupation is the response to the execution.

Tucson Weekly Print Friendly

Tucson Weekly Print Friendly

Terror War on the Web

An Arizona Internet company unknowingly hosted an extremist Web site, raising questions about freedom of speech

By JOHN LASKER

Terrorist Web sites are turning up in the strangest places.

During the Super Bowl, Scottsdale-based GoDaddy.com, one of the world's largest Web site providers, paid $4 million to air a 30-second commercial. It was the one where a curvy brunette, who couldn't quite keep everything tucked inside her tight-fitting tank top, was testifying before Congress.

The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based company also can take credit for inadvertently making a different kind of impression.

For weeks before the big game, GoDaddy.com hosted Mawsuat.com, an Islamic-extremist site that featured a diagram showing how carry out an assassination attempt against a motorcade, as well as a recipe for making a chemical weapon.

The cost to produce the Mawsuat.com site? It could have been less than $100.

The site vanished, however, when GoDaddy.com removed it from its servers after being notified by Internet Haganah, a private effort describing itself as an "Internet counterinsurgency" against Islamic-extremist sites linked to terror groups.

"Our legal department is handling this case, and I cannot comment on the matter," said Nick Fuller, a spokesperson for GoDaddy.com.

GoDaddy.com is the flagship company of The Go Daddy Group, Inc., which includes Wild West Domains, Inc., a domain reseller company. GoDaddy.com hosts thousands of Web sites, and its success has not gone unnoticed. Go Daddy Group won the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for fastest growing privately-held company in 2003, and the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for most innovative large company in 2004.

Also taking note of GoDaddy.com's success, and the Web sites they host, are the U.S. State Department, the Defense Department and the Justice Department. GoDaddy.com is not the focus of any publicly known investigation, but they have become entangled in a debate over whether the government and military should take action against the growing presence of Islamic extremism on the Internet.

"There are some tremendous questions being raised about this," says Retired U.S. Army Reserve Col. Lawrence Dietz. One question, he says, is "whether they (CIA, FBI) have the legal mandate and the authority to do this (shut these sites down)."

Dietz, who now works for a Silicon Valley-based computer security firm, knows how to wage information warfare. He led NATO's I-War (information war) in Bosnia. When asked if the United States is losing the I-War against Islamic extremists, he hesitates.

"I think so," he then says.

He says one big I-War thorn for the United States has been the Internet. Experts say the presence of Islamic radicalism on the Web has grown markedly since Sept. 11. The Internet has become a vital means of communication, financing and indoctrination for jihadism, widely believed to be a decentralized movement. Moreover, the cost of broadcasting a political message to the world has taken an unprecedented plunge. "It's a high-visibility, low-cost activity," says Dietz.

Consider the Nick Berg execution, which was filmed with a camcorder, formatted into a Microsoft Windows Media Player file and posted on the Web site Al-ansar.net. The State Department has designated Al-ansar as a foreign terror organization. The Web site was hosted by a company in Malaysia, and hours after posting the Berg video, the Malaysian government forced the company to shut the site down.

Dietz says the Berg video is fueling an internal debate among the State Department, the Department of Defense and others about how to handle terror sites. Some claim the U.S. government should confiscate servers or hack extremist sites with a defacement or denial of service attack, he says. However, Dietz believes that others within the State Department argue that censoring Web sites would be a double-standard against our nation's policies of promoting free speech.

The government apparently remains on the sidelines. Meanwhile, out of a home in Illinois, A. Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah (haganah.org.il), a grassroots effort confronting Islamic radicalism on the Internet. In Hebrew, "haganah" means defense. Weisburd's tactics, however, are hardly defensive.

A native New Yorker, the 40-something Weisburd and his "small band of researchers, analysts, translators and consultants" from around the globe have shut down 600-plus Web sites--some allegedly raising funds for Hamas, Hezbollah and insurgents in Iraq. One site stated that a donation for as little as $3 buys one bullet.

Weisburd says first a site is researched, and a Whois inquiry is made. If they find evidence of extremism, they'll try to persuade its hosting company to remove it from the hosting company's servers. Surprisingly, much of Internet Haganah's work is focused on the United States, where Web sites are cheap and privacy policies assured.

"There are close to 300 sites listed in our database," wrote Weisburd, who asked to speak through e-mail. "Most of them are kept online by American companies."

For instance, GoDaddy.com. One can still view a Mawsuat.com "mirror" page of the motorcade-assassination diagram on haganah.org.il. The diagram was originally published in the Al Battar Assassination Guide, "produced by Al Qaeda of the Arabian Peninsula," writes Weisburd.

Weisburd says in no way is GoDaddy.com promoting terror, and in many ways, the company is a good corporate citizen. GoDaddy.com donated $250,000 for tsunami relief; they've adopted military units overseas, and founder Bob Parsons is a proud veteran who was wounded in Vietnam. But many Web hosts are simply not aware of their clients' content, believes Weisburd. Most terror sites are written in Arabic. And considering one company can host thousands of sites, most companies lack the capacity to monitor each one, he states.

Weisburd says his goal is simple: to keep the extremists moving from address to address, striking "at the heart of their identity."

"The object isn't to silence them; the object is to keep them moving, keep them talking, force them to make mistakes, so we can gather as much information about them as we can, each step of the way."

Muslims 'about to take over Europe' | Jerusalem Post

Muslims 'about to take over Europe' | Jerusalem Post

srael and the West should work to strengthen moderate forces within the Iranian population, he urged, via an aggressive propaganda campaign including the use of television and radio programs.

"All the evidence is that the regime is extremely unpopular with their own people," he said. "I am told that the Israeli daily [radio] program in Persian is widely listened to all over Iran with rapt attention." Israel and the West should also be looking to reach out to moderate forces within the Arab world, which are equally alarmed by the spread of extremism in their midst, said Lewis. "The Arab governments understand that Israel is not their biggest problem," said Lewis.

Eye On The World

Eye On The World

Paris, France (CNSNews.com) - A year after an Islamic furor over the publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed, a two-day trial that opened in Paris Wednesday is a key test of freedom of expression, according to press freedom advocates here.

The Paris Mosque and the Union of Islamic Organizations of France are suing Charlie Hebdo, a satirical weekly newspaper, accusing it of insulting Muslims and inciting religious hatred by publishing three cartoons.

Two of the cartoons were reprints from a series of 12 published by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005. [...]

Dalil Boubakeur, rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, has said the cartoons went beyond satire and insulted all Muslims by associating them with terrorists.

"We don't want censorship, we don't want the sacred to be protected by blasphemy laws or medieval jurisprudence," Boubakeur said in televised comments Tuesday. [...]

The mosque is being represented in the case by Francis Szpiner, who is also President Jacques Chirac's lawyer.

When Charlie Hebdo originally published the cartoons, Chirac criticized them as provocative and said they could "dangerously stir passions."

France is entering a presidential election campaign. Among the witnesses called to testify at the trial on behalf of Charlie Hebdo are opposition Socialist party leader Francois Hollande and centrist presidential candidate Francois Bayrou. The paper also presented a letter of support from the front-running center right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy. [...]

Al-Suri's Doctrines for Decentralized Jihadi Training - Part 1

For your next assignment class...

Al-Suri's Doctrines for Decentralized Jihadi Training - Part 1

Using his most common pen names—Abu Mus'ab al-Suri and Umar Abd al-Hakim—he has written a 1,600 page treatise, The Call to Global Islamic Resistance, which is among the most frequently mentioned jihadi strategy books.

Combining his newly acquired military skills with his previous training in mechanical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Aleppo, he co-authored a handbook in explosive engineering, which was then his specialty. Al-Suri claims that this handbook, which became known as "The Syrian Memorandum," was later used in the Arab-Afghan camps in Afghanistan. In July 1987, al-Suri met with Abdullah Azzam, the godfather of the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan, and was quickly enlisted as a military instructor.

Following the publication of his 900 page treatise The Islamic Jihadi Revolution in Syria, published in Peshawar in May 1991, he gradually emerged as a jihadi writer and theoretician of some stature.

The book was a frontal attack on the Muslim Brotherhood and was in many ways a Syrian parallel to Ayman al-Zawahiri's The Muslim Brothers' Bitter Harvest in Sixty Years, which appeared at the same time.

Both works were part of the intellectual foundation for the radical jihadi trend that emerged as a considerable force inside the Arab-Afghan movement after Azzam's death in November 1989.

As opposed to many other jihadi writers, al-Suri always strived to maintain a practical and "operative" perspective, emphasizing the need to learn from past mistakes and devise new practical "operative theories" (nazariyat al-'amal) for future jihadi campaigns [4]. In his most important works, he focused on explaining how jihadi groups should operate in order to survive in the new post-Cold War context characterized by enhanced international anti-terrorism cooperation and the progressive elimination of terrorist sanctuaries and safe havens

all of al-Suri's operative theories are built on the premise that the tanzim model—the centralized hierarchical and regional secret jihadi organization—has outlived its role. Their Achilles' heel was their hierarchical structure, which meant that if one member was caught, the whole organization would be at peril.

Al-Suri, therefore, recommends that future jihadi warfare should be concentrated around other forms, namely the "jihad of individual terrorism," practiced by self-contained autonomous cells in combination with jihadi participation on "Open Fronts," wherever such fronts are possible

Hence, the practice of "individual terrorism" is a core theme in al-Suri's most recent writings, and it is rooted in his most famous slogan: nizam, la tanzim (System, not Organization) [6]. In other words, there should be "an operative system" or template available anywhere for anybody wishing to participate in the global jihad either on one's own or with a small group of trusted associates, and there should not exist any "organization for operations."
(This goal parallels that of Al Battar Online training camp of Al Qaeda (mem).

The decisive factor for successful jihadi training is the moral motivation and the desire to fight, not knowledge in the use of arms, al-Suri asserts.

Al-Suri finds the religious foundation for jihadi training in two Quranic verses, namely verse 60 of Surat al-Anfal and verse 46 of Surat al-Tawbah. The former is perhaps the most frequently cited Quranic verse among jihadis. It contains an injunction to prepare for "striking terror in the hearts of the enemies" [12]. It has therefore been a point of departure for a considerable number of jihadi writings on the legitimacy of "terrorism" in Islam [13]. Verse 46 of Surat al-Tawbah, "And if they had wished to go forth they would assuredly have made ready some equipment, but Allah was averse to their being sent forth and held them back and it was said (unto them): Sit ye with the sedentary," demonstrates, according to al-Suri, God's disgrace over the hypocrites who fail to prepare for war [14]. He concludes from reading these two verses that there are three stages in the performance of jihad: "will...preparation...launch."

"The Changing Face of Terror: A Post 9/11 Assessment," Testimony Before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by Ambassador Henry A. Crumpton, Coordinator for Counter-terrorism, Washington, DC, June 13, 2006, http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/rm2/68608.htm.

I mentioned this two weeks ago in a post highlighting the defining work on Nasar, Brynjar Lia’s “The al-Qaida Strategist Abu Mus’ab al-Suri: A Profile.”

In some ways, Nasar’s writing reminds us of the late Saudi jihadist Yusuf al-Ayiri’s, especially since both not only preached, but actually participated in jihad

Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Scott Borg

Lifeboat Foundation Bios: Scott Borg

IT security checklist focuses on consequences of breaches

IT security checklist focuses on consequences of breaches

US gets Israeli security for Super Bowl | Jerusalem Post

US gets Israeli security for Super Bowl | Jerusalem Post

US Muslim Rep. blasts Holocaust denial | Jerusalem Post

US Muslim Rep. blasts Holocaust denial | Jerusalem Post