Caroline Glick argues that Israel needs to do a more effective job of fighting the information war.
WHAT ALL of this shows is that information wars are not just about getting out the facts. Like kinetic warfare, they involve power plays, intimidation and the use of subconscious and visceral manipulation.
Israel has recently awoken to one aspect of information warfare. It has recognized the consequences of years of demonization of Israel in Europe and international organizations. But Israel has yet to awaken to the fact that it is a type of warfare and has to be countered with counter-information warfare.
Obviously this doesn't mean that Israel should begin acting like its enemies. But what it does mean is that Israel must begin using more hard-knuckle techniques to defend itself. It must begin targeting people's emotions as well has their minds.
For instance, when Israel is confronted by threats of lawsuits for acts of self-defense, it responds with defense attorneys. When the US was threatened with lawfare by Belgian courts, then secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld responded by threatening to remove NATO headquarters from Belgium.
When Israel is accused of targeting Palestinian civilians, it responds by attaching legal advisors to combat units. What it should be doing instead is providing film footage of Palestinian children being trained as terrorists and exploited as human shields.
War is a dirty business. Information warfare is a dirty form of war. And if we don't want to lose, we'd better start fighting.
Read the whole thing. You'll also find out why I put a picture of Koby Mandell HY"D (may God avenge his blood) at the top of this post.
Labels: Caroline Glick, Hezbullah, information war, Koby Mandell, Palestinian Authority
posted by Carl in Jerusalem
Sunday, January 2, 2011
A New Alliance for Israel?
The Bible warns us to be aware of foreign alliances. Some of Israel's friends warn her that the American superiority won't last forever.
There is no reason why Israel should not pursue such a “hedging” strategy as it recognizes that U.S. military forces are going to disengage from the Middle East in the future and that the U.S.-Israeli alliance is bound to weaken.
Alliances are by nature temporary. Would the Anglo American bond survive a Sharia Law takeover in Britain? Will France put an end to the annual Muslim car bombings? How will the USA curb the Iranian launching pads for missiles aimed at the US from South America?
The newly-ratified START treaty may have some salubrious effects, but who can predict the reactions from North Korea, China and Iran?
Will Israel undergo nuclear disarmament without first knocking out Iran's nuclear capacity? Will all nations surrender their enriched uranium stocks for lower grade ones? Will India and Pakistan reach a peaceful agreement?
The world is a dangerous place not a friendly card game.
Wickileaks exposed some of the delusions and misinformation that cloud so-called foreign relations by the so-called intelligence community.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Assange States Arab Ambassadors Work 4 CIA
In an interview with al-Jazeera's Arabic language network on Wednesday, Wikileaker Julian Assenge claimed to have names of Arab diplomats who are spying on their own countries for the CIA.
“These officials are spies for the U.S. in their countries,” Assange said, according to Qatar's Peninsula newspaper. More:
The interviewer, Ahmed Mansour, said at the start of the interview which was a continuation of last week’s interface, that Assange had even shown him the files that contained the names of some top Arab officials with alleged links with the CIA. [...]
Some Arab countries even have torture houses where Washington regularly sends ‘suspects’ for ‘interrogation and torture’, he said.
He then complained, "Washington is also projecting me as a terrorist and wants to convince the world that I am another Osama bin Laden."
Observers have long speculated about the massive "insurance" file that WikiLeaks posted on the Pirate Bay, which has by now been downloaded by thousand of people all over the world. Opening the file requires an encryption key that presumably would be released upon Assange's incarceration or untimely death. I guess it's the motherlode.
At Foreign Policy, Blake Hounshell doesn't believe it.
I have my doubts about these new claims, though. The CIA vigorously protects the identities of its sources, and would have no reason to let any old schmo at a U.S. embassy know their names. It is also highly doubtful that the cables would talk about "torture houses" -- the United States has always denied that it (knowingly) outsources rough treatment to foreign governments. Not everyone believes this, mind you, but I'd be surprised if any embassy cables said otherwise.
Maybe Assange and Mansour are confusing ordinary visits of Arab officials to U.S. diplomats with "spying," but it's hard to say for sure without seeing the cables themselves.
Hounshell is too quick to dismiss the stories of outsourcing torture. You can watch a CBS 60 Minutes report on outsourcing torture to Egypt and Jordan here, and there are reports that US was outsourcing torture of terrorists to those countries dating as far back as 2002. (To make it clear, I'm not criticizing that; I'm acknowledging the reality).
As to disclosing the names of Arab officials who are spying for the CIA, Hounshell knows this region well enough (he's based in Qatar) to know that ironclad evidence that would hold up in court is not a necessity. The accusation - especially coming from someone like Assange who is seen as somewhat credible - would be sufficient to put these peoples' lives in danger. I'd bet on the Qatari government telling al-Jazeera not to discuss this again. Because it's probably true.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Arab spies for the CIA, Julian Assange, Wikileaks
posted by Carl in Jerusalem
Southern Poverty Legal Center Subversive & Dangerous
The Southern Poverty Law Center's Unintelligence Report Pamela Geller, American Thinker
The Southern Poverty Law Center's ironically named "Intelligence Report" for Winter 2010 contains a hit piece entitled, "Geller, Jones Amp Up Anti-Muslim Hate Rhetoric."
More disinformation and outright lying from Leftist propagandists.
Their skullduggery is apparent in their presentation of a false narrative. Notice how they are conflating me and my work with the cartoonish Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who gained international fame by threatening to burn the Qur'an - and then backing down. This is Goebbels-style propaganda. Jones is a media creation, a fringe pastor who Tweeted something stupid - that he was going to burn the Qur'an -- and the media descended like locusts. The Ground Zero Mosque story worked in just the opposite way: it became national news in spite of the media's silence, and the American people stood against the mosque despite the media's relentless cheerleading for the Islamic supremacist slumlord Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and the other shady Ground Zero Mosque organizers. The Ground Zero mosque was the people's story, the people's outrage, a cry against the disrespect and insult.
The very idea that merely questioning in a free society would get you preeminent status in the SPLC "Intelligence Report" speaks volumes about how less free we really are, as the left tightens its chokehold on the culture, the media, and politics.
As for my bus ads, they were not "anti-Muslim." They merely offered help to those who were threatened with death in America for leaving Islam, under Islam's traditional death penalty for apostasy - like Rifqa Bary, the Ohio convert from Islam to Christianity who says she was threatened by her father and was certainly threatened by other Muslims on Facebook. Is the SPLC saying that people who receive such threats don't deserve protection? Are we not all equal under the law? Are the lives of Muslims trying to escape the sharia worth less than the Islamic supremacists imposing the sharia in America?
SPLC: "She warned that Muslims will ‘turn to further intimidation, murder and terrorism' if they can't achieve a political takeover."
There have recently been Islamic terror plots uncovered in Portland, Oregon; Baltimore, Maryland; Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Great Britain; and elsewhere. Islamic jihadists murdered 68 Christians in a church in Baghdad. That's just in the last few weeks. Each of these plots had the imprimatur of an Islamic cleric and was plotted in the name of Islam. How much "intimidation, murder and terrorism" from Muslims is the SPLC going to ignore before it speaks out for the victims of these attacks?
SPLC: "Her comments were so incendiary, in fact, that several neo-Nazi< organizations even ignored the fact that she is Jewish and published her diatribes."
Even if neo-Nazis published anything I wrote, it doesn't matter, since they did it without my knowledge or consent. In reality, neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations are generally pro-Islam and pro-jihad, because they hate Jews above all. SPLC in engaging in more Goebbels-style smear tactics by trying to connect me to neo-Nazis.
This is an obvious ploy to keep politicians away from opposing Ground Zero mega-mosque and taking a firm stand on any jihad-related issue. Trust me, the folks at Stormfront, whom I've monitored for years (they were the very first hate site to hit the web back in 1994), can't stand Jews or Israel or me, and it would be obvious to anyone that if there are posts there supporting my work, then this is a manifestation of Sun Tzu's strategy from The Art of War (deliberately planting misinformation from the "other side"). White supremacists and neo-Nazis actually hate Jews and Israel, and love Islam and jihad. The idea of neo-Nazis who love Israel and hate Islamic jihad is a figment of the left's imagination.
SPLC: "She in turn commented favorably on the South African, apartheid-defending terrorist Eugene Terre'Blanche after he was murdered, blaming his death on ‘black supremacism.'"
I never commented favorably on Terre'Blanche. I know little about him. But he was murdered, hacked to death at his home. I do not sanction cold-blooded murder.
In reality, I wrote this about Terre'Blanche: "Insofar as my sanctioning of white supremacists in South Africa -- that is a blatant libel....I vehemently disagree with Terre'blanche's ideas..."
The SPLC also points out that a Leftist/Islamic supremacist counter-demo held during our 9/11 Freedom Rally against the Ground Zero Mosque featured a sign saying, "The attack on Islam is racism." What race is Islam? The Islamic supremacist ideology is at war against freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for women. People of all races hold to this ideology.
And the SPLC, instead of standing for those freedoms, is carrying water for the real haters, the real neo-Nazi Jew-haters: the forces of Islamic supremacism and jihad.
An earlier SPLC attack on me was entitled "Hatewatch." Actually, I consider my work more like "Lovewatch! Keeping the world safe for lovers and other strangers."
I equate the Southern Poverty Law Center coming out for Islamic supremacists with them coming out for Nazis. What's the difference, and why doesn't the SPLC even have a category for Islamic jihadi groups? Not one. The greatest threat facing our nation, our people, our world, and they are shilling for them.
Here is proof: recently a reader sent me an exchange he had with the SPLC's Mark Potok . Reader Bob wrote, "I started out by looking on their website for a definition of the term ‘hate group' fully expecting that Islam would fit any reasonable definition. When I couldn't find such a definition (still can't today) I inquired." In the course of the exchange, Potok wrote back: "With regard to monitoring radical jihadists, we have made a pragmatic decision to leave that mainly to the major Jewish NGOs, which do a good job and have some real expertise that would likely take us years to develop." In other words, the real hate just doesn't matter to the SPLC. "Still," Potok continued, "we do cover black Muslim extremists and have written about such matters as the connections between radical Muslims and neo-Nazis."
Except when they're pretending that the neo-Nazis are connected to me, that is.
But consider what they have admitted to here. They refuse to cover, evaluate, or report on the single greatest threat to free men here and across the world. The jihad is exempt from the prying, dishonest leadership of the SLPC, but those who are standing up against these tremendous odds are being smeared, defamed and destroyed.
And the SPLC is getting well paid to do this. According to the SPLC's 990 Form for 2008, the SPLC's Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees made a generous $348,420 that year. SPLC President and CEO, Richard Cohen, was right behind him, at $344,490. General Counsel Joseph Levin made $189,166. Legal director Rhonda Brownstein brought in $179,806; CFO Teenie Hutchinson, $155,414. Potok pulled in $143,099. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Blancett made $159,301 - that's right, the former COO.
Who is funding this subversive and dangerous organization?
The Southern Poverty Law Center's ironically named "Intelligence Report" for Winter 2010 contains a hit piece entitled, "Geller, Jones Amp Up Anti-Muslim Hate Rhetoric."
More disinformation and outright lying from Leftist propagandists.
Their skullduggery is apparent in their presentation of a false narrative. Notice how they are conflating me and my work with the cartoonish Terry Jones, the Florida pastor who gained international fame by threatening to burn the Qur'an - and then backing down. This is Goebbels-style propaganda. Jones is a media creation, a fringe pastor who Tweeted something stupid - that he was going to burn the Qur'an -- and the media descended like locusts. The Ground Zero Mosque story worked in just the opposite way: it became national news in spite of the media's silence, and the American people stood against the mosque despite the media's relentless cheerleading for the Islamic supremacist slumlord Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf and the other shady Ground Zero Mosque organizers. The Ground Zero mosque was the people's story, the people's outrage, a cry against the disrespect and insult.
The very idea that merely questioning in a free society would get you preeminent status in the SPLC "Intelligence Report" speaks volumes about how less free we really are, as the left tightens its chokehold on the culture, the media, and politics.
As for my bus ads, they were not "anti-Muslim." They merely offered help to those who were threatened with death in America for leaving Islam, under Islam's traditional death penalty for apostasy - like Rifqa Bary, the Ohio convert from Islam to Christianity who says she was threatened by her father and was certainly threatened by other Muslims on Facebook. Is the SPLC saying that people who receive such threats don't deserve protection? Are we not all equal under the law? Are the lives of Muslims trying to escape the sharia worth less than the Islamic supremacists imposing the sharia in America?
SPLC: "She warned that Muslims will ‘turn to further intimidation, murder and terrorism' if they can't achieve a political takeover."
There have recently been Islamic terror plots uncovered in Portland, Oregon; Baltimore, Maryland; Stockholm, Sweden; Copenhagen, Denmark; Great Britain; and elsewhere. Islamic jihadists murdered 68 Christians in a church in Baghdad. That's just in the last few weeks. Each of these plots had the imprimatur of an Islamic cleric and was plotted in the name of Islam. How much "intimidation, murder and terrorism" from Muslims is the SPLC going to ignore before it speaks out for the victims of these attacks?
SPLC: "Her comments were so incendiary, in fact, that several neo-Nazi< organizations even ignored the fact that she is Jewish and published her diatribes."
Even if neo-Nazis published anything I wrote, it doesn't matter, since they did it without my knowledge or consent. In reality, neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations are generally pro-Islam and pro-jihad, because they hate Jews above all. SPLC in engaging in more Goebbels-style smear tactics by trying to connect me to neo-Nazis.
This is an obvious ploy to keep politicians away from opposing Ground Zero mega-mosque and taking a firm stand on any jihad-related issue. Trust me, the folks at Stormfront, whom I've monitored for years (they were the very first hate site to hit the web back in 1994), can't stand Jews or Israel or me, and it would be obvious to anyone that if there are posts there supporting my work, then this is a manifestation of Sun Tzu's strategy from The Art of War (deliberately planting misinformation from the "other side"). White supremacists and neo-Nazis actually hate Jews and Israel, and love Islam and jihad. The idea of neo-Nazis who love Israel and hate Islamic jihad is a figment of the left's imagination.
SPLC: "She in turn commented favorably on the South African, apartheid-defending terrorist Eugene Terre'Blanche after he was murdered, blaming his death on ‘black supremacism.'"
I never commented favorably on Terre'Blanche. I know little about him. But he was murdered, hacked to death at his home. I do not sanction cold-blooded murder.
In reality, I wrote this about Terre'Blanche: "Insofar as my sanctioning of white supremacists in South Africa -- that is a blatant libel....I vehemently disagree with Terre'blanche's ideas..."
The SPLC also points out that a Leftist/Islamic supremacist counter-demo held during our 9/11 Freedom Rally against the Ground Zero Mosque featured a sign saying, "The attack on Islam is racism." What race is Islam? The Islamic supremacist ideology is at war against freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and equal rights for women. People of all races hold to this ideology.
And the SPLC, instead of standing for those freedoms, is carrying water for the real haters, the real neo-Nazi Jew-haters: the forces of Islamic supremacism and jihad.
An earlier SPLC attack on me was entitled "Hatewatch." Actually, I consider my work more like "Lovewatch! Keeping the world safe for lovers and other strangers."
I equate the Southern Poverty Law Center coming out for Islamic supremacists with them coming out for Nazis. What's the difference, and why doesn't the SPLC even have a category for Islamic jihadi groups? Not one. The greatest threat facing our nation, our people, our world, and they are shilling for them.
Here is proof: recently a reader sent me an exchange he had with the SPLC's Mark Potok . Reader Bob wrote, "I started out by looking on their website for a definition of the term ‘hate group' fully expecting that Islam would fit any reasonable definition. When I couldn't find such a definition (still can't today) I inquired." In the course of the exchange, Potok wrote back: "With regard to monitoring radical jihadists, we have made a pragmatic decision to leave that mainly to the major Jewish NGOs, which do a good job and have some real expertise that would likely take us years to develop." In other words, the real hate just doesn't matter to the SPLC. "Still," Potok continued, "we do cover black Muslim extremists and have written about such matters as the connections between radical Muslims and neo-Nazis."
Except when they're pretending that the neo-Nazis are connected to me, that is.
But consider what they have admitted to here. They refuse to cover, evaluate, or report on the single greatest threat to free men here and across the world. The jihad is exempt from the prying, dishonest leadership of the SLPC, but those who are standing up against these tremendous odds are being smeared, defamed and destroyed.
And the SPLC is getting well paid to do this. According to the SPLC's 990 Form for 2008, the SPLC's Chief Trial Counsel Morris Dees made a generous $348,420 that year. SPLC President and CEO, Richard Cohen, was right behind him, at $344,490. General Counsel Joseph Levin made $189,166. Legal director Rhonda Brownstein brought in $179,806; CFO Teenie Hutchinson, $155,414. Potok pulled in $143,099. Former Chief Operating Officer Jeff Blancett made $159,301 - that's right, the former COO.
Who is funding this subversive and dangerous organization?
France Steels Herself for Car Burning
Pathetic. Yes, let's all hide under our beds while Muslim youth set thousands of our cars ablaze. And let's stick our heads further up our sphincters and stop reporting the actual number of cars burned -- that way we can continue to pretend nothing is happening while the continent descends in chaos. There's a plan! That and the Euro-Med partnership that is flooding Europe with more Muslim immigrants.
Notice the sharia media -- no mention of Muslims or Islam anyhere. Good doggies.
France braces for annual New Year's car torchings Reuters
PARIS (Reuters) – France will deploy extra police and keep vandalism statistics under wraps on New Year's Eve to fight what authorities say has become an annual "sweepstakes" of disaffected [Muslim] youths competing to see who can burn the most cars.
Youths in depressed suburbs of French cities have been torching hundreds of vehicles on New Year's Eve and Bastille Day since the early 1990s. Police say the annual rite has turned competitive, with youths tracking the news in the first days of the new year to see which neighborhood did the most damage.
"I have decided to put an end to the competition, the sweepstakes, and will longer publish the number of burned vehicles," Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux said this week, adding that publishing statistics encouraged vandalism.
Opposition politicians described the move as an attempt by President Nicolas Sarkozy's conservative government to cover up the violence.
"The government tends to eliminate unfavorable indicators. The interior minister has been publishing trumped-up statistics for years, and now Hortefeux is going even further," Socialist deputy Delphine Batho, a security specialist, told Reuters.
Last year, the Interior Ministry said 1,137 cars had been torched, a 30 percent rise on 2008. French media reported at the time that several thousand cars had been burned.
Nearly 54,000 police officers will be deployed across France, a rise of some 6,000 compared to normal New Year's Eve staffing levels, and additional command posts set up in several cities, Hortefeux said on Friday.
The image of burning cars remains particularly evocative in France in the wake of urban riots in December 2005. Sarkozy came to power in 2007 promising to quell violence, but crime and vandalism have inched up in the past year.
Arson in France's "sensitive urban areas" rose by 17.2 percent between 2008 and 2009, according to a 2010 study by the Observatory of Sensitive Urban Zones. In 2009 a total of 12,874 cars were burned, it reported.
One Half Hour into New Year Church Bombed
Happy new year and the Islamic killing begins .......It didn't take but a half hour; this just in: Explosion kills five outside Egyptian church
An explosion outside a church in the north Egyptian city of Alexandria has left at least five dead, security officials and witnesses say.
The blast, apparently caused by a car bomb, hit people as they left a new year's service at the al-Qidiseen church shortly after midnight.
Obama say, "Respect it!" Daisy the Khan say, "the era of extremism is over!" Geller says, "Defeat this evil."
Atlas Shrugs
An explosion outside a church in the north Egyptian city of Alexandria has left at least five dead, security officials and witnesses say.
The blast, apparently caused by a car bomb, hit people as they left a new year's service at the al-Qidiseen church shortly after midnight.
Obama say, "Respect it!" Daisy the Khan say, "the era of extremism is over!" Geller says, "Defeat this evil."
Atlas Shrugs
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