Logo of the "anonymous" hackers. Do their mothers know what they're doing instead of their school homework?
Yesterday I wrote about an interview with Italian MP and journalist Fiamma Nirenstein, who referred to the widespread support in the UN for Palestinian statehood as “lunacy.” But the UN is just one place where this disorder prevails. Anti-Israel lunacy is most pronounced on the Left, both in the high reaches of academia and among the poorly educated activists in our streets and apparently at their computer keyboards.
Several Israeli government websites were down Sunday, including the public sites of the IDF, Shabak and Mossad, after a public threat from the hacker group “Anonymous” to attack Israeli sites in retaliation for the interception of last week’s attempt to break the blockade of Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Despite the claims of the group, there is no reason to doubt the Israeli officials who say that the outage was a result of a hardware problem in the data center in which these sites are hosted.
The self-styled “hacktivists” accused Israel of ‘piracy on the high seas’ and claim that Israel’s actions were
illegal, against democracy, human rights, and international and maritime laws. Justifying war, murder, illegal interception and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defense will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world. We do not tolerate this repeated offensive behavior against unarmed civilians…
— video statement by “Anonymous” (my transcription)
The absurdly pompous video ignores the fact that even the UN’s own commission investigating the 2010 seizure of the Mavi Marmara declared that Israel’s blockade of Gaza is legal, and that a blockade-running ship may be boarded in international waters. It tells us that the seizure took place at “exactly 5:59 Gaza time,” as if this is relevant, in order to create an aura of seriousness.
Despite its appeal to international law, it insists that ‘Palestine’ is a “sovereign nation” (it is not) and accuses Israel of acts of war against it. Naturally it doesn’t mention Hamas’ rocket fire on Israeli civilians. “We are legion. We do not forget. We do not forgive. Expect us!” the video concludes in its now-familiar signoff.
This is beyond stupid. It seems to me to be more or less on the level of something that a mediocre high school student might do. Unfortunately, in today’s world even a mediocre student can become a dangerous Internet vandal if he has access to networks of compromised computers that can mount DDoS attacks (explanation here, and much more than you wanted to know here).
The ‘lunacy’ part is that while these ‘activists’, both the ones on the boats and the ones behind their keyboards, claim to be acting in the name of democracy, human rights, peace, justice, freedom, and so on, they are in practice supporting the Hamas, which is undemocratic, tramples on human rights (of women, Jews, Christians, homosexuals, etc.), is presently making war against Israel and whose charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of its people.
But hey, who cares about the real world?
Technorati Tags: Israel, Anonymous, flotilla, Gaza, Hamas, lunacy
Anonymous is more a general ideology/method than a specific group. The way Anonymous works is someone gets mad about something, proposes a hit on the IRC channels, and gets supporters. In some cases, one guy can just rent a botnet to DDOS a site. Completely unrelated groups of people can both adopt the label of Anonymous. Thats the beauty of it and what makes it impossible to eliminate. Likely this is Turkish or Arab hackers are adopting the label. However, the entire group of people identifying as Anonymous could in fact be majority Zionist (it probably isnt, but no matter). There is no leadership that makes decisions. You and your friends could get into hacking, claim to be Anonymous and shut down qassam.pl or whatever.
Anonymous nowadays really means some organization opposed by some group of people is about to have its website DDOSed.