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Those antisemites who think that Jews are using their unnaturally high intelligence to take over the world must have missed this:

FAMAGUSTA, Cyprus (AP) — A boat carrying Jewish activists from Israel, Germany, the U.S. and Britain set sail on Sunday for Gaza, hoping to breach Israel’s naval blockade there.

Richard Kuper, an organizer with the British group Jews for Justice for Palestinians, said one goal is to show that not all Jews support Israeli policies toward Palestinians. Kuper said the boat, which set sail from northern Cyprus flying a British flag, won’t resist if Israeli authorities try to stop it.

Emanuele Ottolenghi comments (h/t Yaakov Lozowick),

There is, nevertheless, a certain irony in the fact that they use Northern Cyprus as a staging ground for their activities — like the Mavi Marmara-led Flotilla did last May. Here’s the irony — Northern Cyprus is an illegally occupied territory that belongs to the EU as part of its member state, Cyprus; it was seized by force in 1974 by the Turkish army; its legal status as a fictionally independent state is only recognized by Turkey (the occupying power); Turkey forcibly removed hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks from that territory and settled its own population to permanently alter the ethnic balance of the area – and, in the process, encouraged the building of what one could characterize as settlements.

Now doesn’t this sound awfully familiar — the kind of accusations that organizations such as the JFJFP would routinely level at Israel’s presence in the West Bank and, until 2005, in Gaza? These are the kind of things that get such enlightened Jews agitated enough that they need to spring into action — if the alleged perpetrator is Israel.

I can imagine how this project got started:

Jew for Justice for Palestinians no. 1: I am so tired of being accused of supporting Israel just because I’m Jewish! Last night I met a super hot chick at the rally against the Judaization of Arab hummus, but as soon as she saw my  Magen David tattoo she  said, “you don’t care about the Palestinian people because you’re Jewish, so just naff off!”  And then she went home with a Turkish guy.

JFJFP 2: I have an idea. Let’s have a flotilla! You saw for yourself what it did for the Turks.

JFJFP 1: But they won’t let us get near Gaza. How will it help the oppressed Palestinian people?

JFJFP 2: Oh, I thought the problem was the chicks.

I guess all the really smart Jews are busy developing cyber-weapons to attack Iran with.

I mean, in all seriousness, what is it possible to say except “stupid, stupid, stupid”?

"Naff off," she said.

Update [28 Sep 0809 PDT]: Stupid British Jews finally get a date:

Technorati Tags: Jews for Justice for Palestinians, flotilla, Gaza, stupid British Jews

Maybe Israel doesn’t need to bomb anything:

Computerworld – Officials in Iran have confirmed that the Stuxnet worm infected at least 30,000 Windows PCs in the country, multiple Iranian news services reported on Saturday.

Experts from Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization also reportedly met this week to discuss how to remove the malware.

Stuxnet, considered by many security researchers to be the most sophisticated malware ever, was first spotted in mid-June by VirusBlokAda, a little-known security firm based in Belarus. A month later Microsoft acknowledged that the worm targeted Windows PCs that managed large-scale industrial-control systems in manufacturing and utility companies.

Those control systems, called SCADA, for “supervisory control and data acquisition,” operate everything from power plants and factory machinery to oil pipelines and military installations.

According to researchers with U.S.-based antivirus vendor Symantec, Iran was hardest hit by Stuxnet. Nearly 60% of all infected PCs in the earliest-known infection were located in that country.

Since then, experts have amassed evidence that Stuxnet has been attacking SCADA systems since at least January 2010. Meanwhile, others have speculated that Stuxnet was created by a state-sponsored team of programmers, and designed to cripple Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor.

No need to stop with nuclear installations. It might be an exaggeration to say that a cyber-attack could  propel a country back into the stone age, but it could give it a good start. Almost all modern industrial systems use programmable logic controllers (PLCs), minicomputers which collect input from data collection devices and operate the relays, solenoids, valves, etc. which control the system.

These PLCs are often connected to PCs running common operating systems like Windows and forms of Unix, which provide the user-interface and programming capability.  The Stuxnet worm not only compromises the PC, but inserts its own code into the PLC itself. Then it renders this added code undetectable by normal procedures.

Can you imagine turbines spinning out of control and flying apart? Pipelines exploding from excess pressure? Nationwide electrical blackouts? Dams overflowing? Satellites commanded to change their orbits? Even military missiles launching themselves or self-destructing in their silos? All this and more is possible.

In fact, it has already happened:

It was a Trojan program inserted into SCADA system software that caused a massive natural gas explosion along the Trans-Siberian pipeline in 1982. A newspaper reported the resulting fireball yielded “the most monumental non-nuclear explosion and fire ever seen from space.” …

The 3-kiloton Trans-Siberian natural gas pipeline explosion … occurred during the Reagan administration. The event was initially acknowledged by a Russian general, and then subsequently denied by the Russian press, and kept secret within the CIA until 2004, when details were released upon publication of the Cold War memoirs of a retired insider. The events and methodology were explained and later presented in security testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives. — Pipeline and Gas Journal

The difference is that today almost every PC is connected to the Internet, and the delivery of the weaponized code is easier and does not require physical access to the target computer.

Cyber-weapons could be a ‘disruptive technology’ in warfare — a game-changer like the English longbow, the machine gun or the military aircraft. Nations that succeed in developing such weapons and the concomitant defensive technologies first will have a huge advantage in almost any conflict.

Importantly, the relative size of the combatants is irrelevant to their capabilities or vulnerabilities in this area. A small country could deter a much larger one with a credible threat of a cyber-attack.

Do I need to tell you what small country is a superpower in software and computer technology? I didn’t think so.

Technorati Tags: Stuxnet, cyber-warfare, Iran

Bret Stephens, a smart guy himself, wrote in today’s Wall Street Journal about a press meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad, he said, was the “smartest guy in the room,” successfully manipulating reporters and correspondents.

So, with this in mind, let’s see what he did at the UN General Assembly today. Here’s a piece of an account by the Jerusalem Post:

Ahmadinejad said there were “three viewpoints” in identifying those responsible for the September 11th attacks. The main viewpoint, he said, “advocated by American statesmen,” is that “a very powerful and complex terrorist group, able to successfully cross all layers of the American intelligence and security, carried out the attack.”

The second viewpoint – which Ahmadinejad called the viewpoint of “the majority of the American people as well as other nations and politicians” – was “that some segments within the US government orchestrated the attack in order to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order also to save the Zionist regime.”

Finally, he said, some believe September 11th “was carried out by a terrorist group but the American government supported and took advantage of the situation.” He conceded that “this viewpoint has fewer proponents.”

Ahmadinejad announced that, in light of this professed ambiguity as to the culpable parties, Iran will host a conference “to study terrorism and the means to confront it.” He also suggested that the UN set up a fact-finding group for September 11th.

Unsurprisingly, the US delegation and several others walked out.

Stephens is right. This was a carefully planned performance which undoubtedly achieved its aim. The idea that the US or the ‘Zionists’ perpetrated 9/11 is — in a certain sense — believed by most of the Muslim world. Of course, at the same time and without cognitive dissonance, Islamists believe that 9/11 was a successful ‘martyrdom operation’, a magnificent piece of jihad.

You are probably wondering how this can be. The answer is that there are different kinds of truth. There is the simple truth that 9/11 was a successful terrorist operation carried out by radical Islamists.

And at the same time, behind Ahmadinejad’s smirk, is the other truth, demonstrated by the act itself of standing in the UN building in New York, the same New York that was struck on 9/11, and humiliating Western dignitaries by accusing them of being the agents of their own punishment. By forcing them to submit to his reality, he places himself — and Islam — above them. The ‘truth’ embodied in this act of dominance is that Islam is superior and will be victorious in the long-term struggle.

Every radical Islamist in the world will immediately grasp both of these truths, and will swell with pride as they watch Ahmadinejad strike a psychic blow, just like the physical blow of 9/11.

The idea of the psychic blow is unintelligible to many Westerners, who will see Ahmadinejad as just a boor (incidentally, these are the same people who don’t get the point of the Ground Zero mosque). But Stephens was right. He is a lot more dangerous than a simple boor.

How should we react? He could have been dragged from the stage and beaten viciously, then thrown into a filthy cell and held hostage until they surrender their uranium (and incidentally release the two young hostages they are holding).

This would have sent the message that we refuse to submit to humiliation, we refuse to accept the dominance of Islam. Of course we would never do that, because we don’t behave like that.

Right there you have the paradox of the asymmetric conflict that we find ourselves in.

Technorati Tags: Ahmadinejad, New York, 9/11