Entries Tagged 'security' ↓

EuropeNews slammed by e-jihadist DDoS attack, server outage

February 7th, 2008 — counterjihad, e-jihadis, blog censorship, sites we like, tech industry, Russia, censorship, security, Europe, blogging

(Scroll down for rolling updates.)

EuropeNews under attack (update 2)

EuropeNews has been under attack, causing the pages to load slowly or not at all. This is verified to be a botnet attack, coming from Russia. After the relevant IP addresses have been blocked, EuropeNews is now running again.

A Turkish hacker team by name of AyYildiz Team (Crescent and Star Team) has attacked various German sites. More information on Earth Times.

We have found that AyYildiz have paid attention to EuropeNews before and may have directed the attack against EuropeNews. What is known for sure is that the attack was a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack coming from obscure addresses in Russia, probably a botnet. Blocking those addresses gave our server breathing room again, and all is normal.

Also, our log indicates a (failed) hacking attempt against us.

The attackers would need a fresh botnet to resume the attack. That is not completely impossible, but we have more experience now and expect any future attacks to be fended off quickly.

The attack seems to be part of a hacker attack wave related to a fire in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in an apartment inhabited by a Turkish family. Claims of arson have been thrown around, nothing proven.

ABC News report.

Guardian report.

Unsurprisingly, the Turkish government is exploiting the event to the max. Zaman report.

The implications are explored in this Spiegel report.

The latest assumption about the cause of the fire is that it may have been caused by tinkering with the electrical installations. From Fact - Fiction blog (German). Thus, possibly the fault of the inhabitants, not an attack.

False accusations of racist hate attacks constitute blood libel.

Revenge through Internet attacks will be published as widely as possible. We will not give in to assorted Turkish bullying.

The Ludwigshafen fire and Turkish reactions

However, the DDoS is the least interesting bit. What is more sinister is the background and the behaviour of the Turkish politicians, who immediately reacted by trying to smear the Germans as a bunch of killer racists and, by implication, the *Turkish* politicians as the true protectors of Turks in Germany.

That included a Turkish minister visiting the place of the fire and lots of official statements recalling the racist arson attack in 1993, implying that now a new wave of racist attacks against Turks is looming. To show their distrust, a Turkish investigation team was sent to control the work of the Germans - very unusual behavior.

All this is based on a tiny grafitti on the entrance door “HASS”, which they take to mean it’s a hate attack. Given the rampant grafitti situation in Germany, and not least in run-down city part like this, there’s absolutely no firm reason to interpret a simple bit of evidence as conclusive proof about racism. This is far-fetched, and it is a severe case of libel, too.

This play by the Turkish politicians also ignores the fact that the firefighters were doing a marvelous job, that the cause of the fire is still unknown after four days of investigation - including Turks specifically looking for arson - and it skips the little detail that the 1993 attack was extensively exploited by Turkish investment groups to discourage Turks in Germany from investing their hard-earned money in Germany. Later these Turkish investement groups went into suspicious bankruptcies, netting AKP-connected businessmen (and probably AKP itself) a whopping 25 billion euro.

Further, the performance of the Turkish politicians posing as the protectors of Turks in Germany is a divisive move eerily similar to the events in the 60’s that eventually led to the division of Cyprus. This is counterproductive to integration but fits well with the “special role” Erdogan assigns the Turkish diaspora in Europe. We are on the edge of insurgencies in many places, latest in Cologne.

Connecting the dots is an interesting art. But one easily ends up with rather unpleasent results, and I’m scratching my head over this: Is it really this dangerous?

In any case, it would be wise for the German politicians to simply reject the Turkish demands. By any measure, the German justice system is much better than the Turkish one, Turkish anti-minority crimes are rampant anyway, and German fire technicians are perfectly capable of determining the cause of fires, and the undue interference of Turkey into German matters are a severe breach of diplomatic etiquette that deserves no reward, only rejection.

Erdogan deserves the humiliation of being rejected by the German politicians. Will they show enough spine to do so?

GoV: Europe News Has Been Knocked Out

Europe News, a joint Danish-German news and opinion aggregating service, suffered a Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attack yesterday initiated by Turkish hackers, temporarily incapacitating their site.

It may be that the above link is not working. That’s because the Europe News site was brought down entirely during the night. Since then service to it has been restored intermittently, but it’s not back to full operations yet.

Henrik, who runs the English-language half of Europe news, sent me this account of recent events:

Turkish nationalist hackers attack Islam-critical blogs

The leading Islam-critical news aggregator EuropeNews has been attacked and knocked off the Internet, along with Politically Incorrect and several other blogs. Yesterday, February 7th, we faced a botnet attack out of Russia, which overloaded and crippled our servers. We weathered that by blocking the IP addresses involved. Today, February 8th at 13:50 CET, our server was knocked out entirely. Right now, 15:45, we are online again.

We do not know yet what exactly has happened. A Turkish hacker team by name of AyYildiz Team (Crescent and Star Team) has attacked and defaced roughly a hundred German sites. More information on Earth Times. The group, according to Netcraft, moves to a fresh server every few months. Part of their ethos is to never attack any Turkish web sites.

The attack seems to be motivated by a fire in Ludwigshafen, Germany, in a house inhabited by Turkish families. The fire had wide publicity, not least by a sensational rescue of a baby falling down four stories. The fire brigade is reported to have done a great job at the scene, but nonetheless nine persons succumbed to the rapid fire in the century-old building.

The fire, however, has escalated to a diplomatic crisis between Germany and Turkey, as claims of arson have been thrown around, nothing proven. (ABC News report; Guardian report. More details in this Spiegel report.) Unsurprisingly, the Turkish government is exploiting the event to the max. Zaman reports, like every other Turkish media.

The latest assumption about the cause of the fire is that it may be due to tinkering with the electrical installations. From Fact — Fiction blog (German).

False accusations of racist hate attacks constitute blood libel.

Revenge through Internet attacks will be publicized as widely as possible, and dealt with to the full extent of the law. We will not give in to assorted Turkish bullying.

EuropeNews back online

EuropeNews is back online after 7 hours of downtime. The DDoS attack of yesterday was averted, but today the server was knocked out solid. We are still analyzing the exact cause of the event.

We’re alive and kicking, so please enjoy the articles.

TC: The German Flag Now Shows a Turkish Islamic Crescent

Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of Turkey, the man who said that Turkey was using democracy like people use a bus to reach their destination, the man who maintains that there is no difference between islam and islamism, that there is only one islam, will visit Germany on February 10th. Huge billboards are all over the place. Most of them are entirely in turkish language and desecrate the official German flag.

Why?

In the German city of Ludwigshafen, an apartment fire in a building inhabited by turks and kurds only, has cost the lives of several inhabitants. Without even a shred of evidence or the beginning of a reasonable suspicion, the Turkish press and Turks in Germany in unison with the usual leftist do-gooders have concluded, a day after the fire, that this was a politically motivated arson by German right wing extremists. A Turkish delegation will come to Germany to investigate.

Official numbers of muslims (mainly Turks) in Germany are pegged at 3.5 million. Unofficial numbers are between 5 and 6 million. Emotions about the fire are rising right now. German natives do not seem to be upset about the desecration of their flag and the inspection visit of the Turkish leader yet. Via internet, young turks and Germans are trading barbs, accusations and racial insults.
(hat tip and pic: PI)

UPDATE: ARD state TV reports that the fire in Ludwigshafen seems to be due to the theft of electrical power from in house power lines, circumventing the power company counter!

Excessive Turkish reactions to the fire in Ludwigshafen

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A Major Victory for the Blogosphere!

February 5th, 2008 — treason, terrorism, Islam, counterjihad, security, fraud, military

It pays to visit Atlas Shrugs regularly!

Maj. Steve Coughlin, the expert on terrorism who was fired from the Pentagon at the behest of a jihadist mole, is back to work, and with a well-deserved promotion. Great news!

But we still have some work to do - we need to hold our officials’ feet to the fire, so that they do a thorough housecleaning at the Pentagon to remove Hesham Islam and other jihadist moles, along with those who aid and abet their careers.

Atlas Shrugs: Justice for Coughlin at Pentagon

I love good news and this is a very good news story. Coughlin was not only saved, he was promoted. Score one for the free world. By the way, where’s Heshie?

Andy Bostom has it all here.

Major Coughlin will now be retained by the DOD, and the Rest of Congresswoman Sue Myrick’s Statement on the Coughlin Affair, 2/5/08

I received this press release by North Carolina Congresswoman Sue Myrick, (included i Bostom’s post in its entirety) from Fred Lucas of Cybercast News Service.

The Congresswoman has been investigating the reported firing (see here, here, here) of Major Stephen Coughlin (USAR) by the Department of Defense (DOD) Joint Staff.

First and foremost, Rep. Myrick confirms that Major Coughlin will now be retained by the DOD, and “…associated with another office program within the Office of the Secretary of Defense where he will continue to spread his message.”

The Congresswoman, one of the handful of stalwart individuals on jihadism in either the House or Senate, also highlights in her statement, the seriousness of what she terms, “…the nature of the radical Islamist enemy that we face today and how they are seeking to infiltrate all elements of our society.”

Rep. Myrick further lavishes deserving praise upon Major Coughlin’s thesis, “Major Coughlin’s
thesis must be read by everyone responsible for ensuring the safety of America,” for which we now learn he has been retained, and arguably even promoted, within the DOD.

But Congresswoman Myrick’s statement also evidences a curious if not disturbing cognitive dissonance about her expressed concern over jihadist “infiltration,” when it comes to Hesham Islam. Specifically, the Congresswoman:

without adducing any hard evidence to contradict Bill Gertz’s steadfast, repeated allegations blithely dismisses Hesham Islam’s putative role in Coughlin’s reported travails,
including the failure torenew Coughlin’s original contract, i.e., his reported firing

ignores the ensuing investigative report by Claudia Rosett about Mr. Islam’s (apparently tendentious) biography originally described by the DOD (and then removed from the DOD website)

ignores Mr. Islam’s role in “outreach” to jihadist sympathizers/potential abettors, including facilitating meetings with such persons within DOD, as reported by Steve Emerson

and ignores Mr. Islam’s intellectually shoddy, unhinged 1992 thesis which epitomizes the bigoted and paranoid jihadist tendency to frame any efforts to counter jihad encroachments in the Middle East, in particular, as the machinations of a nefarious Jewish cabal

Sadly, Rep. Myrick apparently chooses to ignore a man who seems to embody the very process of “infiltration” about which she claims to be so concerned.

Read all of Bostom.

6 Comments

The firing of Maj. Steve Coughlin is a disaster for the U.S.

February 4th, 2008 — injustice, treason, terrorism, Islam, counterjihad, security, fraud, military

Update:

A Major Victory for the Blogosphere!

Atlas Shrugs: Justice for Coughlin at Pentagon

Maj. Steve Coughlin, the expert on terrorism who was fired from the Pentagon at the behest of a jihadist mole, is back to work, and with a well-deserved promotion. Great news!

The firing of Maj. Steve Coughlin was an act of treason.

“Isn’t that a strong word to use?”

Yes, treason is a strong word, but it is also an accurate word to use in this context. His firing - officially, the nonrenewal of his contract - took place at the behest of Hesham Islam, who is both a special assistant to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and a jihadist mole. For more on that, see Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

“Why is it treason to fire Maj. Coughlin?”

Because the firing of Maj. Coughlin deprives the U.S. military of vital information about enemy motives and intentions that it is getting from nowhere else. Firing Maj. Coughlin gives aid and comfort to the enemies of the U.S. by crippling the ability of the U.S. military to make sense out of the evidence it gathers of enemy activities.

“What was Maj. Coughlin trying to tell the U.S. government that was so important?”

His most important point is that the U.S. government is unwise to take Muslims at their word with regard to whether Islamic law and doctrine represent a danger to non-Muslim societies. Nor can we safely assume that terrorism and aggression committed in the name of Islam proceeds merely from a small minority of extremists who have hijacked and misinterpreted Islam, rather than from something inherent in Islamic law and doctrine that gives rise to such aggression.

Here I defer to columnist Jeffrey Breinholt to explain the details. Emphasis is mine.

Maj. Steve Coughlin for Beginners

Jeffrey Breinholt

Maj. Steve Coughlin has been in the news lately. Little of the attention has focused on his ideas – rather, it’s the intrigue surrounding the non-renewal of his contact as a briefer for the Joint Chiefs of Staffs that has been the focus, supposedly because he violated the sensibilities of the current climate. Meanwhile, his 300-page master’s thesis is posted on the website of the International Strategy and Assessment Center, where Maj. Coughlin and I are fellows. What does his thesis say?

My goal here is to summarize Coughlin’s main ideas. As in my “Muslim Brotherhood for Beginners” article from a few months ago, I am going to fight the temptation here to offer my own opinions, and instead just offer the facts, free of analysis, except on one issue. Coughlin has been characterized by some as a “Christian zealot with a pen.” I know Steve Coughlin. I occasionally have a drink with him. I know Christian zealots. H—, I was born in Provo, Utah. He is not one.

Maj. Couglin’s thesis, “To Our Great Detriment: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad” was written in partial satisfaction for the requirements of his master’s degree. Coughlin is also a lawyer, though the thesis was written in the language of military strategy. To understand his argument, I find it helpful to view it through an American legal analogy.

Let’s say someone in the U.S. is accused of a serious crime. In addition to being innocent of the charges, the defendant also believes the crime itself is unconstitutional. This would raise the prospect of a two-pronged defense, and – because American law is so specialized – perhaps two types of lawyers on the defense team: (1) a trial lawyer who can mount a good defense on the factual allegations, and (2) a constitutional lawyer, who could prepare the appropriate motion to dismiss based on the theory that the crime violates the U.S. Constitution.

Each lawyer will focus on a different thing. Success by either could emancipate their client. Nothing stops the defendant from using both skill sets. If the defendant cares about his freedom and has adequate financial means, he would be remiss not to try both strategies.

Let’s now assume that the prosecutor, at the arraignment, assures defendant that the crime he is charged with is indeed constitutional. Should the defendant neglect to hire the constitutional lawyer? Clearly, the defendant should not take the prosecutor’s word for it. Instead, he would find someone more credible who understands the U.S. Constitution – not just what it says, but how it has been interpreted, to determine whether he has a constitutional defense.

Coughlin’s thesis makes a similar argument about Islamic doctrine, as it relates to how the U.S. military should fight the War on Terror. It is based on the notion that we must understand what motivates Islamic terrorists, in doctrinal terms. He describes this need through what is known as the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB): the systematic, continuous process of analyzing the threat and environment in a specific geographic area. The IPB is designed to support the military staff estimates and decision-making.

The key step in the IPB is to align the enemy’s courses of action (COA) to its doctrine – that is, what motivates the enemy. Knowing the enemy’s doctrine is not the entire answer, because enemy COAs can be constrained by environmental factors. To predict how the enemy will act sufficiently for proper military planning, its pure doctrine needs to be “templated” (evaluated in light of constraining environmental factors). It is only through this IPB process of sizing up the enemy, and discerning between its pure doctrine and what is likely to do through “templating” to account for environmental factors, can proper military action – a collection of “friendly COAs” – be undertaken. It all starts, however, will knowledge of the enemy’s doctrine.

To Coughlin, the IPB in the War on Terror is being thrown off by what he describes as the “Current Approach”: the view that Islamic-based extremism is aberrant and that Islam has become a “religion hijacked.” To Coughlin, this view is pernicious in part because it is being pushed by those who claim that Westerners should rely solely on Muslims to tell us what Islam is, much like how the late Professor Edward Said attacked the notion that Westerners could ever understand what people in the “Orient” thought and how they behaved. Coughlin argues that the Current Approach represents an outsourcing of the information requirements that the IPB process is not structured to answer, much like a defendant taking the prosecutor’s word that the statute is constitutional. In American litigation, the resulting strategy will be based on input from people not aligned with the interests of the defendant. Applying this problem to the military challenge and the IPB, “Inputs into the decision-making process from the Current Approach are the product of borrowed knowledge from individuals and entities that may be either unknown or unbeholden to American national security interests.”

The consequences of uncritically accepting the Current Approach is the unstated corollary that because extremists do not represent “true” Islam, Islamic law itself should be excluded from analytical processes that support threat development. This tendency is culturally enticing to us, for we come from a tradition where arguments over the merits of particular religions are considered impolite (and impolitic) dinner party conversation. This tradition undoubtedly reinforces our inability to look closely at Islamic religious doctrine, and to look elsewhere for help. To add to this, we have Muslim intellectuals like Tariq Ramadan telling us (as he wrote a few weeks ago in the New York Times Book Review) that one cannot truly understand the Koran unless one goes at it with faith (“the language of the heart”). For this task, we must trust people like him. No wonder Ramadan is in such high demand.

Coughlin uses the IPB methodology to ask why we are not bothering to ask, “What if?” It is a powerful argument, if one accepts the IPB process itself, since there is no harm in asking the question – just as there is no harm in the criminal defendant considering the constitutionality of the crime while simultaneously planning a full defense on the factual merits. If, in planning military action, intelligence analysts limit their focus to factors that contribute to understanding the enemy’s doctrine, then the result of a rigorous inquiry that supports the Current Approach would ultimately be neutral to the threat assessment. If, on the other hand, the result is a finding against the Current Approach, we ignore the result at our peril since the IPB-driven process will not based on the proper inputs.

Coughlin’s thesis would be powerful if he just ended there, but he it does not. Instead, he searches through the prevailing views of all major schools of Islamic thought to argue “true” Islam – the type taught in the U.S. to 7th grade Muslim-Americans – requires its adherents to engage in violent struggle for worldwide domination, a state of affairs that cannot be adequately explained by the Current Approach. To get there, Coughlin considers the most definitive sources of Islamic law, including what they say about how Islamic doctrine is to be interpreted. It seems that much is settled in Islam, including what the faithful are required to do in the face of non-Muslims with whom they interact. He concludes that the purveyors of the Current Approach are selling us a bill of goods.

No wonder Maj. Coughlin found himself a disliked character in the halls of the Pentagon among the Muslim advisors who have the monopoly on telling us what Islam represents. He threatens their authority, as well as their livelihood.

Coughlin’s arguments about Islamic mandates make up the bulk of his thesis, but are ultimately unnecessary if one accepts his premise – that we owe it to the system to question whether the Current Approach is supported in Islamic law. What are the stakes? Even if the “true” Islam is a religion of peace, we would still need to know the doctrinal basis for the actions of those who have hijacked it, as long as they in fact exist and are able to motivate fellow Muslims to act at their direction. Consider this argument:

For the “extremist” argument to succeed, it simply has to assert a claim that has some doctrinal basis that survives the ideological screen because any surviving portion of the claim still leaves the “extremist” with a validated argument in support of the jihadis’ agenda. Hence, exclusivity is not an essential requirement for the “extremists.” The Current Approach, however, must be able to demonstrate exclusive correctness to the exclusion of the “extremist” position because the success of their argument can only be measured by the extent to which it constrains the “extremist” doctrine.

The problem, as Coughlin describes it, is that when the purveyors of the Current Approach respond to inconvenient Islamic law doctrines by claiming that there are “thousands of different interpretations to Islamic law,” they are saying there is no point to looking to Islamic law for solutions. In their oft-repeated claims that “Islam does not stand for this,” they are necessarily agreeing with Coughlin that there exists such a thing as Islamic doctrine, which necessitates our rigorous examination of it. For Current Approach arguments to succeed at neutralizing “extremist” positions, they must establish that “Islam does not stand for this” in every situation ranging through all interpretations. What are the prospects of that?

So in the end, it does not matter whether Coughlin is right about Islamic doctrine, as much as that the questions are being asked by people who are practicing the appropriate professional standards (another one of Coughlin’s key points). The U.S. government needs to ask these questions, rather than blithely concluding that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by al Qaeda. Even if Coughlin is wrong about the big issues of Islam, he is certainly correct that military planners should be asking about the religious basis for al Qaeda’s actions, so we can better predict how the adherents of “radical Islam” can be expected to act. That is really what matters.

The consequences are failing to do so is illustrated by my legal analogy. The prosecutor has assured the defendant that the crime he is charged with violating is constitutional, presumably because he wants to focus on the facts of the case. For the defendant to not suffer a lost opportunity by taking the prosecutor’s word for it, the prosecutor must be legally correct about what the constitution says. Just as many prosecutors are not constitutional law experts, many Muslims are not experts in Islamic law. Even if the prosecutor is fortuitously correct on this particular constitutional question, few people would argue that the defendant should not hire someone to undertake the necessary research for him, since that is the essence of the adversarial process.

By the same token, for the IPB to deny the need for close examination of the religious doctrinal basis for al Qaeda’s actions is to throw the process itself off. The cost of this decision likely exceeds the benefits of claiming that Islam has been hijacked to win over those who may be susceptible to embracing a more extreme version of the religion. Even by articulating this benefit of the Current Approach, we acknowledge the existence of a radical strain of Islam that can get a hold of people and cause them to act in ways that threaten innocent lives. For us not to then consider the doctrinal basis for this view of Islamic law, and to take it on faith that Islam does not drive their actions, would be malpractice.

# #

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Jeff Breinholt is a Senior Fellow and Director of National Security Law at the International Assessment and Strategy Center (www.strategycenter.net.) Jeff blogs on the Counterterrorism Blog.

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Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

February 2nd, 2008 — treason, Winds of Jihad, crime, smiley, Islam, security, fraud, military

Update:

A Major Victory for the Blogosphere!

Atlas Shrugs: Justice for Coughlin at Pentagon

Maj. Steve Coughlin, the expert on terrorism who was fired from the Pentagon at the behest of a jihadist mole, is back to work, and with a well-deserved promotion. Great news!

Winds of Jihad: Arrest Hesham Islam!

From the “Only in America” department:

* Hesham Islam, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, with his ridiculously cooked CV, should have never been given a security clearance. Hesham Islam is your picture book mole:

Islamist ‘Trojan horse’ in Pentagon, say experts

FBI: Top defense advisers linked to radical Muslim Brotherhood

Hesham Islam is responsible, according to earlier reports, for the firing of Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s only expert on Islamic law. But now the questions about Islam himself, and what his intentions really are, are increasing.

Federal authorities say a high-level Muslim Pentagon aide, who led a campaign to silence a Pentagon intelligence analyst for taking a hard line against Islam, is running an “influence operation” on behalf of U.S. Muslim groups fronting for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

Hesham H. Islam, a special assistant to deputy Defense secretary Gordon England, recently criticized Maj. Stephen Coughlin, one of the military’s leading authorities on Islamic war doctrine, for making the connection between the religion of Islam and terrorism.

After Islam lodged complaints, Coughlin’s contract with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon was not renewed.

Islam also was upset with briefings Coughlin recently prepared for the U.S. military warning that major U.S. Muslim groups were fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement based in Egypt.

Islam, who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups – the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named as a member of the U.S. branch of the Muslim Brotherhood and an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case.

Islam has persuaded his boss, England, to conduct various outreach with ISNA, including hosting the group’s leaders in the Pentagon and speaking at its annual convention.

Burning Smiley

More from World Net Daily

Sheik Yer’mami reported earlier that Hesham Islam is -and always was- a lobbyist on behalf of rabid jihadists to provide mosques, Koran’s and halal food for the Koranimals in Gitmo and also organized the Wahhabi-trained Muslim chaplain Abuhena Mohammed Saifulislam who catered to al-Qaida detainees at Guantanamo and fought to establish the first mosque in Marine Corps history.

Koran being flushed

But now the story got into the MSM, thanks to the bloggers:

By Bill Gertz - Islam probed

The Pentagon is looking into conflicting statements about the background of Hesham Islam, a special assistant to Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England who was the focus of a dispute with a Joint Staff counterterrorism analyst.

Mr. Islam faced tough questions about his background posed by veteran journalist Claudia Rosett, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the United Nations oil-for-food scandal with Iraq. Last week, Miss Rosett took the Pentagon to task by uncovering serious discrepancies about the Egyptian-born Islam that no one at the Pentagon seems willing to answer.

Writing in National Review Online, Miss Rosett revealed that certain claims about Mr. Islam’s background don’t fit.

Shortly after she wrote about the discrepancies contained in a Pentagon-written article on Mr. Islam’s background, the Pentagon removed the biography from its Web site, DefenseLink.mil.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said “that piece was taken down in an attempt to reduce the rhetoric and the emotion surrounding this issue while we try to determine the facts.”

The Pentagon does not comment on such personnel matters, he noted. “That said, we are looking into the matter and trying to reconcile conflicting statements.”

Mr. Morrell called later to clarify that the conflicting statements being probed relate to whether or not Mr. Islam used the term “Christian zealot with a pen” in describing Mr. Coughlin, and not about discrepancies in Mr. Islam’s background.

Mr. Islam has come under fire from supporters of Stephen Coughlin, the Joint Staff analyst on counterterrorism whose contract was not renewed. The action followed a meeting between Mr. Coughlin and Mr. Islam several weeks ago when the two clashed over Mr. Coughlin’s views on the Islamic law roots of terrorism.

After refusing comment to Inside the Ring, Kevin Wensing, a spokesman for Mr. Islam, now says that reports in this space that Mr. Islam called Mr. Coughlin a “Christian zealot with a pen” did not take place during the meeting.

Queries to other Pentagon officials familiar with the issue said the phrase was used by Mr. Islam after the meeting, not during it.

No action was taken against Mr. Islam, a Muslim adviser and confidant of Mr. England, for the anti-Christian comments.

Mr. Islam could not be reached for comment.

Miss Rosett tried — and failed — to get straight answers from Mr. Wensing about why Mr. Islam claimed that when he was 7 his family was bombed by Israeli jets at his home in Cairo, when there is no evidence the Israelis bombed the Egyptian capital during the 1967 war.

Also, Mr. Wensing could not explain why Mr. Islam said in his biography that he was on a freighter sunk by an Iranian torpedo in the Persian Gulf when there is no record of the ship being sunk.

According to his 1992 master’s thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School, Mr. Islam is highly critical of Israel and the influence of American Jews on U.S. politics, noting that U.S. ties to Israel have harmed relations to other states in the Middle East.

Furious Smiley

Diana West: A defining moment

Analyzing the GWB befuddlement:

In 2007 Mr. Bush highlighted the aggression of “Sunni extremists” and “Shia extremists.” In 2006, he warned against “radical Islam.” In 2008, the president merely decried “assassins,” “bombs,” “extremists” and “terrorists.” Why the fuzzy focus? Why declare a “defining ideological struggle” without defining the ideologies involved?

Stop Sign

Be sure to visit Winds of Jihad!

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Foehammer: Anvil Outage Caused by Islamist DDOS Attacks

January 23rd, 2008 — blog censorship, sites we like, leftist-jihadist convergence, Foehammer (author), e-jihadis, counterjihad, censorship, security, tech industry, Foehammer's Anvil, blogging

By Foehammer

Jan. 23, 2008 at 2:25 PM

This should satisfy all that are wondering what has been going on with the hosting here at the Anvil. I finally received an email from a LunarPages admin that actually knows how to do her job. Not surprisingly, her name is something that I can actually pronounce and most likely doesnt belong to a Muslim convert. What follows is an edited version of the response, but you will now see that I have absolute proof that the Leftofascists and Islamofascists have been hard at work tying to shut me up. Ive been telling LunarPages to check for ddos attacks for weeks; someone finally listened:

Hi,

Our admin has moved your account to a quieter server whilst the issues are worked out with regards to your CPU /MEM usage which is why your main page is back online.

This server has fewer customers and is less likely to crash in the event of attacks or high usage.

I have checked back through the last 6,000 lines of your domlogs for foehammer.net on its present server

It has indeed been hit by a flurry of ddos attempts:

This IP has almost 500 hits to your domain and is now blocked in the severs firewall:

(Hits: 467) #.#.#.# (netvigator Hong Kong)

There were also hits in the 100 to 300 from other ISPs.

I then went on to check the pages hit by this IP and it is apparent that this attacker was angered by a post on there with regards to the criticism of obamas muslim background being justified as almost every single hit was to this article:

#.#.#.# - - [22/Jan/2008:22:37:33 -0800] http://foehammer.net/2007/12/ criticism-of-obamas-muslim-background-is-absolutely-justified.html Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)

To overcome this I have now (edited out).

Your current usage is down today and this is before I installed the script, hopefully we will see this greatly reduced in the next 24 hours.

This quieter server is obviously a snail and unacceptable. Im hopeful that once some protections are put into place that I might actually want to blog again.

To those that might think switching hosts is no big deal, Im afraid you do not understand that I am being caught in this treadmill at the worst possible time for me personally, so yes, switching the Anvil to a new host is a very, very big deal to me. Beyond that, the Anvil is not a virtual sheet of paper. It is a heavily customized blog and setting it all up again on a new host would take many hours of intense work that I think I made clear around the New Year definitely wasnt what I wanted to be dealing with in 2008.

D–nit, at this point I do not even want to blog. Can anyone really blame me? Just look at the economy, the Presidential campaign, the continued rocket attacks into Gaza, the Stock Market being bought up by greedy Arab Oil Barons, and on and on and on.

Frankly, too much of what Ive been predicting all these years keeps happening and it looks like were going to elect a President that wont make things better, more likely far worse, in fact. Blogging to a few hundred awake readers and spending 40+ hours a week doing that is no longer an option for me. I have to start circling the wagons. I suggest many of you do the same.

This latest round of attacks on my Free Speech simply puts the exclamation point at the end of every sentence Ive been typing since 2003. Watch out! It looks like Im not lobbing softballs around here to be getting this much unwanted attention.

Be sure to visit Foehammer’s Anvil!

NoisyRoom: An Internet terrorist becomes a battlefield jihadi

7 Comments

E-Jihadist Impersonates Balkans Terrorism Expert, Posts Fake Messages

January 22nd, 2008 — crime, enemy propaganda, terrorism, Balkans, Darko Trifunovic, al Qaeda, Islam, Europe, security, Serbia, counterjihad, e-jihadis, censorship

“On the Internet,
nobody knows you’re a dog al Qaeda!”

Or so they think.

The following is a press release from Dr. Darko Trifunovic, the terrorism expert at the University of Belgrade who found it necessary to cancel his appearance at the 11th Euro Police Congress.

Dr. Darko Trifunovic

diplomacyun@yahoo.com
+381-64-1100279

For some time now, militant Islamic web portal Bosnjaci.net has been engaged in a propaganda campaign against the Serbian people as a whole, and me in person, with the purpose of preventing my appearance at the 11th Congress of European Police, where I am scheduled to speak about a European strategy for combating terrorism. They object to my existence as a Serb, and to the fact that in all of my speeches I make a clear difference between Islamic fundamentalists/mujahedin and Islam as a world religion.

This web portal fabricates stories and spreads dangerous misinformation. It also engages in spreading religious and racial hatred, (see article at http://www.bosnjaci.net/aktuelnosti.php?id=5449&polje=aktuelno, titled ”The Serbocidal Darko Trifunovic, ’expert’ for ’Euro-terrorism’, belongs behind bars”). This sort of racism and ethnic hatred is a threat to peace and security in Bosnia-Herzegovina and elsewhere.

People behind this Islamic fundamentalist portal have fabricated an email correspondence which they attribute to me, with me allegedly saying I wished all Muslims had been killed: The language and expressions used in this alleged email correspondence do not resemble my vocabulary at all – quite the contrary, they sound like broken vernacular of Bosnian Muslim émigrés. This is obviously the vilest sort of fabrication, with the purpose to agitate the citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina.

Reputable experts have identified Bosnjaci.net as a web portal spreading ideas closely related to Al-Qaeda (Bosnjaci.net Attacks on Darko Trifunovic); attacks on me are in line with known Al-Qaeda media strategy (Al Qaeda Media Committee Attacks on Darko Trifunovic). Therefore, this portal and the people associated with it are liable to come under investigation of anti-terrorist law enforcement organizations around the world. Given that this portal also glorifies the mujahedin, Islamic fanatics and war crimes suspects, the FBI has been notified of its operations.

I appeal to all citizens of Bosnia-Herzegovina not to believe the lies, fabrications and the ethnic, racial and religious hatred emanating from this web portal.

Sincerely,

Dr Darko Trifunovic

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 7:39 am and is filed under Balkan Politics.

Watch out for enemy disinformation

Let me remind everyone that we are at war, and that anyone confronting jihadism will be confronting some truly evil people. These are not choirboys, after all, they’re jihadists. They are not playing games. Jihadists aim to conquer and destroy everyone and everything that is outside of their own system.

We must not be surprised when they spread enemy propaganda and disinformation, when they try to use our own blogs and organizations against us, or when they do everything they can to set us against one another.

We must expect this to happen, we must be vigilant, and we must prepare ourselves to take appropriate measures without delay.

3 Comments

Terrorism expert Darko Trifunovic receives death threat

January 22nd, 2008 — crime, al Qaeda, terrorism, Balkans, Darko Trifunovic, Islam, counterjihad, security, Europe, Russia, Serbia, censorship

Why is this happening now? What are the terrorists trying to keep the rest of us from finding out?

Serbia: Terrorism expert receives death threat

AKI (Adnkronos International) Exclusive Interview

Belgrade, 21 Jan. (AKI) – Serbian terrorism expert, Darko Trifunovic, has cancelled a visit to Germany next week after claiming he received death threats from Muslim extremists.

Trifunovic, a professor at Belgrade University, said he has cancelled plans to attend the 11th European police congress in Berlin, after reporting death threats from alleged extremists in Bosnia.

Trifunovic, who has used the term “white Al-Qaeda”, to describe young European Muslims recruited by Islamic terrorist organisations, has been most outspoken on the activities of Islamic extremists in Bosnia and their links to Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

“I’m not panicky, but I do feel in danger,” Trifunovic told Adnkronos International (AKI) in an exclusive interview.

He said he had decided to avoid the Berlin congress on the urging of his friends and associates, after a threatening message was posted on a Bosnian extremist website, bosnjaci.net…

Now this is interesting…

A group of 15 Wahabis was arrested in Serbia’s Sandzak region, with sizable Muslim population, in March last year and is currently standing trial before a Belgrade court. They have been accused of plotting terrorist activities, including an attack on the US embassy in Belgrade.

Trifunovic estimated that up to 40,000 Muslims had been indoctrinated with radical Islam in Bosnia. But he said there are also active Wahabi cells in Sandzak, Serbia’s breakaway Kosovo province and other areas with substantial Muslim communities.

“If only one per cent of these individuals is prepared for the most radical forms of terrorism, the international community should be seriously concerned,” Trifunovic said.

“We are no longer talking about foreign mujahadeen, who have more or less finished their work in Bosnia, but about a ‘small army’ of local followers, with strong logistics, who are recruiting new members and spreading fear.”

That’s right - the Serbian government is putting local jihadists on trial for plotting to attack the US embassy in Serbia!

What exactly does this mean? Had the jihadists gotten away with that nasty little plot, something tells me that they would not have “claimed credit” for the carnage and gore. Instead, as is the case whenever anything bad happens in the Balkans, the jihadists would have tried to blame it on the local Serbs. That would have been easy enough for them to do. Local Bosnian jihadists already speak Serbian and they don’t look any different from Serbs (hence, “white al Qaeda”). The US would undoubtedly have taken the bait, using the allegation as a rationale for dealing even more harshly with Serbia than it already does.

Why are the jihadists so determined to silence Dr. Trifunovic? Like all other branches of al Qaeda, the Balkans jihadists plan to attempt more terrorist activity in the future - and not only in Serbia. And it would cramp their style if Darko Trifunovic were to alert everybody about the extent of jihadist activity coming from the Balkans - especially at the Euro police conference that he was planning to attend. In fact, just now, any publicity about Balkans jihadism could derail the current US-backed effort, dear to the hearts of the jihadists, to pry Kosovo away from Serbia.

Read the rest of the article.

More about Dr. Trifunovic, the Balkans, and Kosovo:

1389 Blog articles about Darko Trifunovic
US State Department Bungling Toward Armageddon
Kosovo terror group issues fresh threats

Tanjug PRIŠTINA — Members of the ANA, an armed ethnic Albanian group in Kosovo the UN has branded terrorist, have spoken again.

Members of the Albanian National Army (ANA) say they are “currently focused on the northern parts of Kosovo,” where Serbs are a majority and where they will allegedly, following a unilateral proclamation of independence of the province, “attempt to bring in security forces,” Tanjug news agency has quoted BIRN, an online publication.

“Several armed groups of Kosovo Albanians, with unclear sources of financing, are active in Kosovo and the international security forces are carefully monitoring them for the time being,” BIRN editor Krenar Gashi wrote.
In Too Deep

The Prizren League — the famous meeting that set out to combine into a “Greater Albania” all lands where there were large populations of Albanians — took place on June 10, 1878…

It has only now come to my attention, thanks to an Albanian newspaper, that Bush’s recent historic visit to Albania — the first ever by a sitting American president — to endorse Kosovo independence and ceremonialize closer ties between the U.S. and a Muslim Greater Albania, was timed to coincide with the anniversary of the Albanian League of Prizren — June 10th.
Serbs Get Support from the Least Expected Quarter

This George Gets it Right: Clooney to Organize Protest Against Unilateral Declaration of Kosovo Independence

Famous Hollywood actor, activist and campaigner George Clooney in a statement to the Frankfurt daily News announced he intends to organize a protest with his colleagues against the unilateral declaration of independence of Serbian province of Kosovo and Metohija.

“With my coworker and friend Sharon Stone and her childhood friends of Serbian ancestry, I’ll soon organize a protest against the attempts to grant independence to Kosovo,” the popular American actor said.
Hollywood Support for Serbia Grows

Carrying the information from Frankfurt daily News, RTS reported on Sunday that, after two among the most popular Hollywood stars, George Clooney and Sharon Stone, announced they will organize a protest against severing province of Kosovo and Metohija from the rest of Serbia, they were joined by Richard Gere and the all-time favorite James Bond — Sir Sean Connery.

“In case Serbian officials and Russia do not succeed in preserving Kosovo, the celebrated Hollywood stars might. The world’s most famous stars will, most probably already next month, stand in defense of the southern Serbian province in Hollywood, the heart of international movie industry: Sharon Stone, George Clooney, and also Richard Gere and Sir Sean Connery,” the Frankfurt daily News say.
Julia Gorin: Actors… Thinking
GOV: The Kosovo Connection
Blic Online: George Clooney swamped with e-mails