Posted on

Blogging anti-arab sentiment

Perhaps I’m just reading the wrong blogs, but I must say that I’m quite dismayed at how many of them seem obsessed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and seem to take a vehemently pro-Israel anti-Arab/Islam/Palestinian (invariably and indistinguishly lumped together as one) stance. (This is NOT to say that I take the opposite stance, for I don’t. In fact I find the issue much too complicated and quite frankly I feel a bit too removed from it to take any stance other than a seemingly vain longing for peace).

Just to take one very mild by comparison quote at random, “Coupled with massive immigration from Middle Eastern countries, we are seeing either the beginning of the fall of Europe, or, as I believe, a rebellion against the fall of Europe.” (My italics added). This sentence is actually from a post about Pim Fortuyn and the recent Dutch parlimentary elections, a not coincidental association if you ask me.

At any rate, I’m fast growing tired of reading terms like “Islamofacism” or “Islamocreeps” thrown around freely on these sites. A site like Little Green Footballs, which rates high mentions on many blogs I’ve come across, I find particularly odoriferous, especially if one is brave and starts to read the user comments as well as the posts.

Posted on

Bin Laden still alive, according to Omar

This Reuters wire story (via a mention at Cursor) notes that a recent interview of Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader on the run since November, has been published by the Arab newspaper Ashraq al-Awsat (based in London). The crux of the story is that according to Omar, Osama Bin Laden is still alive.

So while the media makes hay about the recent revelations that the Bush administration had warnings about Bin Laden and terrorists enrolling in flight schools from the CIA and FBI pre-9/11, the fact of the matter that seems to recede further each day from the public consciousness is that Bin Laden and Omar are still at large, and that whether they’re “dead or alive”, the US military (oh excuse me, the “allied effort”) has no fucking clue.

Incidentally, I noted with some amusement this bit from the above-mentioned Reuters story: “[…] the article would also be published on what it called the official Internet site of the Taliban. It did not carry the address for the site.” A quick Google search brought up this Wired article from last October about the mysterious site, which was at www.afghanistan-ie.com until just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when it mysteriously vanished off the face of the Internet. As mentioned in the article, WHOIS still shows the domain registered to Pakistan’s largest ISP Brain.net, and lists the “administrative contact” as the “Taliban Govt Web Page”. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine shows us what the site looked like as of July 2001.

(A fascinating tidbit gleaned from the Wired piece surrounding the background of Brain.net: it grew out of Brain Computers in Lahore, the owners of which wrote one of the world’s first computer viruses back in the early ’80’s.)

At any rate, I did more surfing and I think it’s safe to say that www.taliban.org is definitely not the Taliban’s official site, despite the spot-on cheesy design.