| Arab Racism: The story the Left ignores Posted: 29 May 2012 08:00 PM PDT Here's a story about racism that was published three days ago, but that was ignored in the major leftist websites. Wonder why? From The Economist: THE multilingual, fashion-conscious residents of Beirut, Lebanon's capital, fancy their city to be cosmopolitan. But not everyone is welcome. Black people and foreigners from Asia and elsewhere in the third world who make up the bulk of migrant workers are often turned away from the city's smarter venues. Conscious of the bad blood this can cause, Lebanon's government has warned beach clubs against barring entry on the basis of race, nationality or disability.
But racism is unlikely to be erased overnight, either in Lebanon or in many other Middle Eastern countries where blacks are routinely looked down on. Racist taunts are often heard on Egypt's streets, and in Yemen, darker-skinned people, known as al-akhdam ("the servants"), who make up perhaps 5% of the population, are confined to menial jobs and tend to dwell in slums. In Libya rebel militias often targeted darker-skinned people from nearby countries such as Chad and Mali and from countries further south, accusing them of being mercenaries of Muammar Qaddafi.
Filipinos, Sri Lankans and Chinese-Americans, among others, whisper of racist slurs both at work and on Lebanon's streets. "When black or Asian friends visit," says a young Lebanese professional, "I'm at the airport the moment they land to make sure immigration officers don't ask inappropriate questions. It's a disgrace."
Some people blame the legacy of the slave trade, which brought sub-Saharan Africans, as well as others, to the region from the 7th century onwards. But Nadim Houry of Human Rights Watch, a New York-based lobby group says that racism persists in the region because governments have been lax about tackling it. "There are racists everywhere in the world, but in many countries it is now taboo to make comments, partly because there are laws against it," he says. "Here, even when there is legislation, it is never applied."
Snobbery makes things worse. Millions of foreigners in the Middle East do cleaning and building jobs which locals consider beneath them. Sponsorship schemes often deny such workers basic rights. "People just see us as cheap labour," says a Filipino university graduate who makes $200 a month in a Beirut beauty parlour. Some beach clubs have already said they will ignore the new regulation. Their customers, they say, would not tolerate having to rub shoulders with the dark-skinned servant class. Will there be any soul-searching in the Arab world about this explicit racism? Will the "pro-Palestinian" crowd notice that Arab racism makes the bigotry of some Israelis pale by comparison? Will there be follow-up stories in the media about this, which might shame some Arabs? No, no and no. 
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| 16 year old Copt gets 3 years in prison for cartoon on Facebook Posted: 29 May 2012 03:00 PM PDT From Egypt Independent: An Egyptian court on Tuesday upheld a three year sentence against a 16-year-old Christian student for posting a drawing on his Facebook page that mocked Islam and the Prophet Mohamed.
The Assiut Court of Appeals said that it has found Gamal Abdu Massoud guilty of defaming religion, state-run news service MENA reported on Tuesday.
Massoud published the cartoons in December, then some Muslims reacted angrily by attacking Christians and burning houses in the Manqabad village in the southern city of Assiut, home to a large Christian population.
In April, Assiut juvenile court sentenced him to three years in prison.
According to Article 98(f) of the Penal Code, "Confinement for a period of not less than six months and not exceeding five years… shall be the penalty inflicted on whoever makes use of religion in propagating, either by words, in writing, or in any other means, extreme ideas for the purpose of inciting strife, ridiculing or insulting a heavenly religion or a sect following it, or damaging national unity." According to reports, this was the offensive cartoon, which makes this painfully ironic. Naturally, most news outlets following the case refused to publish this cartoon. 
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| Wall map excludes Israel Posted: 29 May 2012 02:00 PM PDT From the JC: An interior design company has had to "re-draw" a wall world map which omitted Israel for being "too small."
Customer Joanna Koenigsberg, of Sidcup, planned to decorate walls in her new home with panels in different designs from online company Binary Box. But two of the company's map designs, one labelled with country names and one covered in different flags in the shapes of countries, each omitted Israel, giving Jordan a Mediterranean coastline.
Ms Koenigsberg said: "I was saddened because I really liked these designs, but I can't accept this fiddling with the truth."
After being contacted by the JC, the company said it was an "error" and was not politically motivated. Aidan Stonehouse, graphic designer at Binary Box, said the sticker panel had been redesigned to include Israel.
Ms Koenigsberg said she was pleased with the response, and said the company had sent her the new designs. "Of course we have no idea how many were sold of the old ones, or who designed them, but it was a decent response. I don't feel there was any political element to the oversight." Here's part of the map; see if you agree it was an oversight. (Notice that Lebanon is missing as well.) 
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| "Zionists using job ads to gather information" Posted: 29 May 2012 12:45 PM PDT Hamas newspaper Palestine Times reveals the Mossad's latest plan on recruiting informants: placing ads for fake jobs in Palestinian Arab media. According to the article, Israel is placing ads for bogus jobs with attractive salaries attractive and good benefits, just to gather job applications and resumes. The applications ask for name, address, skills, achievements and personal qualities, e-mail addresses and phone number, all of which are valuable intelligence information. The article admits that marketers use similar tactics to gather email addresses and phone numbers for spam and other marketing schemes. One of the proofs the article gives that the Mossad is behind the ads is that one of the ads asked where the applicant lived - and mentioned Rafah separately from Gaza, indicating that the people who placed the ad were trying to gather information about smugglers in Rafah. While I can believe that Israeli intelligence would use methods like this to gather information, it is equally plausible that Hamas would do the same, for example in order to discover any smuggling tunnels that are not yet being taxed. 
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| "Israelis unfurled Zionist flag on Al Aqsa Mosque" Posted: 29 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT The latest rumor started by the Al Aqsa Heritage Foundation is that Israelis who visited the Temple Mount yesterday unfurled a huge Israeli flag. This one reached AFP: Soldiers on Monday violated the status quo on the esplanade of the mosques in east Jerusalem by raising Israel's flag, the head of the Islamic Waqf organization that oversees the compound charged.
"More than 180 soldiers from a special Israeli army unit today raised a large Israeli flag opposite the mosque of the Rock, which is a grave provocation," Sheikh Azzam al-Khatib told AFP. They have lots of photos of Israelis on the Mount, but not one shows any flag. Sheikh Azzam al Khatib declared scenes like the ones above "catastrophic." Last year they freaked out over a Photoshopped picture of an Israeli flag on top of the Dome of the Rock. By the way, last week's rumor was that the Jews were planting fake graves all over the area of the Temple Mount, through Silwan and to the Mount of Olives, in a land-grab. That rumor has now reached the Arab League where they condemned this alleged practice. Of course, Muslims have been known to place fake graves in areas in Jerusalem, so this looks like more projection. 
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| Richard Millett's review of Habima's Merchant of Venice Posted: 29 May 2012 10:15 AM PDT Richard Millett does a great job reviewing the Habima Theater's production of The Merchant of Venice last night in London. Two points he makes are worth noting here: There was also a pen for Palestine Solidarity Campaign activists. One PSC man had donned a mask with a big nose, but swore it wasn't an anti-Semitic gesture.
I asked some of the PSC lot whether they saw the recent production of Richard II by the Palestinian theatre company also at The Globe. They said they didn't as it was a matinee and they had work commitments. They must have conveniently failed to spot the Saturday performance at 7.30pm then; proof, if ever it was needed, that PSC activists don't give a damn about the Palestinians. 
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| PA officials attend free Israeli agricultural training Posted: 29 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT From COGAT: From May 21 to 23rd, twenty-four Palestinian officials, mostly agricultural engineers, attended a three-day seminar on agricultural technologies, plant protection, and fertilisers in Netanya. The lectures were delivered by Israeli experts, professors and officials from the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture.
"This workshop is intended to provide information about technologies that we use in Israel to protect and improve crops in open-fields and green houses", said Ayman Assad, from the Agriculture Department at the Civil Administration.
The seminar is one of many Israeli-Palestinian workshops planned for 2012. "Through these workshops we are improving the relationship, cooperation and communication with the Palestinian Authority", added Ayman Assad. The Civil Administration offers full board to the Palestinian guests, including travel and meal coverage.
Sitting by the hotel swimming pool during lunch break, Najud, a 23 year-old agricultural engineer from Jericho confides: "I'm happy to learn here, the lectures are very intense and I wish we had more time to visit!"
The Agriculture Department of the Civil Administration works with Palestinian farmers in the field to find out more about problems affecting their trade. Based on this, the Ministry of Agriculture organizes seminars, lectures and training in Israel to increase the quality and output of Palestinian crops, explained Shlomo Ekaïam from the Ministry.
"Palestinians and Israeli consumers eat fruit and vegetables coming from Israel and the West Bank, so we collectively strive for the best agricultural standards", he added.
Muhammad Saïd Lahan, Director of the Flower and Vegetable Protection and Preservation Department at the Palestinian Authority knows Netanya well: "I came here many times, maybe 8 or 10 times. It is important for our team to come because 16 of us are young engineers who need experience and more field-training."
On Wednesday, the Palestinian delegation was taken to Beit Shean for training on open-fields.
"We also organize seminars in Ramallah in our own Ministry or abroad where we are often invited", added Mr. Lahan. Agriwashing, again! Those Israelis have no shame! 
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| "McDonald's Happy Meal toy insults Mohammed" Posted: 29 May 2012 07:30 AM PDT From Raymond Ibrahim at Gatestone Institute: Saudi Arabians are angry at a McDonald's toy which they say mocks their prophet Muhammad. According to a report appearing today (5/27/12) on the Arabic news website, Kermalkom.com, the McDonald's fast food restaurant "abused the Prophet Muhammad by placing his name at the base of a toy that is being distributed as part of the Happy Meal, a toy which steps on the name 'Muhammad.'"
The toy consists of a blue superhero figurine (apparently a Power Ranger Samurai. It stands on one leg, and, when the lever is pressed, it pounds on the base with the other leg. According to the Saudis, the designs that appear all around the base, where the figurine stomps its foot, is really the name "Muhammad" written several times in circles.
The toy had been distributed a few days before Saudi children and their parents began to take note of the name. Soon thereafter, Saudi Muslims launched several campaigns against McDonald's in "response to the savage attacks on the noble Prophet," under banners like "Help your Prophet!" and "Together in support of the Prophet."
Saudis, "demanding the strongest possible punishment for the restaurant" and insisting that "they will not be silent until this is realized," further complained how such an obvious insult could pass the supervision of the management at McDonalds.
In response, "Saudi McDonald's" has withdrawn the toy from all its restaurants, "in order to safeguard against any accusations or misunderstandings." Get ready to seethe: And, just in case you cannot see the obvious allusion to Mohammed in the squiggle, this site makes it clear as day:  | | Calligraphic Mohammed | Waiting for the fatwa.... (h/t Ian) 
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| Democracy, Egyptian-style Posted: 29 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT Egypt's runoff elections will be between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi and former PM Ahmed Shafiq. So supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood decided to burn down Shafiq's headquarters: A group of protesters stormed the campaign headquarters of presidential candidate Ahmed Shafiq late Monday night, ransacking and burning the offices there.
A secretary working at the campaign offices, Heba Hamed, told Egypt Independent that the campaign workers were notified to leave before the fire started and that the intruders had been apprehended. The fire was later extinguished.
An eyewitness told Egypt Independent that some 400 people arrived from the direction of Tahrir Square chanting against feloul, or remnants of the former regime. They broke into the villa near Vini Square in Dokki that hosts Shafiq's offices, and then stole computers and documents and threw some into the street. If Shafiq wins the runoff, it is clear that those against him will simply start a new violent revolution. That seems to be the lesson that some Egyptians have learned from the revolution: not that democracy is the way to go, but that protests are the way to get the government you want. If it doesn't work the first time, keep trying. 
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| Ya'alon hints Israel might be behind "Flame" malware Posted: 29 May 2012 02:27 AM PDT Wired reports on a newly discovered cyber weapon that dwarfs Stuxnet in complexity: A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.
The malware, discovered by Russia-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, is an espionage toolkit that has been infecting targeted systems in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, the Israeli Occupied Territories and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa for at least two years.
Dubbed "Flame" by Kaspersky, the malicious code dwarfs Stuxnet in size – the groundbreaking infrastructure-sabotaging malware that is believed to have wreaked havoc on Iran's nuclear program in 2009 and 2010. Although Flame has both a different purpose and composition than Stuxnet, and appears to have been written by different programmers, its complexity, the geographic scope of its infections and its behavior indicate strongly that a nation-state is behind Flame, rather than common cyber-criminals — marking it as yet another tool in the growing arsenal of cyberweaponry.
The researchers say that Flame may be part of a parallel project created by contractors who were hired by the same nation-state team that was behind Stuxnet and its sister malware, DuQu.
"Stuxnet and Duqu belonged to a single chain of attacks, which raised cyberwar-related concerns worldwide," said Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, in a statement. "The Flame malware looks to be another phase in this war, and it's important to understand that such cyber weapons can easily be used against any country."
Early analysis of Flame by the Lab indicates that it's designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them, including documents, recorded conversations and keystrokes. It also opens a backdoor to infected systems to allow the attackers to tweak the toolkit and add new functionality.
The malware, which is 20 megabytes when all of its modules are installed, contains multiple libraries, SQLite3 databases, various levels of encryption — some strong, some weak — and 20 plug-ins that can be swapped in and out to provide various functionality for the attackers. It even contains some code that is written in the LUA programming language — an uncommon choice for malware.
Kaspersky Lab is calling it "one of the most complex threats ever discovered."
"It's pretty fantastic and incredible in complexity," said Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab.
Flame appears to have been operating in the wild as early as March 2010, though it remained undetected by antivirus companies.
"It's a very big chunk of code. Because of that, it's quite interesting that it stayed undetected for at least two years," Gostev said. He noted that there are clues that the malware may actually date back to as early as 2007, around the same time-period when Stuxnet and DuQu are believed to have been created.
Gostev says that because of its size and complexity, complete analysis of the code may take years.
"It took us half-a-year to analyze Stuxnet," he said. "This is 20-times more complicated. It will take us 10 years to fully understand everything."
Kaspersky discovered the malware about two weeks ago after the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union asked the Lab to look into reports in April that computers belonging to the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company had been hit with malware that was stealing and deleting information from the systems. The malware was named alternatively in news articles as "Wiper" and "Viper," a discrepancy that may be due to a translation mixup.
Kaspersky researchers searched through their reporting archive, which contains suspicious filenames sent automatically from customer machines so the names can be checked against whitelists of known malware, and found an MD5 hash and filename that appeared to have been deployed only on machines in Iran and other Middle East countries. As the researchers dug further, they found other components infecting machines in the region, which they pieced together as parts of Flame.
Kaspersky, however, is currently treating Flame as if it is not connected to Wiper/Viper, and believes it is a separate infection entirely. The researchers dubbed the toolkit "Flame" after the name of a module inside it.
Among Flame's many modules is one that turns on the internal microphone of an infected machine to secretly record conversations that occur either over Skype or in the computer's near vicinity; a module that turns Bluetooth-enabled computers into a Bluetooth beacon, which scans for other Bluetooth-enabled devices in the vicinity to siphon names and phone numbers from their contacts folder; and a module that grabs and stores frequent screenshots of activity on the machine, such as instant-messaging and email communications, and sends them via a covert SSL channel to the attackers' command-and-control servers.
The malware also has a sniffer component that can scan all of the traffic on an infected machine's local network and collect usernames and password hashes that are transmitted across the network. The attackers appear to use this component to hijack administrative accounts and gain high-level privileges to other machines and parts of the network.
Flame does contain a module named Viper, adding more confusion to the Wiper/Viper issue, but this component is used to transfer stolen data from infected machines to command-and-control servers. News reports out of Iran indicated the Wiper/Viper program that infected the oil ministry was designed to delete large swaths of data from infected systems.
Although the Flame toolkit does not appear to have been written by the same programmers who wrote Stuxnet and DuQu, it does share a few interesting things with Stuxnet.
Stuxnet is believed to have been written through a partnership between Israel and the United States, and was first launched in June 2009. It is widely believed to have been designed to sabotage centrifuges used in Iran's uranium enrichment program. DuQu was an espionage tool discovered on machines in Iran, Sudan, and elsewhere in 2011 that was designed to steal documents and other data from machines. Stuxnet and DuQu appeared to have been built on the same framework, using identical parts and using similar techniques.
But Flame doesn't resemble either of these in framework, design or functionality.
Stuxnet and DuQu were made of compact and efficient code that was pared down to its essentials. Flame is 20 megabytes in size, compared to Stuxnet's 500 kilobytes, and contains a lot of components that are not used by the code by default, but appear to be there to provide the attackers with options to turn on post-installation.
"It was obvious DuQu was from the same source as Stuxnet. But no matter how much we looked for similarities [in Flame], there are zero similarities," Gostev said. "Everything is completely different, with the exception of two specific things."
One of these is an interesting export function in both Stuxnet and Flame, which may turn out to link the two pieces of malware upon further analysis, Gostev said. The export function allows the malware to be executed on the system.
Also, like Stuxnet, Flame has the ability to spread by infecting USB sticks using the autorun and .lnk vulnerabilities that Stuxnet used. It also uses the same print spooler vulnerability that Stuxnet used to spread to computers on a local network. This suggests that the authors of Flame may have had access to the same menu of exploits that the creators of Stuxnet used.
The researchers say they don't know yet how an initial infection of Flame occurs on a machine before it starts spreading. The malware has the ability to infect a fully patched Windows 7 computer, which suggests that there may be a zero-day exploit in the code that the researchers have not yet found. Iran admits losing lots of data to Flame: Iranian authorities have admitted that malicious software dubbed Flame has attacked it, and instructed to run an urgent inspection of all computer systems in the country.
Iran's MAHER Center said Tuesday that the Flame virus "has caused substantial damage" and that "massive amounts of data have been lost."
The center, which is part of Iran's Communication's Ministry said that the virus' level of complexity, accuracy and high-functionality – noted mostly by the information corrupted – indicated that there is a "relation" to the Stuxnet virus.
Iranian experts said that Flame was able to overcome 43 different anti-virus programs.
While no one knows who is behind "the most sophisticated virus of all times," the bottom line, computer experts say, is that only a state could have developed such a complex virus. And Israel's Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon hinted that Israel might be that state: "Anyone who sees the Iranian threat as a significant threat will likely take various countermeasures, including, to hurt them," said Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon, in an interview with program "Good Morning Israel" with Golan Yochpaz. "Israel is blessed as a country rich in high technology; these tools we have open all sorts of possibilities to us." (h/t Yoel) 
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