The Internet, Fraudulent Freedoms and the Long Arm of Zionism

After a week of propaganda about the wonders of freedom, democracy and online twittering, the mask finally slipped - thanks to the self-promoting boastfulness of a Washington Zionist.

We now know that while talking about free exchange of political views on the Internet, influential Zionists were actively trying to close down one side of the debate, using methods illegal under UK law to block Iranian political and media websites.

Josh Koster, a political consultant who specialises in advice to American election candidates on the use of the Internet, has boasted in an article posted on 18th June: "I decided it was time to cut off the flow" from Iranian websites.

What Koster did was to organise a "denial of service attack". This is a method frequently used by malicious computer hackers, by which repeated "hits" are generated on a particular website, rapidly overloading the servers on which the site is based. The U.S. Government's National Cyber Alert System explains DoS attacks.

In his article Koster proudly points out that by organising such attacks he temporarily closed down the sites of the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Tehran broadcaster IRIB, and Iran's spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei.

Koster's "denial of service" attack generated intense web traffic (comparable to or exceeding the traffic experienced by some of the web's most heavily used sites) towards these Iranian sites whose servers were not equipped to handle it.

Though often accused of paranoia, in this instance the Iranian authorities did not anticipate the shameless hypocrisy of Western "liberals", so the sites briefly disappeared from the Internet until extra server space could be organised.

However in the long term Josh Koster and his allies may regret having revealed their disreputable activities. A deliberate denial of service attack is illegal in many countries, including Sweden and the United Kingdom, where Koster's attack on Iranian web servers would be considered a criminal offence under the Police and Justice Act 2006, with a maximum penalty of ten years in prison.

Though there is no such specific law in the U.S. against DoS attacks, such behaviour would sometimes be covered by several criminal statutes including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Earlier this year the Wall Street Journal complained that Russia was carrying out DoS attacks which closed down web servers in neighbouring Kyrgyztan, but what was allegedly outrageous behaviour for the Russians seems to be celebrated when committed by Zionist Americans!

In his own country Koster has contravened Twitter's terms of service, which state:
You may not use the Twitter.com service for any illegal or unauthorized purpose. International users agree to comply with all local laws regarding online conduct and acceptable content.

Josh Koster (above) used Twitter to launch an
illegal attack on Iranian web servers;
Twitter's co-founder was Isaac Stone (below)

While Josh Koster was abusing the Twitter network to disrupt Iranian web servers another young Washington Zionist, State Department official Jared Cohen, was liaising with Twitter's senior management.

On 15th June Cohen contacted Jack Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter with Isaac Stone, to ask that scheduled maintenance work on Twitter's service should be delayed so as to keep the network online during Tehran's daytime hours.

Cohen's boss at the State Department - assistant secretary of state P.J. Crowley - maintained that this was not part of any strategy of interfering in Iran's internal affairs. He insisted that U.S. policy was to be:
proponents of freedom of expression. Information should be used as a way to promote freedom of expression.

In which case one wonders how Mr Crowley accounts for the other arm of the U.S. pincer movement against Iran - the use of that same Twitter network not to promote free expression but to silence Iranian news and political websites. A cursory examination of his colleague's career shows that young Mr Cohen (like Mr Koster) is interested in promoting a particular agenda, not in a free exchange of ideas.

Jared Cohen (now 27) made his name while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, where he obtained an M.Phil. in International Relations and wrote a book, Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East. His research for the book took him to Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where he became the leading American specialist on Islamic youth and how in the rapidly changing demography of the Middle East issues of youth culture could have a political impact.

In a November 2007 interview with the New Yorker magazine Cohen told of his experiences of alcohol, drug taking and other illicit activity on the fringes of the youth scene in the Islamic world and explained:
Now I’m in a place [i.e. the U.S. State Department] where I can take what young people are saying to me and work with my colleagues in Operations and in the embassies to do something that actually happens on the ground.

At the end of 2007 Cohen helped organise a conference in New York titled "Alliance of Youth Movements", where young people from countries including Lebanon and Saudi Arabia discussed how social networking sites such as Facebook could be used in political and social activism. Notably Google and Facebook have chosen this week to launch Farsi versions of their services, even though economic sanctions and current turmoil in Iran mean this is scarcely a commercial proposition at this moment.

Cohen and others have been working on how pro-American movements can be encouraged without obvious U.S. intervention, and he has recently been working with Obama's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, State Department veteran Richard Holbrooke.

He describes career CIA officer and former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci as "a wonderful mentor to me". Carlucci served with the CIA in the Congo during the overthrow and murder of the country's first post-independence leader Patrice Lumumba, and was named in a film released in 2000 as having being involved in the killing.

During the past half century the CIA has regularly used proxies - sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly - to overthrow democratically elected governments when election results seem unfavourable to American interests. Examples include:

Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh

Recent events suggest that blatant paramilitary coup plots have been replaced (or supplemented) by a more indirect war of cultural subversion.

This culture war is reminiscent of the "cultural cold war" waged during the 1950s and 1960s, when the CIA used various fronts such as the magazine Encounter to promote cultural trends which were directly (or often very indirectly) inimical to Soviet communism. This historical topic is explored at length by British historian Frances Stonor Saunders in her book Who Paid the Piper?

The equivalents to Twitter in those days were the CIA-controlled propaganda stations Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia.

From the earliest days of the Internet it has been predicted that the development of online communications would have profound political implications, potentially liberating individuals around the world from the stifling grip of prevailing political orthodoxies. No longer dependent on corporate media giants for their information, and no longer restricted to the political choices favoured and funded by vested interests, citizens would be able to hear a wider range of arguments, including those unorthodox views previously marginalised or even demonised.

Predictably establishment forces have closed ranks to warn that "extremists" have been able to exploit the increasing freedoms of the new media age. The presence of channels such as Press TV and Al-Jazeera altered the world's perspective on the terrible violence in Gaza a few months ago, where in past conflicts Israel would have safely relied on friendly coverage from established international networks.

Meanwhile Zionist campaign groups such as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre have complained that the expansion of the World Wide Web has allowed Israel's founding mythology to be challenged. Writers and publishers such as Ernst Zundel, Robert Faurisson and David Irving have been able to promote unorthodox research on previously taboo topics such as the alleged "Holocaust" of six million European Jews during the 1940s. In October 2008 the German and British authorities combined to execute a European Arrest Warrant against the Australian academic Dr Fredrick Toben, seized from a plane while in transit at Heathrow airport and charged with having challenged orthodox interpretations of the "Holocaust" on his Australian based website. This warrant was eventually deemed invalid, but criminal proceedings continue against Toben and his website in the Australian courts.

World Wide Web technology had the potential to be a liberating force because of its infinite scope. Sadly we must recognise that it also has the potential (like all the communications media of the last century) to bolster the power of American and Zionist interests.

The CIA's first "director of political warfare", Frank Wisner, boasted that the Agency's worldwide propaganda resources amounter to a "Mighty Wurlitzer" - a gigantic musical instrument on which he could play any tune in any style.

Wisner's typically American hubris led him to mental breakdown and suicide, but his 21st century equivalents in the Obama White House clearly hope that an online "Mighty Wurlitzer" will help them destroy the only challenge to Zionist power. The next few weeks will determine whether the Internet is a force for pluralism or hegemony.