In this, Israel is not unique; any American (even the ones that voted for Barack Obama) will tell you that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. But Israel’s government inefficiency hasn’t just been a drag on economy; over the past several weeks, the government’s difficulties in explaining its case on the Gaza flotilla has cost us big-time.

Note that I said “difficulty,” not “failure,” as many others have claimed. There are those who just hate Israel (and Jews; Helen Thomas proves they go together), and nothing we can say will make them unhate us. But there are many people who are willing to give us a fair hearing – and unfortunately, these are the people we failed in the first days after the incident. It took at least 24 hours for word to get out about the violent attack on Israeli soldiers by the “terror activists,” and only three days later did Israel’s story get mainstream publicity.

Of course, hasbara has to take a back seat to real security, and sometimes you have few options; like with the Gaza flotilla’s Mavi Marmara – where IDF soldiers had no choice but to use real bullets to save the lives of their comrades, who were savagely attacked by knife and club wielding “peace activists” – you’re damned if you do or don’t. But if we know our story is right, and we’re convinced of it, why do we seem to have such trouble selling it properly – and convincingly?

Maybe what we need is a little private-sector ingenuity for our hasbara efforts. Look at the saga of the “We Con the World” video; as you’ve probably heard by now, the video, produced by Latma, which is edited by our own Caroline Glick, was pulled from Youtube, most likely because of complaints by anti-Israel viewers who were appalled that their story – of how big bad Israel attacked the innocent “activists” – was hijacked, with the world seeing the truth of the intentions of the passengers on the Marmara, because of a parody, of all things!

Of course, Youtube claimed that the reason for the video’s ban was that it was in violation of “a copyright claim by Warner/ Chappell Music, Inc.” the owners of the rights to the original USA for Africa “We Are the World” song and video, produced in the 1980s to raise money for hunger in Africa. But that can’t be right, because U.S. copyright law provides for “fair use,” meaning that existing works of art can be freely used for parody or education purposes. Just ask Lenny Solomon and “Weird Al” Yankovic, who for decades have been rewriting top pop songs for education (Solomon) and parody (Al) purposes!

The point of the story, though, is why Youtube was moved to remove the video – because it was making an impact, thanks to the 3 million plus hits it generated in barely a week. Now the genie is out of the bottle; “We Con the World” has spread too far and too wide, and is now available on all sorts of sites. In fact, doing a search for “We Con the World” at Youtube yields dozens of copies, now dubbed in all sorts of languages!

As many have said, “We Con the World” was one of the best pro-Israel hasbara pieces to emerge in a long time – and the government had nothing to do with it! The truth is, though, the marketing people at many  Israeli companies – startups and veterans – are just as talented as the people at Latma. Why not come out with a parody a week – or some other effective video, audio, or web campaign, that can tell Israel’s side of the story in a surprising, interesting – and successful – manner?

That’s exactly the question that came up when I recently interviewed an Israeli “captain of industry” (he remains anonymous for this story, in order not to mix politics and business). We met just a day after the flotilla story took over the media. By that time, the headlines worldwide castigated the IDF for boarding the Marmara and five other ships, with the resulting nine deaths. Meanwhile, nearly no one was paying attention to Israel’s side of the story.

Commenting on the seeming lack of ability of Israel to get its point across, I told this executive that it appeared that the tepid efforts by hasbara officials to explain Israel’s position was possibly the result of the game of “musical chairs” played by politicians in this country. You have the same people running different ministries and departments in various governments, while the actual day to day work is done by the bureaucrats who remain on the job, no matter who the boss is. “The minister spends years just learning the issues, while the bureaucrats have no incentive to change their ways. While that system may be acceptable for deciding on where to build a sewage treatment plant, it just doesn’t work in day to day hasbara,” we both agreed.

Then we brainstormed an idea; why not “outsource” hasbara? I don’t mean officially; no bureaucrats will be hurt in the execution of this plan. But if every successful hi-tech company, if every successful PR firm, non-profit marketing department, university information bureau, were to donate, say, an hour a week to a specific hasbara project, imagine how well Israel’s story would be told! The executive agreed; working on such projects, utilizing the amazing talent we have in this country, could be the solution we have long sought to the problem of getting the world’s attention. If “We Con the World” proves anything, it’s that good people around the world are indeed willing to give us a fair hearing. We just need to come up with something good for them to hear! The executive’s on board; how about you?

Related articles by Zemanta

• ‘We Con the World’ video kerfuffle: When Middle East politics meets the parody/satire divide (copyrightsandcampaigns.blogspot.com)
• Inevitable: YouTube pulls “We Con the World” video (hotair.com)
• The Flotilla Choir Presents: We Con the World (newsbusters.org)

Facebook and Youtube have been playing an important role in this too, with the former hosting longer manifestoes and idea exchanges, and the latter hosting grainy film of protests and police attacks  captured on cell phone cameras. But for “front line” news bulletins, Twitter has emerged as the preferred mode of clandestine communication. The “Twitter Revolution,” as some are calling it, is apparently giving the Iranian government conniptions, to the extent that the U.S. State Department supposedly asked the Twitter people to postpone scheduled maintenance that would have shut down the service during the elections – the better to enable Iranians to communicate news abroad.

As events have developed, many members of the “chattering classes” have commented on the emergence of social network applications as agents of social change etc., to the extent that the concept has turned into a media cliché almost overnight! Note that Twitter has played a role in several social upheavals already – it helped get a college kid out of jail in Egypt last year, and students in Moldova used it to organize anti-government protests earlier this year. The Twitter Revolution in Iran was the first one to be recognized in a big way, however – possibly because many mainstream journalists have started using Twitter themselves only recently!

On the other hand, Twitter can be used for “evil,” as well – to disseminate disinformation, for example, like a Twitterer called Bamos did, when he got conservatives up in arms about phony spending proposals in the U.S. Federal Budget. Bottom line – Twitter is a tool – like e-mail or the telephone. There are lots of ways to communicate, and Twitter is one more. What’s “revolutionary” about social media’s role in the Iranian uprising is that the authorities have been unable to shut it down completely, as they have other methods of communication; and that Iranians and Westerners have developed numerous methods to beat the internet suppression. But chances are that if the phones worked,  protesters would use that tool instead. I certainly would.

Never one to chatter, I won’t bore you with media cliches; you can see for yourself just how important  Twitter has been in Iran by surfing to the Twitter search site and typing in “Iran.” But there are a few other things I take away from the Twitter Revolution, specifically relevant to us here in Israel:

1) The internet doesn’t (always) hate us: Somehow, when there’s a problem anywhere in the Mideast, it’s at least partially the Jews’/Israel’s fault. Israel is to blame for Iraq, Lebanon, and other trouble spots, according to most of the region’s residents, the “voices of balance” in the blogosphere, and even the mainstream media. Indeed, as things heated up in Tehran last week, the government “discovered” an Election Day plot to bomb crowded sites in the city, organized by you-know-who. In fact, some in the anti-Israel blogging crowd (some of whom I wrote about recently) have blamed the whole Twitter Revolution thing on us as well; it’s an attempt on Israel’s part to destabilize Iran, and when things are destabilized enough, we will attack them. According to this theory, somehow three or four Israelis are disseminating all the Iran uprising tweets, thus causing gullible Iranians to resist Ahmenijadad. It’s very complicated!

Needless to say, ridiculous conspiracy theories like these are being totally ignored by Twitter users, and even by the blogosphere, for the most part. The fact that Iranians are able to tweet out what’s going on as it happens makes it clear that this is an organic uprising, and that Israel, while it may or may not be happy about what’s going on, has nothing to do with it. It’s a nice change of pace, not being “responsible” for a Middle East mess!

2) Israel isn’t all that bad, even for Palestinians: As I mentioned earlier, the reason Iranians are being forced to rely on Twitter and other social media to get the word out is because the “traditional” methods of communication – international phone service, worldwide media reporting – has been cut off by the authorities. Would Iranians choose to use these services if the traditional alternatives were available? There’s no way to know, of course, but Iranians – and the rest of us – are fortunate that we live in a time when alternatives are available.

However, note that the Palestinians, whose “struggle” has gotten far more publicity than the Iranians’, are not big social media users (until a month ago, the common wisdom said that Iranians were on board with the mullah system and were big Ahmenijadad fans; clearly this uprising didn’t come out of nowhere). There’s plenty of internet in Palestinian Authority controlled areas, and PA residents are just as big cellphone fanatics as Israelis. Yet Hamas and Fatah haven’t resorted to “underground” reports from the field in order to get the news out. That’s because they don’t have to! For a speck on the map, geographically and numerically – Israel – and the Palestinians – get far more media coverage than they should. Palestinians don’t use alternative communications tools to promote their “uprisings” – because the traditional methods work just fine, thanks to Israel’s liberal policies.

3) The Middle East “blog balance” has changed once again: One reason the anti-Israel internet crowd is trying to delegitimize the Iranian uprising is because of the impact it will have on U.S. policy in the Mideast. While President Obama hasn’t taken sides on the election yet, he has demanded that the Iranian government stop beating up its citizens (each subsequent statement that he has made has been stronger than the previous one). So it would appear that  U.S. will have no choice but to back away from the “dialogue” it had been planning with the Ahmenijadad regime, at least temporarily – and maybe permanently, if  Ahmenijadad loses his job.

You have to imagine that Obama is doing some thinking about his whole Middle East stance – and that maybe there is something to the idea that democracy does make a difference. Israel isn’t perfect, but it’s a whole lot more democratic than Iran, Egypt, Syria, and the other dictatorships, kingdoms, and sheikhdoms in the neighborhood. Obama was supposed to be different, the anti-Israel bloggers believed; he was finally, after all these years, going to “stick it” to Israel. But reality has apparently bitten, and now the rest of the world might take what Israel says about Iran – and maybe even other issues – a little more seriously. It’s a blow to the anti-Israel forces on the internet – and it’s all thanks to social media, and especially Twitter.

And in 2009, it appears those shocks are hitting home, as businesses begin the business of laying off workers in earnest. If you’re a victim, I feel your pain; it’s a hi-tech road I’ve been down before. And as many of us learned in the last downturn in 2002-3, things change after a major industry crackup; new companies demand skill sets you may not have, and while retraining is always an option, you don’t want to spend months learning some new skill only to find out that it has a limited shelf life. While there might be many jobs in requiring X skill right now, the question you have to ask is – what happens in five years, when you’re of a “certain age” – the age where computer industry bosses think you’re “overqualified” (i.e., too old and too expensive) for their business?

Even if you do do have the option of remaining in the same industry, you’ll still want to choose the right employer, one who will be around for the near and mid-term, at least; you may get a job now, but if you find yourself having to look again a year from now, you’ll be a year old, and a year more “overqualified.”

For many people right now, the immediate question is how to pay next month’s mortgage, and hopefully most of us will figure out how to keep going in “survival mode” for as long as it takes. But you still need a long-term plan that takes into consideration the day after tomorrow. Where do you see yourself – where would you like to be – in five years? Maybe a better question to ask is, will the industry you decide to get involved in still be there in five years? It’s probably a question that in a million years would not have registered on the radar of the 2004 MBA grad crowd, but as they – and the rest of us – have so painfully learned, anything, even the impossible, can happen.

There are no shortage of sites that claim to tell you what the “hot” areas of the economy are going to be – which is probably where you would want to be, if you can get there. I’m not talking about general predictions, like how people are going to be scared of real estate or stock market investments for a long time to come, but professionally researched predictions that claim to have a fix on the up and coming business and industry trends. In the computer business, for example, the best-known “industry prophet” is the Gartner Group (http://www.gartner.com/), which watches trends in all areas of the computer industry. At http://xrl.us/beemod, for example, you can see Gartner’s predictions for the Eight Mobile Technologies to Watch in 2009 and 2010, and at http://xrl.us/beemrv, you’ll find Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009. Gartner makes its money by producing reports that predict trends for companies and industries (reports that cost a lot of money), so the Gartner “top tens” are pretty general.

Besides Gartner’s professional predictive systems, there are many sites that rely on “the wisdom of crowds” (www.randomhouse.com/features/wisdomofcrowds/) to give you a clue on what’s in store, the theory being that the many are wiser than the few. Ziitrend (http://www.ziitrend.com/), for example, is a site where anyone can make a prediction on anything, with site users voting on the likelihood of the event happening.

For most of us, both these approaches are a bit thin; they may be useful as water cooler talk, but we need something a bit more solid on which to build a future. If you’re being pushed into a career shift, you want to make sure you pick the right career to shift to, after all. We need a little more insight on where things are going.

If you thought I was building up to introducing a site that can predict the future – well, I apologize; nobody knows what is “really” going to happen. But: I can help point you to sites that will give you ideas on how to make those predictions for yourself – the potential areas you should be looking at, based on your skills and interests. Assuming you are in touch with your own experience, background, skills, etc. (if you’re out of practice on how to write a resume, interview, etc., by all means check out http://www.jobhuntersbible.com/), the ideas here will hopefully give you some insight about how to think about the future, thereby making it easier for you to make a decision on investing your time, helping you to figure out what stable industries and businesses are out there that you qualify for.

If we’re in a new era, it’s time to think differently, and one way to learn how to do this is to check out different “thinking methodologies” – like Triz, a Russian acronym for the “Theory of Inventive Problem Solving.” The system was developed in the former Soviet Union between 1946 and 1985, by Soviet engineer and researcher Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues. Boiled down to its basic core, Triz has two general principles: “1. Somebody, someplace, has already solved your problem or one similar to it. Creativity means finding that solution and adapting it to the current problem”; and, 2. “Don’t accept compromises. Eliminate them” (http://xrl.us/beemve). There are all sorts of Triz success stories out there (http://xrl.us/beemvp), with companies employing the 40 principles of Triz (http://triz40.com/aff_Principles.htm) to solve industrial and business problems. At (http://triz40.com/), you’ll find the “Interactive TRIZ Contradiction Matrix,” which demonstrates the system as applied to real problems.

Triz certainly qualifies as “thinking differently,” but can it help you figure out where you’re going? I believe it can. First of all, just getting exposure to different approaches to problem solving helps jog the brain, and pushes you to get more creative about solving your problem. Problem solving is what Triz is all about, and there’s no reason Triz problem solving methodology can’t be used to figure out employment and career problems, not just industrial production problems. That, in fact, is the theme of an article (http://xrl.us/beemxn), on the Triz Journal site (http://www.triz-journal.com/), probably the best resource online for insights into how to think Triz (note that there are many “professional” Triz sites that charge money for their services; the Triz Journal is completely free, and has at least as much information as the others, from what I could see).

Remember, we’re taking a long view here, so it stands to reason you’ll have a better chance of getting to where you need to go – and figuring out where that should be – using a scientific approach. Finding a job – one that you can be reasonably sure you’ll still have next month, much less next year – is a “job” during normal times, but in today’s economy, it’s more akin to rocket science. Actually, maybe we should make that “Triz science!”

Answer: You, me, and hundreds of millions of other internet users around the world. Deep down in our consciousness, we “knew” what was coming; and the bad news isn’t over.

Such at least is the theory behind the Web Bot Project (http://tinyurl.com/9lqcq2), which sends out bots (spiders) around the internet to collect text and information from publicly accessible web sites. The bots look for about 300,000 words with emotional context, like intensity, impact, etc.; words with a “kick,” coming from posted articles, forum opinions, chat rooms, etc. (the bots do not check e-mail or other private communications). The words are then put into contexts, and if the emotion is strong enough, a context becomes a trend – a prediction, based on the feelings of those who feel most strongly about the information, the ones who bother posting information. It’s a form of theory of the Wisdom of Crowds (http://tinyurl.com/mbmnb); the truth is out there, and everybody has a little piece of it. The Web Bot Project helps filter that information, put it into context – and tell us where we’re going, in advance.

Data from the Web Bot Project is publicly accessible on the Urban Survival site (http://urbansurvival.com/simplebots.htm), which posts a daily newsletter based in part on the information generated by the bots and interpreted by its specialized linguistic software.

Predicting the future is tough enough for prophets, much less for web sites. But if you look at the list of predictions that cam out of the Project at the beginning of 2008 for this past year (http://tinyurl.com/axz8az), you can’t help but be just a little impressed, since the average person wasn’t aware of the extent of the financial problems in the U.S. at the time. While it’s probably no biggie to figure out what February and March are going to look like when it’s January, October and November are something else. The list for September, for example, includes “Mood of the population improves: People have a renewed sense of optimism that the corporate/elite can and will be replaced in the elections and the ‘us against them’ grows.” September, if I recall, was when the excitement over Barack Obama started cresting; back in January, most people expected Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination.

The October predictions, meanwhile, contain statements like”Think of the US economy as a lit fuse that is lit over the early part of 2008, and “in late 2008 the rest of the world’s currencies are ‘touched off’ by the dollar and US decline.” The Project also predicted “a significant event” occurring on October 7, which turned out to be a precipitous decline on stock markets around the world. That event, according to the Project, would have an even bigger effect than 9/11 – which the Project also claims to have predicted 90 days before it took place (http://tinyurl.com/9wzt44). According to the Project, data collected from the previous June indicated that a “life altering event” would take place within 60-90 days. Somehow, there was a feeling that “something big” was about to happen – and it was this that the Project focused on.

Most of the specific predictions for 2009 haven’t been released yet (check http://tinyurl.com/yoc2tp to see when George Ure of the UrbanSurvival site will be on the radio, which you can hear over the internet on an affiliate). But a few predictions for early 2009 are already available (http://tinyurl.com/3hqq6b); very cold winter in the U.S. northeast (seems correct so far), “a 2009 winter/spring natural disaster, which caused people to become angry about government response,” and an event in which “a permanent loss of low-lying territory globally and foresees that one continent in particular will get hit badly, but it does not say which one. Places to avoid: anything at sea level (Bangladesh/Florida/ etc).”

Scary, huh? On the other hand, the system is not flawless; note that the Project also predicted “ a West Coast/Vancouver area large-scale earthquake around December 12, 2008” (didn’t happen). The Web Bot Project isn’t the only prediction game in town; Princeton’s Global Consciousness Project (http://noosphere.princeton.edu/), also called the EGG Project, also examines consciousness over the internet, using a complicated statistical formula.

Global consciousness predicting future events? Sounds a little “left coast,” as they say in the east. The overwhelming tendency of most people who post stuff on the internet seems to be that they expect the worst (apparently the optimistic people are too busy enjoying life to bother with chat rooms and forums). And nowadays, it’s almost second nature for people to believe that “the worst is yet to come,” since no one wants to be labeled “Pollyanish.” If we’re “relying” on web to tell us the future based on what people think, we shouldn’t expect too much, since most people are so pessimistic – as they were even when “the tide was high” and things were going relatively well. But maybe there’s a lesson we can learn; if the power of suggestion is such that it can will bad stuff to happen (which could be what’s going on; after all, the Web Bot Project makes its predictions based on how people feel, which could technically be called a self-fulfilling prophecy), maybe a little positive thinking will help make things better. Can’t hurt, can it?

“If you’re asking for a mission statement, here it is,” replied Chris Dibona, Director of Open Source Code at Google World Headquarters. “We want to harness the world’s information and make it useful.”

Such was the atmosphere among computer folk at last week’s Google Development Day (GDD), held at Airport City. There were seminars and talks on how to use the tools Google has developed (or acquired and made their own) for the organization, digestion, and presentation of that information.

The computing society is moving on-line, converging from three directions – print, television, and computer media. Print’s problems are well-known, with the long-term erosion of its audience (due to the internet and poor worldwide reading standards). As far as television is concerned, that. too is showing its first signs of cracking under the strain of competition with the Web: In last week’s election, pollsters found that more of the 18-31 set got their information about Barack Obama and John McCain from the internet than from TV. And media, such as disks, CDs, and even DVDs, have long been losing out to on-line storage, digital MP3 music and video files, etc.

So it’s not just information that Google is organizing: It’s online electronic information, which Google hopes will become the medium for storage and transfer of most forms of information, like books,
video, documents, databases, etc. Naturally, the company develops tools to allow developers and users to manipulate that information.

But Google can’t be everywhere all the time; it can’t provide all the information it would like to in all possible forms. But it can help developers do so – and in order to make things easier for them, Google provides numerous APIs which they can plug into the applications or services they are building, many with minimal programming required; much of the “heavy” programming work is done on the Google back end, so if you don’t need to modify the default API too much, you won’t have to dedicate too much effort to integrating it into your product. Thus does Google win hearts and minds in the developer community – by making available to them easy to use and integrate components that make their lives easier, all for free!

Google sponsors its Developer Days in 16 countries around the world – including Israel, which has, according to the Google folk at the fair, one of the larger GDDs, thanks to the large number of internet application and service companies here. The truth is, lots of these companies would probably use the Google API as components in their applications anyway, because they’re there, easy to use, and free. So, it’s awfully nice of Google to put on a nice party, complete with snacks and lunch – thus promoting good public relations, as the company realizes that the true way to the heart of internet programmers is through their stomachs.

And, according to the company execs who presented at a press conference during the program, Google is always innovating, looking for the new products to roll out to developers. “Seventy percent of Google’s work is in the search engine and applications, 20A% is in emerging products – where we come up with major new ideas that eventually go ‘mainstream,’ like Google Docs – and 10% is what we call the ‘crazy’ stuff, which may or may not ever get out of the lab,” Dibona said.

Google’s two newest projects – Chrome and Android – were much on the mind of Google staffers. Chrome (http://www.google.com/chrome), of course, is the new browser the company has released, with Google hoping to garner market share from Internet Explorer and Firefox users. Why bother with a browser? According to Bill Hesse, who works on Chrome, the company wanted “a faster browser with fewer buttons and more space on the screen for display, as well as being more compatible with increasingly complex Google applications.” The browser is completely open source, and according to http://tinyurl.com/5zzz9q, Chrome doesn’t collect information about your online activity, and doesn’t even hardcode its own search engine into the browser (unlike IE, where, if you leave MSN as the default page, you can’t even touch the screen until the MSN site loads).

Android is an even more ambitious project – an operating system and software platform for mobile phones, also open source, free, and completely flexible for development purposes. The phones themselves are made and offered by cell phone manufacturers and service providers (especially T-Mobile in the U.S.), and cost roughly the same as other smart phone; the idea is to let developers run wild, taking advantage of all the features of both phones and Android code, letting them come up with the next “killer app.”

Naturally, the Google Israel people had what to say as well. Yossi Matias, head of Google’s Tel Aviv development center, and Yoelle Mark, head of the company’s Haifa development center, discussed the Israeli contribution to Google worldwide. Far from just rendering Gmail and Google Maps into Hebrew (and a fine job they did on both), Israel is also the main development center for several Google products, such as Trends (http://www.google.com/trends), Youtube annotations (http://www.youtube.com/t/annotations_about), and Youtube contests (http://www.youtube.com/contests_main). Thus Israel, too, pulls its weight in the Global Google Information Empire. And we couldn’t be happier!

Actually, it’s not that big of a secret – millions of people know about it already. But it is the most frequently asked question in my e-mail box; the question of how to download movies and such. I try not to answer such questions in print, because there are legal issues involved – as in it’s illegal to download commercial movies using the Internet (in this case, the Bittorrent network, which I will describe to those not yet in the know forthwith).

Opinions – legal and personal – on file sharing run the gamut, with some condemning it outright and suing the pants off anybody caught doing it (http://www.riaa.com/), to groups that seek a more creative solution to a technological advance that many believe cannot be sued out of existence, just like all the advances that came before and interfered with the “traditional” ways of doing things (http://www.eff.org). Today, the most popular method for P2P file distribution is with the Bittorrent system (http://www.bittorrent.com), where users upload or download a small segment of a much larger file as part of a peer-sharing network. When all the pieces (hashes) get to the recipient’s computer, the file is assembled into a whole.

Although Bittorrent as a protocol, along with its aligned software and Web sites, has a reputation as a being a den of of mass copyright thievery, there are plenty of legal ways to use Bittorrent; many open source or Gnu license programs, like Open Office, offer Bittorrent downloads (http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/) because they make downloading of large files easier – for both the user (who can easily pause the process in the middle) and the central server (which can rely a wide network of supporting PCs sharing portions of the file, lessening the load on the server). There are plenty of files legally available for Bittorrent protocol users; you can find a nice list of sources for such files at http://tinyurl.com/26dmvu.

And, as it turns out, torrent downloading has turned out to be a boon for democracy, freedom, and independence – because torrent download sites are, as of right now (Sunday), just about the only way you will be able to get to see the now-banned Internet movie called Fitna (http://tinyurl.com/3bzwjs).

Fitna is a 16 and a half minute film produced by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, head of the Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Dutch parliament. The very chilling film shows footage of terrorist attacks by Islamist fanatics in Israel, New York, London, and of course Holland, interspersed with calls by Muslim clerics to kill Jews, Westerners, and a whole raft of other people. The scenes are graphic, and the combination of the bloody scenes with verses from the Koran and footage of Islamist preachers is not for the weak of heart.

Fitna was originally hosted at http://www.liveleak.com – but was removed sometime over the weekend due to threats by extremists against the staff of the site, which is located in the UK, and which has its own share of radical Muslims. Instead of the page where the film was hosted after it was released last Thursday displaying the video (http://tinyurl.com/3chhug), there is a message saying, among other things, that the site’s staff had been threatened, and that the fear of harm to LiveLeak workers was very real indeed.

While LiveLeak pulled down the video, there are a couple of sites on the Web that uploaded it as well, and haven’t removed it – yet. For example, as of Sunday night, the film was still up at http://tinyurl.com/2knwku, a Google Video site. That might not last too long, though, according to http://tinyurl.com/2zn6lp. Interestingly, the official site of the movie (http://www.fitnathemovie.com/) is down as well, with the message that “ Network Solutions is investigating whether the site’s content is in violation of the Network Solutions Acceptable Use Policy,” because it had received complaints about the site. Of course, we can imagine what Network Solutions means by “complaints,” given the situation on other Web sites that hosted the film.

Whether or not, as Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said (http://tinyurl.com/2lld6x), Fitna “is an obvious attempt to generate discord between faith communities,” these same sites host hundreds of anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic films (http://tinyurl.com/2nbup4) and have not removed them despite protests (not threats, notice) by Jewish groups. And just like LiveLeak, Youtube, and all the rest would defend their hosting of neo-Nazi clips as “freedom of expression,” they have an obligation to allow opinions that others disagree with to be expressed as well.

But they also have an obligation to self-preservation, I guess – which is why the rules that apply to Jews, American soldiers in Iraq, and even Barack Obama’s preacher, do not apply to Muslims. In other words, I wouldn’t count on Web sites as long term hosts for this film; if you want to see it, the best way is to download it yourself. And that brings us back to Bittorrent; as things stand now, it’s the most reliable way for you to stand up for your rights to see the film that major Web sites are afraid to touch with a 10 foot pole.

Here’s how to do it: First, you need a torrent download program. The best one around is unquestionably Vuze (http://www.vuze.com/app), formerly known as Azureus. Vuze takes care of much of the “bookkeeping” that goes with torrent downloading (you’re expected to share as well as download). Installation is simple, and you can download files with one click.

Once installed, you need to find a torrent download site that host the film. For this, a Google search – something along the lines of “fitna +torrent” – will do the job. You can find it here (http://www.mininova.org/tor/1283065) if you’d prefer not to search, though. Once on the page, search out the small button that reads “Azureus magnet link” and click on it; the file will begin automatically downloading to your computer, informing you when the download begins and ends. The file is in .flv format and is only 39.6 MB, so the download should be done in several minutes. To view the film, download and install the free VLC media player (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/), a cross-platform media player that can handle just about any file you throw at it. Once downloaded, sit back and watch – and be happy that there are still some people sticking up for your right to watch a film that needs to be seen, and that you have a right to see.