That’s been the theory until now in Israeli policy-making circles – and it’s a theory that’s proved true, at least when it comes to Iran. The regimes in the Sunni Gulf, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are all deathly afraid of Iran’s Shi’ite tentacles, according to Wikileaks cables that have been published over the past several weeks – to the extent that some of them have even urged the U.S. to either directly attack Iran itself, or to encourage Israel to do so.

Why can’t they all just get along? The bottom line is that the Sunnis are running scared from the Shi’ite Iranians – which, it would appear, would be just another chapter in a history full of strife between the two groups. But after having thoroughly studied the TV broadcasts from the Arab world over the past months, I think I can say that it’s not the Shi’ites the Sunnis fear – it’s the Shi’ite’s fanatical resistance to modernization.

Although “fear of Shi’ism” and “fear of Shi’ite fanaticism” sounds like the same thing, it isn’t. The Egyptians, the Kuwaitis, Abu Dhabians, and Dubai-ites would certainly consider themselves to be as good Muslims as the Iranians; certainly, with a little goodwill, you’d think that the relatively small differences between Shi’ites and Sunnis could be bridged, and a united Muslim front could be established.

But they can’t – and won’t – get together. Iran and the majority of the rest of the Muslim world want two different things. If Iran ever did get control of the Muslim world, the leaders of the western-leaning states in the Gulf, Egypt, and even Jordan would find themselves on the firing line. Not because they’re Sunnis, but because they encourage a western lifestyle, at least to some extent, among their citizens. And, the more western-leaning the country, the more likely it was to speak against Iran, as quoted by American diplomats in the Wikileaks documents. It’s a package deal: The more a Muslim country seeks to modernize the more likely they are to speak out against Iran – and the more open their TV broadcasts.

Unlike in Israel or the U.S., most Arabic-speaking residents of the Middle East are treated to free TV broadcasts, via satellite. Of course, there are cable and DBS pay systems, but unlike many other places, residents of the Middle East can enjoy a rich diet of news, entertainment, movies, and TV series – both in Arabic and English. In fact, there are any number of TV stations, especially in the Gulf states, that could give YES and HOT a run for their money, broadcasting for free the same TV series and movies that Israelis have to pay to watch. The major satellites serving Arabic-speakers – Nilesat, Arabsat, etc. – carry about 600 channels, and each country’s stations have their own “personality” – with a direct correlation between the “modernity” of the broadcasts, the western-leaningness of the country, the fear of Iran by the country’s leaders, and their openness to dealing with Israel.  Here are some examples:

Dubai: Without doubt, the most Western of Middle Eastern states, Dubai is home to the MBC network, the premier free-to-air broadcaster in the region, and perhaps the world. While a private network, the fact that an ostensibly conservative regime like Dubai’s lets MBC broadcast the latest American sitcoms, dramas, and movies, with no censorship whatsoever (even rough language isn’t cut out) makes it clear where the regime stands on the question of how modern Dubai should be.

MBC channels run commercials, many for Western products like Ford cars, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Close-Up toothpaste, and a host of others.  If you turn down the sound, you will have a hard time believing you are watching commercials aimed at residents of a conservative Muslim country; none of the women are wearing veils (although some of the men are dressed in jalabiyas and the like), and there is plenty of physical contact between men and women. Dubai’s leaders have strongly advocated U.S. action in restraining Iran, and it’s “well-known” that Israel and Dubai have pursued relations on an unofficial level for years.

Egypt: Having signed a peace treaty with Israel decades ago, the Egyptians have stuck to the letter, if not the spirit, of that agreement. But despite leaving much to be desired when it comes to our relations with them, Egypt most certainly would prefer Israel’s company over Iran’s.

As the most populous and influential Arab country with a substantial fundamentalist population, Egypt treads a fine line, and comes off a bit more conservative than Dubai on TV. The country has only a couple of English-language free-to-air TV stations (one of them government-sponsored, with another dedicated to, of all things, horror movies!).

The Egyptian government runs the county’s main TV entertainment network, called Nile, which has a mix of comedies, drama, and sports, depending on the channel. Here the actors are dressed a little more conservatively, and the shows appear to be homey-type dramas with original programming (in Dubai, Kuwait, and other more modern places, many of the shows are from Turkey, dubbed in Arabic, and many are rather “racy”) that don’t fit the Nile formula. However, Egypt has several private networks as well, such as Melody Entertainment, which plays MTV-style music videos and Turkish dramas.

Saudi Arabia: You won’t find much on official Saudi Arabian TV, other than live broadcasts of services in the Mecca Masjid and Koran readings. But the largest entertainment network in the Arabic-speaking world, called Rotana, is owned by none other than Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. A media conglomerate, Rotana broadcasts everything from western movies and TV shows (in cooperation with the News Corporation’s Fox networks, a 9% owner of Rotana) to western music videos, to religious programming. The Saudis, as we noted, were the ones that called for the U.S. to “get Iran.”

I could go on, but you get the idea. When it comes to Iran, Muslim countries like Egypt, Saudia Arabia, Dubai, and others have much in common with Israel – and when it comes to TV, they have much more in common with our western lifestyle than with the Iranian alternative. Who says you can’t learn anything from TV?

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.

While most of the hackers out there seem to be doing it for fun, there are lots of hackers who are in it for the politics. Many of them seem to be Turkish, but there are enough anti-Israel Arab hackers – and enough attacks on Israeli sites. Between July 1 and late Sunday, as I wrote this, something called the “Moroccan Jurm Team” (sounds like an appropriate name to me!) had left their calling card on over 100 Israeli sites! Most hackers make sure to change the front page of a site, to announce their triumph and/or spread their messages. The JURMs have a fairly harsh message for Israelis, the usual stuff you can read on anti-Israel web sites (Israel bad, Palestinians good) – as well as photos of suffering Palestinian children, etc. on some of the hacked sites.

You, too, can keep your finger on the pulse of the hacker world by surfing to http://www.zone-h.org/. The first thing a lot of hacker teams do when they break into a site is alert Zone-h, which records the hacked page in its archive for posterity. On the left side of the page you’ll see the “Attacks Archive” link; click it, and then at the top of the Digital Attacks Archive page, click “enable filters,” and type in “.il” in the Domain box on the right.; then click on the magnifying glass on the right to see the archived hacked version of the site. Do the search, and you’ll see just how lousy security is on many Israeli sites! Interestingly, the vast majority of hacked sites were located on Windows 2003 servers, with the occasional rare hacked site using Linux. But that’s neither here nor there – we must defend our brothers’ web sites as our own!

If we assume that most people who bother to hack web sites are pimply faced kids with no life, then we can be proud of our Israeli youth, who are too busy living a real life to have to get satisfaction with a virtual one. You’d think that our hackers would be on the offensive against countries like Iran or Egypt, but no – most of the hacks in the Iranian demain (.ir) seem to have been done by Iranian groups, like the Persian Boys Hacker Team; and ditto for Egypt, where there’s a lot of Arabic on the hacked pages, and messages like “no harm meant, we’re just testing your security.” There have been fledging attempts by pro-Israel hackers to go on the offensive against Israel’s cyber-enemies, but after a burst of energy, the effort seems to die down (probably all the kids were studying for Bagrut). The dozens of teams from Turkey, Iran, Morocco, etc., seem to have all the time in the world to hack away at poorly defended web sites.

So how do they do it? It’s not like these hackers are such geniuses; chances are they’re nothing more than “script kiddies” who basically download ready made “rootkits,” which they can use to invade a site. There are dozens of rootkits around, and they take advantage of known security defects and holes in different versions of Web server software – something any newbie administrator should be able to plug up by applying the proper software patches regularly released by web server software makers. Script kiddies get no respect or love from real hackers, who at least do creative and interesting stunts – and do it for the public good. The script kiddies, on the other hand, are just interested in destroying – and if they can attach a political message to prop up their self confidence, then they’re happy to do it. But don’t think that political idealism is what motivates them.

Short of learning hacking techniques – ie basic programming – there’s little the average fan of Israel can do to fight back against Islamo-Web terrorism. But as it happens, Google, of all sites, provides you with a few tools that might let you perform a little on-line mischief. And even if the Google Hack 2.0 tools don’t lead you to sites you can have your way with, you’ll still be fascinated by a trip to a side of the Web you never even realized existed!

First, you must see the video, at http://www.tinkernut.com/archives/18 – and you can also download a PDF with all the instructions, This is the original home of the next generation of Google Hacks, which, if anything, proves how ubiquitous the search engine has become. For example, Google is indexing online cameras now! By entering a command like “intitle:”Live View / – AXIS” into a Google search box, you’ll get to an AXIS 241S Video Server, which in some cases you can control right from your browser (although all the ones I’ve come across want a name and password, which you of course have to figure out). Other tricks include accessing someone’s desktop (“”vnc desktop” inurl:5800”) – ditto on the passwords (the PDF’s author has some tips on how to proceed there) and a hack to give you total mastery over a web site, giving you PHP Administrator Access!

Interesting, but where’s the counter-hacking angle? Well, because many of these servers and devices don’t have DNS names, they display their IP addresses as their web connections. All you have to do is figure out which web site is Iranian, Egyptian, Moroccan, or whatever other group you want to stick it to. At http://www.find-ip-address.org/ip-country/, you’ll find the address blocks of IP addresses assigned to each country; if you know anyone who can write a little script comparing the results of a Google search to the relevant IP addresses – and find a device or server that will actually let you in – you’ll be in the pro-Israel hacking business! But I’ll be that, like your kids, you have too fulfilling a life to go for this idea. Still, it’s nice to know that we can, if we want to!

Readers will have certainly read this story (http://tinyurl.com/6mcjbq), a Jerusalem Post scoop, describing serious security breaches on Facebook. IDF soldiers have posted details of their bases, weapons they have worked with, and personal information about who they are and what they do in the IDF. A special IDF unit, the article says, has been searching Facebook for months trying to identify and, hopefully, eliminate the information, which could potentially be used against Israel in a future war.

It’s the same on Google Earth; terrorists have, by their own admission, used information on GE to target Israeli sites (http://tinyurl.com/3agqb7):

“Members of the Aksa Martyrs Brigade, a group aligned with the Fatah political party, say they use the popular Internet mapping tool to help determine their targets for rocket strikes. ‘We obtain the details from Google Earth and check them against our maps of the city center and sensitive areas,’ Khaled Jaabari, the group’s commander in Gaza who is known as Abu Walid, told the Guardian. Abu Walid showed the Guardian an aerial image of the Israeli town of Sderot on his computer to demonstrate how his group searches for targets.”

All this, in addition to the insult and injury both Google Earth (http://tinyurl.com/5vazkc) and Facebook (http://tinyurl.com/5pzttm) cause us as a nation and a people.

But what’s good for the Israeli goose is good for the Iranian and Syrian gander. They, too, have military secrets that are “out there,” and a discerning Web surfer could find out a thing or two about how Israel’s enemies are preparing for war. Much information of use to terrorists anywhere in the world is publicly available on the Web. Many shopping malls, for example, have detailed information about the way the building was constructed, the plumbing or air filtration system, or similar details that an ambitious terrorist could take advantage of.

And there are also sites that have useful tidbits and nuggets about security procedures, weapons and other interesting information for almost every country in the world (it helps to be multilingual, though). Even local map sites have interesting and useful information that maybe shouldn’t be there. I found a couple of what I thought were “questionable” items on a well-known Israeli map site (I won’t mention what or where, for obvious reasons, but I did e-mail the site).

What’s good about services like Google Earth and Facebook is that they’re “concentrated” – everything you need is on one site, if you know what you’re looking for. And no country is safe; finding out “secrets” is often more about human error (as in the case of the IDF soldiers and Facebook), or intelligent people putting two and two together.

Intelligence experts in Europe last week noticed something different on a satellite photo taken in Iran recently, and determined that Iran was developing long-range ballistic missiles capable of reaching targets in Europe (now they know how it feels).

Of course, anybody with access to a multimillion-dollar satellite that can take high-resolution photos from space of objects two feet off the ground (http://tinyurl.com/5s8j4w) can pull off the same trick. But you don’t need to spend a lot of money on satellite photos to figure out what the Iranians are doing. All you need is a quick eye on Google Earth, like the person at http://tinyurl.com/5bmg55. While the hi-res photo didn’t reveal the specific site in Iran where the missile development is taking place, comparing the hi-res photo with older images of Iran on GE, the poster of this information figured out where the new facility was – right down to the building:

“Entering the coordinates N 35 13 19, E 53 53 41 reveals a Digital Globe satellite image of the facility taken earlier than” the one cited by Jane’s (the site was referred to in the article as “a previously unknown missile location, the site, about 230 kilometers. southeast of Teheran”).

Another intelligent guess on intelligence regarding Iran can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/59xvh2, where the author extrapolates what Iran would do with the the S-300PT SAM system it purchased from Belarus (it got two from Belarus and two from an “undisclosed source”). The author of this blog cites his source as Jane’s, and discusses several other weapons and defensive systems Iran has acquired recently.

Being apparently less innovative than Israel in how its weapons are deployed, the author makes a case for a scenario in how the systems would be used to defend strategic Iranian interests, including Teheran and the country’s nuclear facilities. Attached to the analysis are images of Google Earth, marked up with diagrams showing how the missile systems (to be used for defensive purposes, the author said) would be deployed, as well as the most logical locations for the systems, given their known capabilities.

GE has also helped reveal to the wider world the “secret” of Syria’s nuclear weapons deployment in the North of the country. The Ogle Earth site (http://tinyurl.com/5vwjva), which is where GE geeks go to share ideas, analyzes the satellite photos of the September 6 raid (officially, we still don’t know who was behind it), and based on information quoted in the name of a “senior US official,” pinpoints what the site believes to be the “single spot” where the facility could have been. The building where the facility was being built for the last six years, according to intelligence reports (http://tinyurl.com/63dgbf), should have shown up in GE – and indeed it does, following the coordinates based on the analysis listed.

Of course, Israel’s security is a lot more important to us then Iran’s or Syria’s – and Israelis, as citizens of the nation with the highest per capita amount of computer ownership in the world, have more opportunities to make mistakes. (It’s hard to imagine Syrian troops forming a club on Facebook.) With greater opportunity comes greater responsibility, of course – but it’s nice to see that the system can work in our favor sometimes, too!

It seems that there’s nothing that can’t be blamed on the Jews – whether its missing Christian children during the Middle Ages, in the classic take on the “Blood Libel” – or the massive Internet outage that hit the Arab world over the past week. Well, not just the Arabs; India has had a lot of Internet problems, and Iran may still be 100% without Internet access, after several underwater fiber optic cables were damaged or cut.

The outages, which many in the Arab world and the far-left hate-Israel community are already blaming on you-know-who, began about a week ago, when a pair of undersea communications cables between Egypt and Europe – the data “lifeline” for much of the Arab world, it turns out – broke about 8 kilometers off Alexandria harbor, which was closed most of last week due to the massive storm that hit the region. India, which uses the FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 cables as well, was severely hampered, wreaking havoc with much of the world’s backoffice data-processing, and leaving frustrated Americans without the technical assistance that India does so well.

Banks in the Gulf region were hurting, and officials said it could be a week, maybe two, until things got back to normal. Besides being used for fast Internet communications, the cables also carry digital phone calls and TV signals, so even the many in the region who don’t use the Internet at all were affected, as the legions of guest workers in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia couldn’t make phone calls to family or transfer their salaries home to places like the Philippines and Pakistan (which had Internet problems of its own). Several African countries which use the cables, as well as Egypt and Syria, were all out of Internet luck too.

And then there was Iran. On Friday, a third cable (maybe a fourth, according to some accounts) got cut in the Persian Gulf, slowing the already bottlenecked traffic that could still get through – and cutting off Iran altogether. Curiously, the anti-Israel crowd crows, there were only two countries left unscathed by the cable fiasco: Israel and Iraq (I read contradictory reports on Lebanon). Hmm.

Actually, according to the companies that owns the Mediterranean cables, the outage was apparently caused by the anchor of a ship that spliced the cable when it fell overboard (I haven’t heard any explanation yet for the Gulf cable). Although it seems a little too coincidental, it’s not unreasonable for weather related mishaps to occur in the middle of a major winter storm on the high seas – and as far as the Gulf is concerned, I wouldn’t be surprised if this (http://tinyurl.com/yqf3ka) was the explanation. Of course, logic never comes into play for these people; it’s got to be Israel’s fault! Well, I’ve got a theory of my own; instead of saying that Israel and/or the CIA (which, as we all know, controls Iraq nowadays) deliberately cut the cables in order to isolate the Arab world, and especially Iran, to set them up for “something” (which has yet to take place), I think it was the Arabs/Iran themselves that did the cutting to make Israel look bad by having something to blame on us! Or we could just call it a draw, and attribute the breakages to bad winter weather and infrastructure failure, not unheard of with underwater cables.

Why wasn’t Israel affected? Simply because we use a different cable, with Egypt and company refusing to allow Israel to rent bandwidth on the same one it uses. Israel’s cable is called MedNautilus (http://www.mednautilus.com), originally put together by a consortium that involved Israelis, but now wholly owned by Spain’s Telefonica. “Our” cable travels under the Mediterranean from Tel Aviv to Sicily, and looks on the map to be several dozen kilometer north of the broken Egyptian cable.

Considering how important these cables are for business and telecommunication, one would think there would be a backup system of some sort, to avoid the outages and data-pipe shortages that have affecting nearly a billion people over the past week. Unfortunately for the Egyptians, Kuwaitis and Iranians Indians, there was apparently no sufficient backup data communications system to keep their businesses going. And the same holds true for us!

Actually, we have it worse than others in our neighborhood. While some reports said that Saudi Arabia was able to partially restore its service using “terrestrial routes” (overland cables, I guess), we don’t have that option. For high-speed communications, MedNautilus is the only option. There are two other cables available, the EMOS and CIOS systems, which have been around since the early 1990s (MedNautilus was set up in 2001), which, according to one Internet expert I spoke to, “couldn’t hold the bandwidth of even one big Israeli ISP today, much less all of them.” Not to mention that the price of access on MedNautilus has been rising in recent years, making things much more expensive for ISPs and keeping prices relatively high for many customers. And what would happen to Israel’s hi-tech economy if the line to the West was down for a couple of weeks?

The solution to both the redundancy problem and the high prices on MedNautilus would seem to be the construction of another high-speed underwater communications cable, and last month a number of Israeli ISPs got together to discuss doing just that (http://tinyurl.com/ypak5e). Unfortunately, given that the investment in such a project could reach tens of millions of dollars, it’s unlikely to get off the ground, many experts believe, even if all the communications companies work together to lower risks. If the mess in the Arab Internet world last week should teach us anything, it should teach us three things: One, the importance of redundant systems for an an advanced hi-tech economy; two, the importance of a strong navy, to keep troublemakers bent on economic terrorism from cutting the cable; and three, the importance for ship captains to make sure they don’t drop anchor in the wrong place!