Among those cute stories and political jokes, though, you often find more disturbing things – for example, videos translated from Arabic by organizations like Memri, highlighting the latest outrageous statements by Islamic fanatics. Those videos are a window into the staple ideological fare of tens of millions of Muslims, and realizing that they probably represent the beliefs of nations and cultures throughout the Muslim world is, to say the least, scary.

We take it for granted that Israel always gets the short end of the stick in social media – that “they” hate us regardless of what we say, that our hasbara (pro-Israel public pronouncements) is second-rate anyway, etc. But interestingly, whenever MEMRI posts a video with translations on the bottom, allowing English speakers to understand what is really going on in the “mysterious Orient,” everyone suddenly understands the problem and danger: The talkbacks (sometimes thousands of them, when taken as a single unit) make it clear that lots of people, not just those who love Israel, are scared. And Muslims who do not subscribe to the “Down with Israel/America” philosophy and tactics espoused by these imams suddenly appear, posting messages and counter-videos showing the rational side of Islam. Why we don’t hear from them more often is a question we can’t deal with here, but suffice to say that when the fanatics decide to go after the “kaffir” (heretics against Islam) of the world, they usually start by “cleaning house” – ie, going after the Muslims they aren’t fond of.

What works on the negative side – showing the true face of radical Islam – can work on the positive side as well, showing the positive side of Israel. While there are many pro-Israel videos on Youtube, there are so many positive, untold stories that have never been told – possibly because those telling them don’t know English, or don’t have the “connections” to get their story out to the Youtube world. In a world of homogenized milk and homogenized fast food, language is the last barrier to getting your message out to the masses. Thousands of years later, the “curse of Babel” is still with us, and for thousands of years, the only to make yourself understood was to hire a professional translator, who knew the language of the people you were trying to reach.

Slowly but surely, that last roadblock to human understanding is disappearing, thanks to innovative web services that are bringing speakers of different tongues together. Google Translate, for example, lets you type in text or paste a URL into its translation box, and seconds later, you get a direct translation of your text in one of several dozen languages – or, a fully translated web page. As I’ve written previously, the translations aren’t always perfect, but if you paste the URL of an Arabic language news page into Google Translate, you’ll get a passable English translation of the page (sans, of course, proper grammar, in most cases. But who worries about grammar these days anyway?)

Text translations, while far from easy, are infinitely less complicated than audio translations. Accents, dialects, and the quality of elocution of speakers makes writing standard translations software nearly impossible, with applications needing major component additions for each specific language. That’s not stopping Google from trying, though, and one of the result of the company’s stated desire to make all knowledge accessible to all people is the new Youtube Transcribe Audio feature. Google doesn’t really have an audio site of its own, but it does own Youtube, and almost videos have sound. And when you combine Google Translate technology with audi transcription, you get either a window onto the world – with an automatic English (or other language) text translation of what you are hearing  – or, in some cases, a really funny story!

That’s because the service is still in beta, and clearly is going to be an ongoing project for awhile. Even the automatic transcription of audio in the same language (English voiceover to english text) isn’t always successful, but Google gets lots of credit for at least getting the ball rolling. When you load a Youtube video like this one, you may see a box on the bottom right of the video marked “CC” – which stands for “closed caption,” a caption generated by Youtube of the voice on the video. Hover your mouse over that box, and you’ll see a selection for “Translate captions,” which gives you a list of dozens of languages to translate the captions into. Magically, the captions change into something you can understand (more or less – try it on the above video and you’ll see what I mean!).

The criteria for being chosen for a transcribe/translate job aren’t clear, but the videos I found that do have them were mostly interviews, such as the one listed. And not all of the interviewees are as intelligent as the guy in that video, believe me – some of them are of the type that gave Youtube its reputation as the “black hole” of internet time wasting. So, if you want your inspiring Israeli story to be seen and read without Hebrew being a barrier to the viewer, check out dotSUB, a site that makes transcription and translation as easy as feasibly possible. Using dotSUB’s convenient tools, you can quickly and easily enter the transcribed text in your language, and then do the same for the translation. You can them download the finished product and upload it to Youtube, confident that you’ve got a first-class translation, all laid out with properly placed captions – ready to win the hearts and minds of the people “out there.”

Related articles

• Google Translate Conversation Mode (searchengineland.com)
• Google Can Translate Poetry (googletutor.com)
• How Google Translate Works (mt-soft.com.ar)
• dotSUB: Spread your message into other languages (socialmedia.biz)

But getting money out of an angel isn’t so simple; there’s an art to it, and not everyone qualifies. There are criteria to fulfill – but not necessarily the ones you’re thinking of. According to Chaim Venezia, founder and co-CEO of Proxima Israel Investments, it’s more about you than about your idea. “How many times have we come across a product or web service, and someone has told us that they thought of it a long time ago? So you can see that ideas on paper are just that,” Venezia says. “Anyone can have a great idea – the question is, can you turn it into a product?”

A good question from a man who’s been there and done that – investing in a successful startup called Onigma, an information security solution provider, which had a very positive exit, being bought out by anti-virus giant McAfee. “That exit was a little too successful, in fact,” says Venezia, because his U.S. investor partners made so much that they had short-term capital gains issues with the IRS (we should all have such problems!).

Venezia spoke at an event last week sponsored by the MIT Enterprise Forum of Israel, called “Day of the Entrepreneur,” where seminars and talks discussing the perks and pitfalls of running a hi-tech business. The Forum, says Ayla Matalon, director of the Forum, tries to educate entrepreneurs on the process of running, funding, and growing a business, with an emphasis on hi-tech (although the information presented in forum events is certainly useful in any business, she says, and many of the speakers at Forum events come from various industries). “It’s not a typical ’startup’ crowd, but a more serious group that already has years of experience in business, and already understand the issues that they need to deal with,” Matalon says.

Past speakers at forum events have included some of the top names in Israeli hi-tech and business, including Yossi Vardi, Shai Agasi, Stef Wertheimer, Dan Maydan (Applied Materials), and many others. Presenting at last week’s seminar at Tel Aviv University were, besides Venezia, Prof. Amnon Shaashua, CTO of Mobileye, Dr. Shlomo Kalish, Founder of Jerusalem Global Ventures grad, Dalia Prasher, Co-Founder, New Dimension (which was sold to BMC for $620 million), and several newly successful web and tech entrepreneurs. A number of the presenters, in fact, were MIT graduates; the Forum is one of 26 started by MIT alumni around the world (the Israeli branch, the first outside the US, was started 15 years ago).

The Forum encourages entrepreneurs at all stages of business experience to attend events. “The session we held last week at Tel Aviv University, under the partial sponsorship of the Recanati School of Business (among the other sponsors were Carmel Ventures, Canaan Partners, Ramot, Erlich and Fenster Patent Attorneys – and the Golan Winery, which threw a smashing wine and cheese party!), included presentations on how to get funding, how to grow companies, technology transfer from academia to hi-tech, and much more,” Matalon says.

Including a session on the care and feeding of angels, given by Venezia – specifically, what entrepreneurs can do to find favor in their eyes. As mentioned, having a great business plan isn’t a guarantee of anything, Venezia says, except of having a great business plan. “There are so many factors involved in the way the world works that no business plan can anticipate,” he says. Not that ideas aren’t important; “obviously we wouldn’t invest in a crackpot scheme,” he says. But in the end, history decides just who the crackpots are. “I can just imagine the reaction many angels had a few years ago, when Sergey Brin and Larry Page were shopping for money for Google,” he says. “The world had enough search engines.”

But what it didn’t have were creative geniuses the likes of Brin and Page – and that, says Venezia, is what angels look for when deciding to place a bet on a startup. “We want to see creativity and drive,” he says. “We understand that ideas are fungible, that business plans and markets change. What we want to see is if the entrepreneur has what it takes to succeed. It’s about integrity, honesty, drive, and ambition.”

It sounds a bit unfair and subjective, but then again, we are talking about private funding, which can legally discriminate all it wants. But Venezia says there a few “tells” he watches out for that indicate whether he’s found his person – such as whether or not the entrepreneur has a job when s/he comes, hat in hand. “Anyone who wants funding for their idea and is still working for a salary is automatically out of the game, as far as I’m concerned,” Venezia says. “You’re not going to succeed unless you have enough faith in your ideas and abilities to dedicate your full working time to making it work. Here you are asking me to take a risk on you – but are you willing to take a risk on yourself? If not, we can’t do business,” Venezia says. “At the very least, we should split the risk 50/50 – me with my money, and you with your time,” he adds.

And although he realizes that in many cases, the tech “flavor of the month” – whether its an application using Youtube’s API or a service that hooks into Twitter, to name two popular development trends – is more likely to come to his attention, Venezia is willing to look at any idea, as long as it’s viable, and especially if it the people behind it have the right stuff. “It’s easier to get money for a ’sexy’ idea, but that doesn’t mean that those ideas are better than one that is far less exciting,” he says.

Matalon would agree – and in fact, one of the speakers on entrepreneurial success at the Forum was Amir Shpitalni, the founder and CEO of Spiral Supports, one of the few ‘low-tech’ companies funded by the Chief Scientist’s Office. Shpitalni invented a new kind of support for shelving that reduces stress and mess – certainly not a ’sexy’ product, but a very practical one. Speaking to Matalon, I got a hint on how well this company was doing – and all I can tell you is that I’ve started praying for my own angel, to fund my big idea!

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• Why Not Having a Plan Can Be the Best Plan of All (blogs.hbr.org)
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As was announced recently, Google suspects China of stealing intellectual property (both from it and from other companies), as well as hacking into the mail accounts of human rights activists. According to Google’s press release, released in an official blog last week, “we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses (besides Google), including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors,” have been targeted by hack attacks originating in China. Why? “We have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists,” Google says. “These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”

So: Some sites were hacked and hackers managed to get some malware onto the computers of “prime targets.” That is the sum of Google’s charges against China, and the reason the company has decided “that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.”

The reaction to this (possible) decision to shut down China’s Google operations has been much more mixed than you might imagine. On the one hand, even constant Google critics like the Electronic Freedom Foundation have praised Google for its stance (although it did remind readers that it Google originally agreed to Chinese censorship when it began operations in the country in 2006). On the other hand, there are plenty of contrarian blogger and talkback opinions posted on the thousands of articles that have appeared on this subject in the past week. Opinions have ranged from comments like “Google just doesn’t understand China’s culture,” to “this is no different than what goes on in many countries, where hacking and phishing are daily occurrences.”

China evokes strong emotions among many Westerners, who fear what many still refer to as the “red menace,” because of its Communism, its lack of human rights, and its industrial fecundity. While many (mostly younger) Chinese bemoan the dictatorship that still controls the country, many older residents are thankful for the material benefits the “Chinese way” has bestowed upon them, especially in the past decade. It may be a dictatorship – on the net and off -  say China-lovers, but at least the country has done much to raise the standard of living of many of its citizens.

I certainly do not approve of China’s policies on human rights – all people should be free to surf and connect to anything they want, unless they make a personal decision to filter their own access willingly, imho. But I bring the above by way of contrast – to the internet policies of countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and even Jordan. Google not only does not protest the censorship and invasive net practices of Arab governments – it even cooperates with them. And not only has there been no criticism of these policies by Google, there has been no hint from the company that it intends to close down its offices anywhere in the Arab world – ever.

An extensive catalog of Arab governments’ netizen abuses can be seen at http://openarab.net/en, which catalogs, country by country, the limitations on freedom of net surfing in Arab countries. Of course, you would expect heavy censorship in countries like Syria (where, the site says, all traffic is strictly monitored) and Libya (where just walking into an internet cafe can get you into trouble). But even countries that regard themselves as “westernized” to some extent, like the UAE, Kuwait, and of course that bastion of democracy, Egypt, keep tabs on users and sites, sniffing out “inappropriate” use of the internet.

Bloggers who dare to write something that their government disapproves of are likely to find themselves in jail, or worse. Contrary to the impression given in many Western media reports, the governments in conservative, Western-allied countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia not only seek to ban websites and blogs written by radical Islamists seeking to overthrow the old order – they’re out to get any hint of criticism of the regime or its institutions, including (perhaps especially) complaints by the citizenry on even banal, everyday problems. Who knows where such complaints could lead, after all?

Most countries ban access by users to thousands of sites that contain, in the words of a 2006 UAE law on legal use of the internet (similar to laws in many other Arab countries), “content challenging public interest, public morality, public order and national security, national reconciliation, and Islamic morals, or content prohibited by the laws of the United Arab Emirates and their regulations.” The law can be, and generally is, very widely interpreted, to include a panoply of “offenses;” just how widely can be seen at http://www.anhri.net/en/, which contains a depressingly long list of abuses against internet users and “uncooperative” citizens seeking basic rights. Even Jordan, arguably the most “liberal” Arab country when it comes to internet use, blocks hundreds of sites perceived to be critical of King Abdullah’s regime, and according to OpenArabNet, “tens of reporters were tried and face imprisonment” for “libel,” a law that is apparently all too easy for journalists in Jordan to violate.

Believe it or not, even internet voice services like Skype are banned in most Arab countries – apparently in order to keep up the profits of cellphone network operators! Tens of millions of foreign workers, especially in the Gulf countries, are forced to spend exorbitant amounts on cellphone service in order to keep in touch with their loved ones, instead of using the far less costly VoIP services denied them.

So what does Google have to say about any of this? Not a word (I searched the net high and low, using Google, of course!).  Apparently Google has invested all its human rights energy in China, leaving nothing left over for Egypt and the UAE – two countries where Google has offices, and that heavily censor (and punish) “inappropriate” internet use, probably more harshly than China does. Yet there is no talk of Google closing down its offices in either country. It’s not like the Arab world really wants Google around anyway – after all, YouTube (a Google product) has long been banned in most Arab countries (because, as a UAE official says,  “YouTube stirs hatred between the sons of our homeland.”) Even China recanted its brief ban on Youtube last year. Why close offices in China, but not the Arab lands? If you’re going to take a stand on internet censorship, isn’t it discriminatory – even racist – to come down hard on one set of abusers, while letting another group of abusers off the hook altogether?

“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!

While not exactly old hat, iPods have been around long enough to have come down in price significantly. There are a host of cheaper imitators that may be easier to handle (see below), but let’s face it: Zunes, Sansas, and no-name made in China MP4 players just don’t have the afikomen oomph of an iPod. If they don’t already have one, you could do worse than spending $39 on a refurbished iPod (http://tinyurl.com/65qfhr), on sale at Apple USA. If you’ve got someone to bring them in for you, iPods at those prices qualify as gifts for the under $50 no import duty rule. You may have to pay VAT if you have them shipped, although the shipping costs would be minimal, because they’re so small.

Modern generation iPods can play music and video, as can many other modern portable player clones. The difference is that the iPod is a platform, with many extra applications written or produced especially for it. Because the iPod is so popular, many developers have come up with tweaks and programs to help you get more out of it.

Sometimes, it seems, it pays to go with the name brand.

For example, you can download and install CantoPod (for Mac OSx or Windows), which lets you see the lyrics to the songs on your iPod (all except the Shuffle). The program’s database has the words to over 200,000 songs, including many of those that your kids are listening to that you know are they shouldn’t be, but can’t figure out why, because you can’t understand what the performers are saying. There is also a version for cell phones with music players. Check out the free CantoPod at http://www.staylazy.net/canto/.

The miniscule iPod is perfect for running around with, whether in the gym or on an outdoor running track. Many people who already exercise buy one to keep them company, while many others buy one as an incentive to get them to exercise. That’s where the free iPodGym program comes in handy (http://somatotype.net/iPod-Gym/). This site has dozens of instructional videos you can download to your iPod (properly formatted, of course) and watch. Even more ambitious (but costing $19.95) is iWorkout (http://www.helmesinnovations.com/iWorkout/) with 101 videos, nutritional charts, nutrition & dieting essentials, etc.

The iPod is great for exercising not only your body – but your mind as well! Any iPod that can display video or song lyrics can also display text and with iPod Notes (http://www.ipod-notes.com/) you can turn a text file on your computer, or even a Web page, into an e-book that you can display and read on your iPod. Also available is iPod eBook Creator (http://ebookhood.com/ipod-ebook-creator), which, in association with http://ebookhood.com/, lets you download hundreds of already converted e-books (including many classics, science fiction, etc.) all ready to go. And, if you like the idea of a “walking encyclopedia,” you can download the entire Wikidpedia for storage and display on your device. Or, if you need instant access to a dictionary, you can download the 2006 edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary at http://tinyurl.com/qymfc/ (all programs are free except the dictionary, which is $9.95).

One of the most amazing programs for the iPod is Handbrake (http://handbrake.fr/). If you’ve never tried this all around (and free!) video converter for iPods, get it now before Apple people sue it out of existence. Handbrake will take any DVD (Video-TS folder, DVD image or real DVD) and output it to MP4 (Mpeg4, suitable for iPod display), MKV, AVI or OGM, with all the DVD features including subtitles, chapters, etc. Handbrake can even “do” encrypted videos (using third party components) and the program has a very active user forum with lots of good advice on the site’s community page. If you prefer “pre-canned” video in the form of clips you can download from Youtube, check out Ares Tube (http://www.benjaminstrahs.com/, for PC only), which can handle video from not only Youtube, but dozens of other video sites as well.

Not all is hunky dory in the world of iPod. The bane of many device users is having to coordinate what’s on the player with iTunes, which has its own peculiar (some would say rigid) way of doing things. Fortunately, you can divorce an iPod from its dependence on iTunes; download Floola (http://www.floola.com/), a cross platform iPod manager that does everything iTunes does, and then some, adding support for lyrics, album artwork, converting video files to MP4 format, and downloading Youtube files. It also lets you copy files to and from the iPod without “synchronizing” the whole thing with the computer’s music library, as well as, allowing you to connect more than one iPod to a computer – both features that seem beyond the abilities of iTunes to perform in a user friendly manner.

In fact, if you try to do either of these things with a Mac, expect to spend several hours at your computer trying to work things out! If you insist on using iTunes and you want to copy songs or video or your device onto the computer independent of the music library, check out Expod (http://expod.joynt.net/). After being the nice dad who got his kids a bunch of iPods and who wanted to transfer songs from one device to another without having to erase them each time (because of iTunes’ limitations), and after trying a bunch of tools that claimed to allow such copying, I found Expod to be the only program that actually worked, letting you run such a basic operation on an iTunes equipped Mac. In the case of multiple accounts and copying songs, the iPod could learn a trick or two from its Chinese no-name clone cousin!

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.