Published: 20 January, 2012, 01:48

Although many members of Congress have just this week changed their stance on the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, the raid on Megaupload Thursday proved that the feds don’t need SOPA or its sister legislation, PIPA, in order to pose a threat to the Web.

Click here to read the report “Anonymous downs government, music industry sites in largest attack ever”.

By BENJAMIN WEINTHAL, JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT
01/20/2012 00:41

BERLIN – The media firestorm unleashed by allegedly anti- Semitic bloggers at a prominent think tank affiliated with the US Democratic Party resulted Thursday in a White House Jewish affairs official terming the situation at the Center for American Progress to be “troubling.”

According to a Washington Post online article on Thursday, Jarrod Bernstein, the new White House liaison with the Jewish community, told Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, that what was unfolding at CAP was “troubling,” and, “that [the attitude toward Israel at the think tank] is not this administration.”

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Click here to continue reading “White House troubled by ‘anti-Semitic think tank'” by Benjamin Weinthal.

RELATED: “The “anti-Semitism” smear campaign against CAP and Media Matters rolls on” by Glen Greenwald

There are many points to make about how this campaign has manifested, but I want to focus on one amazing aspect of it. Because these “leading Jewish groups” have whittled away their credibility by continuously exploiting charges of “anti-Semitism” for political gain and debate-suppressing ends, it is no longer sufficient for them simply to spout the accusation and be taken seriously. They are now required to specify what exactly is out of bounds and what makes someone “anti-Semitic” as opposed to a mere critic of Israeli actions. And in their answers here one finds extremely revealing — and damning — facts.

Click here to read “The “anti-Semitism” smear campaign against CAP and Media Matters rolls on” by Glen Greenwald.

Killing our enemies abroad is just state-sponsored terror – whatever euphemism western leaders like to use

Mehdi Hasan · guardian.co.uk

On the morning of 11 January Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran’s uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was in his car on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He wasn’t armed, or anywhere near a battlefield.

Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter’s nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage or condemnation, we have been treated to expressions of undisguised glee.

Click here to continue reading “Iran’s nuclear scientists are not being assassinated. They are being murdered” by Mehdi Hasan.

Uploaded to YouTube.com by RussiaToday on Jan 18, 2012

Should the international community give up its fight to curb Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions? Is it really worth starting a war with the Islamic republic? And if the option of a war is put aside, is there anything that could be done to limit Iran’s rising power in the region? Or will the West finally put up with its influence? And what is a bigger threat to stability in the Middle East: the Ahmadinejad regime or the Netanyahu regime? CrossTalking with Mark Fitzpatrick, Salam Al-Marayati and Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich.

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Social Media Meets 21st Century Statecraft in Latin America

by Cyril Mychalejko, Upside Down World, 16 January 2012

A Senate report released in October 2011 urging the US government to expand the use of social media as a foreign policy tool in Latin America offers another warning for activists seduced by the idea of technology and social media as an indispensable tool for social change.

In this past year as the world witnessed uprisings from Santiago to Zuccotti Park to Tahrir Square, social media has been lauded as a weapon of mass mobilization. Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent, wrote in his new book published this month Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, (excerpted in the Guardian) that this new communications technology was a “crucial” contributing factor to these revolutionary times. Nobel peace laureate and Burmese human rights campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi pointed out in a lecture in June that this “communications revolution…not only enabled [Tunisians] to better organize and co-ordinate their movements, it kept the attention of the whole world firmly focused on them.” CNN even ran an article comparing Facebook to “democracy in action”, while Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was imprisoned in Egypt for starting a Facebook page told Wolf Blitzer that the revolution in Egypt “started on Facebook” and that he wanted to “meet Mark Zuckerberg some day and thank him personally.”

While the positive contributions of technology to social movements and uprisings have been been amply noted, if not overstated, more attention needs to be paid to the intrinsic dangers looming in the co-optation of this technology-driven networking, specifically by Washington, but by other repressive governments as well.

Clay Shirkey, professor of New Media at New York University, wrote in the January/February 2011 issue of Foreign Affairs that “the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring, interdicting, or co-opting these tools.”

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