Iran.

Washington Post/AP – TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s state radio says authorities have executed two men convicted of spying for Israel’s Mossad and the American CIA spy agency.

Sunday’s report says Mohammad Heidari, who was accused of providing Mossad with classified information in return of money, and Kourosh Ahmadi, who allegedly gave the CIA intelligence on Iran, were hanged.

Read full story.

Missiles.

Ynet – Syria has put its most advanced missiles on standby with orders to hit Tel Aviv if Israel launches another strike on its territory, The Sunday Times reported overnight Sunday.

According to the British newspaper, reconnaissance satellites have been monitoring preparations by the Syrian army to deploy surface-to-surface Tishreen missiles.

Read full story.

A sculpture by Audrey Flack. Photo: Audreyflack.com

The Jewish presence and identity in the contemporary world of art is one truly worth noting. At the 3rd annual conference of “Jewish Arts & Identity in the contemporary world” in Baruch College’s Jewish Studies Center, at a panel entitled “Jewish Ways of Seeing: The Visual Arts and the Jewish Tradition”, the Jewish impact on the creative world is exemplified through the discussion of artist Audrey Flack and her various works. Flack was born in 1931 to a fairly Orthodox Jewish family in New York City, and was well versed in her Jewish heritage and tradition. Though she is an observant Jew, one may be confused by Flack’s vivid depictions of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ as well as other Catholic imagery and symbolism. Among other influences, the artist was deeply concerned with the way women were portrayed, and sought to dispel stereotypes of the excessively emotional woman, restoring strength and empowerment to female depiction. In many of her paintings, including Macarena of Miracles, the Virgin Mary is a consistent theme.

The infamous heartache and devastation endured by Mary, a Jewish woman herself, over her lost child was a theme which spoke to Flack, which she identified with and which inspired her innovative use of the Catholic religion in Jewish art. It is well emphasized that Flack employs this imagery because of her Jewish religious affiliation, not in spite of it; to celebrate this interrelation and identification with Mary, a Jewish woman and mother who has as well known suffering of the human condition. As pondered by Flack “what is it about Mary that intercedes for all human beings?”

Among other moving works discussed, were her depictions of World War II and prominent figures of that era including Hitler, Marilyn Monroe and JFK. In her painting Marilyn (Vanitas), a young fresher-faced Marilyn is shown, a Marilyn that existed before she reached the height of her fame and tumultuous career. This Marilyn, the artist expressed, evoked her own vulnerability. The use of feminine objects such as pearls and perfume in the painting, give the work a feminine feel, an uncommon motif of photo-realism at that time. On a more somber note, was the discussion of Flack’s riveting World War II depiction. In the work, one can see a black and white photo of prisoners in a concentration camp contrast with beautiful brighter images including a Star of David, a candle, and a silver tray of sweets among other rosy objects. The artist elaborates on this contrast and use of positive imagery to depict a dark time, by explaining that “I chose not to show injury; too much blood has been shed already. I want invite the gaze of the viewer, make them think”. Flack faced much criticism over this painting, this clear, raw depiction of the war many at that time preferred to keep in the past and not “deal with”. Imagery of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was depicted in the painting as well, used as another contrast to darkness. Rabbi Nachman was best known for his light of heart in the face of tragedy, whom never spoke the word “bad” or knew of its meaning. His presence in the painting represents hope and light, in the face of war, darkness, and despair.

Flack has stopped painting temporarily, and is currently working on sculpture art, her most recent project a sculpture of Eve. The work has many powerful feminist connotations and aims to restore the image of Eve and of all women. Eve is depicted as powerful and strong, a woman whom Flack believes we have perhaps been too hard on. After all, “all she did was ask questions”, said the artist. The works of Audrey Flack inspire, teach and inform. They are controversial yet, invite one to search within themselves, to identify with the artists’ careful expression of human emotion and thought.

A MQ-9 Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle.

They say it is far easier to criticize something than to propose a solution. When it comes to the methods by which the United States prosecutes the war on terror, idealistic “human rights” activists tend to take the path of least resistance, protesting loudly about drone strikes and indefinite detention without ever suggesting a workable alternative.

In doing so, they overlook what ought to be the most obvious point – that terrorism exists, and must be fought.

Since 9/11, two US administrations have fought terrorism in two very different ways. Bush preferred to incarcerate terrorists. Obama prefers to incinerate them.

Call me a bleeding heart, but I favor the former approach.

Under Bush, terrorists were captured on the battlefield and detained at Guantanamo Bay. Once there, they would be brought before a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT), which would determine whether they had been correctly identified as enemy combatants.

The CSRTs were as fair as they could have been under the circumstances. The US Supreme Court’s Chief Justice John Roberts, for example, described them as “the most generous set of procedural protections ever afforded aliens detained by this country as enemy combatants.”

They did a thorough job, too. By the time the Guantanamo Review Task Force issued its final report in January 2010, less than 5 percent of the 240 detainees were found not to have been directly engaged in terrorism.

By contrast, of those who were released from Guantanamo Bay whilst Bush was in the White House – for lack of evidence, or because they were deemed no longer to pose a threat – 31 percent are confirmed or suspected to have resumed their terrorist activities.

What this serves to demonstrate is that, if you found yourself wearing an orange jumpsuit in Guantanamo Bay between 2002 and 2009, you almost certainly belonged there.

Then along came Obama, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who vowed to put an end to indefinite detention and turn the page on what he called a “sad chapter in American history.”

Every bit as explosive as Obama’s arrival on the political scene was his new, presumably happier chapter, which began with a massive increase in the number of aerial drone strikes on Pakistani territory. Whilst Bush presided over fewer than 50 such attacks, Obama has authorized more than 300 to date.

There is nothing wrong with that, of course. Drone strikes are extremely effective at combating terrorism. According to a study conducted by the RAND Corporation’s Patrick Johnston, “drone strikes are associated with decreases in the number and lethality of militant attacks in the areas where strikes are conducted.”

Indeed, emails recovered from computers seized during the 2011 raid on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout revealed how Al-Qaeda’s top brass had complained of drones killing their fighters faster than they could be replaced.

Crucially, these operational successes in the war on terror have come at a remarkably low cost to civilian life; of the roughly 3,000 killed by US drones patrolling the skies over Pakistan, the New America Foundation calculates that at least 80 percent were terrorists.

The Long War Journal puts the figure even higher, reporting civilian casualties at no more than 6 percent.

Even the most damning (and least reliable) statistics on drone strikes have the civilian-combatant death ratio at around 1:2, which still compares favorably to the UN’s estimate of a 3:1 average for all modern, asymmetric conflicts.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is a fact that Obama’s policy of incinerating terrorists from a height of 10,000 feet will always result in the accidental killing of more innocents than Bush’s policy of incarceration ever did.

Ironically, the shift from the latter to the former is a consequence of the public outrage whipped up by the “human rights” activists who campaigned so vociferously against indefinite detention and interrogation.

But they got what they wanted – an alternative to Guantanamo Bay. If there is an alternative to the alternative, I would love to hear it.

A version of this article first appeared in the Yorker, a student publication at the University of York.

Nakba Day protestors at the Israeli embassy in Cairo, 2011. Photo: wiki commons.

Today, Palestinians and their supporters, as they have done increasingly over the years, mark what they call the naqba (Arabic for catastrophe). It was on this day 65 years ago that Israel came into existence upon the expiry of British rule under a League of Nations mandate.

That juxtaposition of Israel and naqba in not accidental. We are meant to understand that Israel’s creation caused the displacement of hundreds of thousand of Palestinian Arabs.

But the truth is different. A British document from early 1948, declassified only weeks ago, tells the story: “the Arabs have suffered a series of overwhelming defeats…. Jewish victories … have reduced Arab morale to zero and, following the cowardly example of their inept leaders, they are fleeing from the mixed areas in their thousands.”

In other words, Jew and Arabs, including irregular foreign militias from neighboring states, were already fighting and Arabs fleeing even before Israel had sovereign existence.

Thus, on May 15, what is now called the naqba consisted, not of an Israeli act of forcible displacement of Arabs, but of neighboring Arab armies and internal Palestinian militias responding to Israel’s declaration of independence and Britain’s departure with full-scale hostilities. Tel Aviv was bombed from the air and the head of Israel’s provisional government, David Ben Gurion, delivered his first radio address to the nation from an air-raid shelter.

Israel successfully resisted invasion and dismemberment — the universally affirmed objective of the Arab belligerents — and Palestinians came off worst of all from the whole venture. At war’s end, over 600,000 Palestinians were living as refugees under neighboring Arab regimes.

So the term naqba is misleading. Indeed, it smacks of falsehood, inasmuch as it implies a tragedy inflicted by others. The tragedy, of course, was self-inflicted.

As Israel’s UN ambassador Abba Eban was to put it, “Once you determine the responsibility for that war, you have determined the responsibility for the refugee problem. Nothing in the history of our generation is clearer or less controversial than the initiative of Arab governments for the conflict out of which the refugee tragedy emerged.”

However, the Palestinians do not mourn today the ill-conceived choice of going to war to abort Israel. They mourn only that they failed.

This is contrary to normal historical experience of disastrous defeat. The Germans today mourn their losses in the Second World War — but not by lauding their invasion of Poland and justifying their attempt to subjugate Europe. They do not glorify Nazi aggression.

The Japanese today mourn their losses in the Second World War — but not by lauding their assault on Pearl Harbor and their attempt to subjugate southeast Asia. They do not glorify Japanese imperialism.

The very existence of naqba commemorations is therefore instructive in a way few realize. It informs us that Palestinians have not admitted or assimilated the fact — as Germans and Japanese have done — that they became victims as a direct result of their efforts to be perpetrators. It informs us that Palestinians would still like to succeed today at what they miserably failed to achieve then. And it informs us that they take no responsibility for their own predicament, which is uniquely maintained to this day at their own insistence.

If readers doubt my word, consider this vignette from January 2001. That month, Palestinian rioters in the West Bank burned in effigy John Manley, then Foreign Minister in Jean Chrétien’s Canadian Government. His sin? — Mr. Manley had offered to welcome Palestinian refugees and their descendants to Canada after a peace settlement. The Palestinian response? Legislator Hussum Khader of Fatah, Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’ party — not Hamas or another of the Islamist groups — threatened Canada, saying, “If Canada is serious about resettlement, you could expect military attacks in Ottawa or Montreal.” A similar offer by then-Australian Immigration Minister, Philip Ruddock, also received a threatening Palestinian rejoinder.

Scarcely a typical response by a government official to an offer of refugee relief, Mr. Khader’s was illuminating. Setting up a Palestinian state and resettling the refugees and their descendants inside it or abroad would remove any internationally accepted ground for conflict. That is why helping to solve the Palestinian refugee problem is regarded as a hostile act — by Palestinians.

Naqba commemorations disclose that the conflict is about Israel’s existence — not about territory, borders, holy places, refugees, or any other bill of particulars.

Only when Palestinians accept that Israel is here to stay will the possibility of the conflict’s end come into view. In the meantime, responsible governments can discourage and repudiate naqba commemorations as a small but important step towards bringing that day closer.

This article was originally published by the American Spectator.

Bruce Hennes of Hennes Paynter Communications, which is representing the victims of the Cleveland kidnappings that have become a global news sensation.

(Cleveland Jewish News) Hennes Paynter Communications, a firm co-owned by a Jewish resident of Cleveland, has been tapped to handle public relations for the victims of the Cleveland kidnappings that have become a global news sensation.

Amanda Berry, Gina DeJesus and Michelle Knight on May 6 broke free of Ariel Castro’s house after nine to 11 years of captivity.

Bruce Hennes, a Cleveland Heights resident who is Jewish, is co-owner of the Hennes Paynter Communications company with Barbara Paynter. On May 10, Jones Day, the Cleveland law firm handling the women’s cases, asked Hennes Paynter whether it would take care of public relations for the now-famous victims of the Cleveland kidnappings. Hennes said May 13 he was surprised to get the call and honored to do the job.

“The strategy right now is to give the women time and to preserve the integrity of the court case,” said Hennes, a former president of the Cleveland Jewish News Board of Directors.

“Right now, there is no other strategy,” he said. “That’s why the women are not speaking publicly. At this point, our only role is to compile a list of media people who are interested in interviewing them. We’re getting whatever requests there might be and aggregating all of those. At the appropriate time, the women will make their own decisions about whom they want to talk to and when.”

Hennes said he has not spoken to the women, adding “our main contact is through the law firm.” Hennes’s firm has been fielding requests from all over the world, he said, citing all the domestic networks, including Spanish-language channel Telemundo, as well as Radio Australia and “everybody in between.”

“We’re on lockdown,” he said. “It’s very important that nothing be said that will jeopardize the ongoing investigation and the prosecution of Mr. Castro.

“We were floored to get the call, and when we were asked to do this pro bono, the answer was, immediately, of course. We’re honored to be able to help them. I can’t even begin to imagine what they went through.”

As for the media, “they’re looking for the ‘get’ right now” as far as the Cleveland kidnappings story goes, Hennes said. “There’s a worldwide scramble. They want the picture, the interview. This is the hottest news.”

Castro, 52, was arraigned on charges or rape and kidnapping on May 9. Bond was set at $8 million. Cuyahoga County prosecutors allege he beat and sexually assaulted all three women. They also say Castro is the father of Berry’s 6-year-old daughter.

Berry, 27, and DeJesus, 23, reunited with their families after brief hospital stays, according to various news accounts. Knight’s whereabouts is cloudy, however. According to a story in the May 12 Christian Science Monitor, Knight, 32, didn’t even tell her mother where she was going when she left the hospital where she was treated the night of May 10.

Editor’s note: This story was originally published by the Cleveland Jewish News, www.clevelandjewishnews.com, and is distributed with the permission of that newspaper.

Pope Francis. Photo: Casa Rosada/Wikimedia Commons

The lost history of Christians forced to convert to Islam—or die—is reemerging, figuratively and literally. According to the BBC: “Pope Francis has proclaimed the first saints of his pontificate in a ceremony [last Sunday] at the Vatican—a list which includes 800 victims of an atrocity carried out by Ottoman soldiers in 1480.They were beheaded in the southern Italian town of Otranto after refusing to convert to Islam.”

The BBC adds in a sidebar: “The ‘Martyrs of Otranto’ were 813 Italians beheaded for defying demands by Turkish invaders to renounce Christianity. The Turks had been sent by Mohammed II, who had already captured the ‘second Rome’ of Constantinople.”

Historical texts throughout the centuries are filled with similar anecdotes, including the “60 Martyrs of Gaza,” Christian soldiers who were executed for refusing Islam during the 7^th century Islamic invasion of Jerusalem. Seven centuries later, during the Islamic invasion of Georgia, Christians refusing to convert were forced into their church and set on fire. Witnesses for Christ lists 200 anecdotes of Christians killed—including some burned at the stake, thrown on iron spikes, dismembered, stoned, stabbed, shot at, drowned, pummeled to death, impaled and crucified—for refusing to embrace Islam.

If history is shocking, the fact is, today, Christians—men, women, and children—are still being forced to convert to Islam. Pope Francis alluded to their sufferings during the same ceremony: “As we venerate the martyrs of Otranto, let us ask God to sustain those many Christians who, in these times and in many parts of the world, right now, still suffer violence, and give them the courage and fidelity to respond to evil with good.”

Consider some recent anecdotes:

In Pakistan, a “devoted Christian” was butchered by Muslim men “with multiple axe blows [24 per autopsy] for refusing to convert to Islam.” Another two Christian men returning from church were accosted by six Muslims who tried to force them to convert to Islam, but “the two refused to renounce Christianity.” Accordingly, the Muslims severely beat them, yelling they must either convert “or be prepared to die. . . . the two Christians fell unconscious, and the young Muslim men left assuming they had killed them.”

In Bangladesh some 300 Christian children were abducted in 2012 and sold to Islamic schools, where “imams force them to abjure Christianity.” The children are then instructed in Islam and beaten. After full indoctrination they are asked if they are “ready to give their lives for Islam,” presumably by becoming jihadi suicide-bombers. (Even here the historic patterns are undeniable: for centuries, Christian children were forcibly taken, converted to and indoctrinated in Islam, trained to be jihadis extraordinaire, and then unleashed on their former Christian families. Such were the Janissaries and Mamelukes.)

In Palestine in 2012, Christians in Gaza protested over the “kidnappings and forced conversions of some former believers to Islam.” The ever-dwindling Christian community banged on a church bellwhile chanting, “With our spirit, with our blood we will sacrifice ourselves for you, Jesus.”

Just as happened throughout history, Muslims today regularly “invite” Christians to Islam, often presenting it as the only cure to their sufferings—sufferings caused by Muslims in the first place. In Pakistan, a Christian couple was arrested on a false charge and severely beaten by police. The pregnant wife was “punched, kicked and beat” as her interrogators threatened to kill her unborn baby. A policeman offered to drop the theft charge if the husband would only “renounce Christianity and convert to Islam,” but the man refused.

In Uzbekistan, a 26-year-old Christian woman, partially paralyzed from youth, and her elderly mother were violently attacked by invaders who ransacked their home, confiscating “icons, Bibles, religious calendars, and prayer books.” At the police department, the paralyzed woman was “offered to convert to Islam.” She refused, and the judge “decided that the women had resisted police and had stored the banned religious literature at home and conducted missionary activities. He fined them 20 minimum monthly wages each.”

In Sudan, Muslims kidnapped a 15-year-old Christian girl; they raped, beat and ordered her to convert to Islam. When her mother went to police to open a case, the Muslim officer of the so-called “Family and Child Protection Unit,” told her: “You must convert to Islam if you want your daughter back.”

Indeed, because Christian females are the most vulnerable segments of Islamic societies, they are especially targeted for forced conversions. In 2012, U.S. Congress heard testimony about the “escalating abduction, coerced conversion and forced marriage of Coptic Christian women and girls [550 cases in the last five years alone].Those women are being terrorized and, consequently, marginalized, in the formation of the new Egypt.”

As my new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians documents, wherever there are large numbers of Muslims—whether in the Arab World, Africa, Asia, or even in the West—Christians are being persecuted. Forced conversions are the tip of the iceberg, and certainly not anomalies of history.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and associate fellow at the Middle East Forum.

This article was originally published by The Blaze.

The KFC logo. Photo: KFC.

A Palestinian smuggling company is now offering Gazans the taste of Colonel Sanders’s KFC secret recipe.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, the al-Yamama company in Gaza advertises its illegal smuggling service on Facebook. It receives about 10 orders a week for KFC meals, despite the lofty cost of $30 to cover the transportation and smuggling fees. The finger lickin’ chicken goes from the deep fryers in Al-Arish in the Sinai to Gaza and at your doorstep in about three hours.

“All you need to have any KFC product is a short phone call and a few hours, then you can enjoy the great taste of fried chickens,” Rafat Shororo, an accountant in Gaza, told the Christian Science Monitor.

Israel imposed the blockade on Gaza several years ago to prevent Hamas and other Gaza terror groups from obtaining rockets and other materials needed for weapons. Recently, however, Israel has eased its restrictions into Gaza, prompting smugglers to look for other means of income, such as fried chicken.

The Syrian Electronic Army took credit for hacking the Financial Times.

If you are one of some 600,000 subscribers to the Financial Times, you may wish to change your account’s  password.

Earlier today, a few of the paper’s Twitter accounts and a blog were compromised by Bashar Assad’s thugs, bragging on their Twitter, ”Hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army.”  Earlier the FT reported that a member of the Syrian Electronic Army was interviewed by the paper’s reporters via email, and that the hacking was facilitated by phishing attacks on some of the FT’s email accounts. Yet no link was made between that correspondence, which exposed FT email accounts, to today’s hacking.

In what can best be described as English subtlety, the article describing the attack did not even made headlines on the FT’s home page. “We have now locked those accounts,” announced the FT official, who praised Twitter’s help. Nothing was said about the paper’s subscribers’ accounts. Clearly, the new two-step authentication that Twitter was supposed to establish, after the Associated Press account was hacked last month, failed.

Phishing, hacking emails, stealing passwords and compromising whatever and whoever is linked is not the only threat our cyber communications is facing today.

Discoveries that computers–used by governments, industries financial institutions and everything else–have been infected by malware, either imbedded in software or through the Internet, don’t make headlines anymore. The damages that are reported are huge, but most still go unreported and possibly have not yet been discovered and therefore the real cost is unfathomable.

While these discoveries demonstrate that security experts are catching up, it’s too little, too late. While protecting our cyber communication channels from stealth predators though the Internet is challenging, we could and should prevent the planting of malware in software by carefully vetting the designers.

However, software developers often seem more concerned with their bottom line and are cutting cost by employing cheap, unvetted labor. While their revenues may well increase, the cost to the economy and national security could be devastating.

Most public and private entities rely on and are dependent upon by the government for timely warning and for identifying the attackers after an attack. To better protect the critical infrastructure against cyberattack, DHS has contracted Northrop Grumman to begin the security accreditation process that’s required before approval to operate as a commercial services provider under the Department’s Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program.

Major private sector entities would like the government to allow them to take preventive offensive tactics against cyber attacks. Since the government prevents such measures, “Bank representatives on the Federal Advisory Council said at their last gathering on Feb. 8 in Washington that the Fed should collect and distribute threat information to lenders, law enforcement, securities exchanges and clearinghouses,” according to Bloomberg. A number of banks recently asked the Federal Reserve to take the lead in defending the financial services industry from cyberattacks by working with federal counterterrorism, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies.

The government, for its part, may have the expertise, but it’s stuck in the rut of only gathering and aggregating information on private sector cyber attacks.

In the absence of enabling legislation the FBI have been meeting with big bankers urging them to report about attacks. If the government is still at step one of cybersecurity–information sharing about attack–it appears that it cannot even manage that in a comprehensive way. On April 18, the House of Representatives passed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA).  It was dead on arrival in the Democratic Senate, due to White House opposition.

CBS News suggested the Administration opposed it “because language in its current draft suggests that companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, share information with the federal government without a warrant.” Huffington Post argued that the House bill doesn’t “sufficiently protect privacy and civil liberties, ensure that a civilian department–not an intelligence agency–is the primary point of entry for cybersecurity information sharing, and provide narrowly tailored liability protections that would allow the private sector to respond to threats.” And The Hill offered that “the final version of the bill did not satisfy the White House’s key principles because it would allow companies to share cyber threat information directly with the military, including the National Security Agency (NSA), without being required to remove personal information from that data first.” The Hill also said the current bill doesn’t require companies to remove information on the identity of a specific person before sharing the threat information: “CISPA requires the government to strip that personal information from the cyber threat data it receives from companies instead.”

New bipartisan legislation [PDF], “The Deter Cyber Theft Act, S. 884″ that was introduced on May 7^th, by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich.; John McCain, R-Ariz.; Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.; and Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

Levin said we should hit those who commit cyberespionage in their wallets, “by blocking imports of products or from companies that benefit from this theft.”  The law would require an annual report listing the countries involved in cyberespionage and detail the kind of data the perpetrators were stealing.  These lists could result in the president blocking imports of certain products from those countries.

This would be a welcome step in the right direction.   The trouble is one cannot be sure how the White House would react. All of its actions regarding the Chinese cyberthreat have been “let’s talk.” While the administration has more than acknowledged China’s depredations, no other steps seem to be taken. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, recently visited with Chinese general Fang Fenghui, and talked about setting up a cybersecurity “mechanism.” What does that mean?  This seems to indicate that the administration is less interested in getting China to stop cyberattacks than it is in finding a compromise where no compromise ought to be seen as an outcome favorable to the United States. Remember: The Chinese want to regulate the Internet.

The May 6th Pentagon report openly blamed Chinese cyber attacks directly on its government and military.  The report also said that Chinese espionage “was designed to benefit its defense and technology industry into U.S. policy makers’ think about China.”  But there is nothing new in the report that we haven’t known about for years. In fact latest reports say the Chinese have increased their cyberattacks.

If the Defense Department is so concerned about Chinese penetration of U.S. defense systems, as the report suggests, then how does it explain its recent $10.6 million contract with the Chinese for a year’s use of their Apstar-7 satellite for data communications purposes?

On March 20, NASA administrator Charles Bolden told Congress that the agency “had closed down its technical reports database and imposed tighter restrictions on remote access to its computer systems” as a consequence of suspected espionage by an employee who happened to be a Chinese national. Bolden also said he had ordered to prevent access of “foreign nationals from designated countries — including China, Iran and North Korea — are given to NASA facilities and a moratorium on providing new access to citizens of those countries.”

Why do China, Iran, and North Korean nationals have access to NASA facilities, let alone serve as NASA contractors?   The Syrian Electronic Army’s hacking of the AP Twitter account, and falsely reporting on explosions at the White House, instantly wiped $136 billion off the DOW. The DOW came back. But what happened to those who lost the money?   A new venue for hacking into our financial system, the SEC trade-tracking computer system, has been recently introduced.  It is  purportedly designed to insulate the market from flash crashes caused by High Frequency Trading and other glitches.

SEC Commissioner Mary Shapiro broke a 2-2 commission deadlock in favor of next-day reporting on hacking, instead of an immediate reporting ostensibly because the real-time version would be too costly.   Constantine von Hoffman has said, the market is now protected thus: “1) See horse in barn; 2) see horse leave barn; and 3) go close gate.” Unfortunately, the same applies to the general state of U.S. cybersecurity.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Director of American Center for Democracy, is author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed- and How to Stop It.”

The logo of the far-right Hungarian political party, Jobbik, whose rising influence in the country has led to concerns of increased anti-Semitism and hate speech. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The Hungarian Reformed Church is trying to defrock Lorant Hegedus, a Protestant pastor, for participating in a radical right-wing rally during which his wife had given a speech denouncing Jews and Israel.

Hegedus’s wife is a deputy for the right-wing Jobbik party in the Hungarian Parliament. The party had won 17 percent of the country’s vote in the 2010 election.

“This is a permanent provocation… It has nothing to do with the Gospel,” said Gusztav Bolcskei, the church’s presiding bishop, regarding Hegedus’s involvement with Jobbik, according to Reuters. Defrocking the pastor “should start at the church district level,” Bolcskei said. ”It can be done, but it’s a very long procedure,” he said.

Peter Feldmajer, who just stepped down as the head of the 80,000-100,000-member Hungarian Jewish community, said Hungarian Jews are “satisfied with the actions of the churches,” and that he thinks “at the end of the day, he will be fired.”