Did The American Conservative just get hacked by Zionists?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, January 27, 2010

Philip Weiss drew my attention to an article that caught Andrew Sullivan‘s eye: Jihadism, anti-Jihadism and Palestine by Daniel Larison. It appears at Pat Buchanan’s The American Conservative. But if you follow the link at this time (1.20 PM Eastern) you won’t find much — just a GoDaddy.com placeholder.

TAC got hacked. By who?

This is where it gets interesting. The Google cache page shows this — a statement by an ostensibly Turkish pro-Palestinian hacker/group. Here’s a screenshot:

If that looks familiar it’s probably because you read about the hacking of The Jewish Chronicle in Britain a week ago. The text and image appear to be the same:

There is one difference — the claim of authorship. The hackers of the Chronicle identified themselves as “PALESTINIAN MUJAHEEDS” whereas the TAC hackers used this name: “HaCKeD By CWD@rBe”.

So what can we infer? Some Turkish pro-Palestinians don’t know much about the American media? Perhaps.

The American Conservative is certainly a counter-intuitive target to pick. It’s one of the few American publications that acknowledges the legitimacy of the Palestinian cause and it is by no stretch of the imagination an Israel-friendly publication.

So who might the Palestinian Mujaheeds be? A Google search indicates that the name had never shown up until the Jewish Chronicle attack.

The equation between Palestinians and Mujahadins is a strange one to make — unless that is you happen to be an anti-Jihadist of the type that figures in Daniel Larison’s article. He writes:

The Palestinian cause generates remarkable reactions in Western anti-jihadists. For most of them, it is an article of faith that Palestinians, or at least the organized factions that speak for them, are just about as bad and hostile to “the West” as Al Qaeda itself, and so there is no point in attempting to make any deal with them. As far as they are concerned, the correct response is to back Israeli policies to the hilt, and to throw up as many obstacles to anyone here at home who would attempt to use U.S. influence to change those policies. The Bush-era habit of lumping together every Islamic revolutionary, militant and terrorist group under some catch-all term of “Islamofascism” made it easier to lump all these causes together, which is oddly enough exactly what jihadists would like, and once they were lumped together they could be that much more easily demonized together.

Now is that the kind of statement that a pro-Palestinian Turk believes should be blocked from public viewing? It’s conceivable but rather improbable. Much more plausible is the idea that a pro-Israeli hacker finds the expression of such views particularly unpalatable.

It’s not always possible to judge who you are dealing with simply by seeing the colors on the flag that they choose to waive.

Meanwhile, as TAC deals with the damage done by “HaCKeD By CWD@rBe”, be sure to look at Daniel Larison’s piece which I’ve reposted here. It’s essential reading.