.. articleMetaData:: :Where: Groessen, The Netherlands
As there are no big things happenings right now I'll be putting some minor things here. As first I'd like to apologize to Mr Zak for my howto on booking flights. I had the great pleasure on booking some flights for myself, and of course (Murphy is everywhere) I fucked it up. Instead of booking a flight from Trondheim (that's in Norway) to Amsterdam, I booked the wrong way around. Luckily the guys at the travel agency could fix it quickly for me.
Then the Manuel phenomenon happened again, with some very annoying posts to the PHP-QA list he tried to annoy everybody again. Of course this succeeded very well. (See the update here).
Then we have had Independence Day in the US of A. No terrorist attacks were carried out, atleast that's what the FBI was telling. There was some shooting incident at LAX, and that may be classified as a terrorist attack against the state of Israel. You can find some interesting insight on Israel and this situation below:
Let's put it this way. The fact that there are people trying to cross the Egyptian border into Israel, who usually get caught either by the Egyptian army or by the IDF and admit in their questioning that they wanted to get inside in order to either shoot Israelis or blow themselves up in the presence of Israelis and the fact that on the other side of the world, an Egyptian person did exactly that, and not to some random Lufthansa or Swiss counter, but to the El Al counter, it's not rocket science to compute that those trying to cross the borders are terrorists, even though they're not 'organized', and this guy in LA is one just the same. You know that most of the suicide bombers are not 'organized'? They either prepare their own bomb belt, or get it from someone a day before they blow themselves up. It's organized on the nation level, as far as anti west, and primarily anti-Israeli propaganda when the 'small person' just gets up and does something about it, it's too late. And it's a part of the overall effort. -- Zeev Suraski
Let's make a (currently) imaginary experiment: Let's say someone downtown Boston wakes up tomorrow, tunes in to whatever Osama has to say believes in it wholeheartedly, goes to his work room in the back and prepares a big ass bomb and blows himself up in a busy shopping mall (something which is much closer to reality than some care to think). Is he a random whacko, or a terrorist? -- Zeev Suraski
The organization in this case is fundamental Islam and the fierce anti Israeli and anti-west propaganda in most of the Arab states. That's the bond, and it's stronger than you may think. As I wrote a friend a few minutes ago - Terrorism is when someone gets up in the morning and goes out killing people, typically indiscriminantly, because of political or racial views he may hold. That it. It doesn't have to be planned, it doesn't have to be big. It can be just a stupid Palestinian girl trying to slay a Jewish Yeshiva student with a box cutter in the suburbs of Jerusalem, and it can be a well trained Saudi using the same box cutter to drive a plane into the twin towers. They're both terrorists. What drives them is identical. The rest is details (important details, no doubt, but not important or even relevant to their tagging as terrorists). -- Zeev Suraski