Forecast Highs

AqsaTube is back up as of Sunday. Sources tell me that the Foreign Ministry has asked the Russian government to speak to the Russian Internet Service Provider 2X4 to remove AqsaTube from its service, but that the Russians have still not acted. In any case, even if the Russians take AqsaTube down, it seems likely Hamas will just find another service provider somewhere in the East, most likely Malaysian or Indonesian.

Here is the story from last Friday:

An Israeli intelligence think-tank and a Hamas video website seem to be playing a game of cat and mouse with each other.

Click on the links for the blow by blow.

Last week the Intelligence Terrorism Information Center, a Ramat-Hasharon- based research center closely associated with Israel’s domestic spy agency Shin Bet and Military Intelligence, released a report detailing the establishment, by Hamas, of AqsaTube, [IT IS BACK UP] a video-sharing web platform closely modeled on the popular YouTube, but filled with videos praising suicide martyrdom, as well as videos showing how to build bombs and carry out attacks. Following publication of the story in The Jerusalem Post, Google removed its AdSense program from the Hamas website, and one day later, AqsaTube’s French Internet Service Provider OVH took the Islamist site offline.

On Wednesday, AqsaTube was back up, bigger and more brazen than before. The Hamas site obtained a new service provider, the Russian 2X4.ru Internet Services company; a new logo, brand new videos and some new ads. The graphic design of the site underwent a number of changes. The original logo, whose color was almost identical with that of YouTube, is now yellow and gray and bears its name in Arabic and a picture of the Al-Aqsa mosque. The site was still registered to Abu Nasser Skandar, from Dubai.

On Thursday, the ITIC released its second report on AqsaTube, detailing its return and all its new features. In a carefully calculated move, the ITIC, in its report, highlighted a video on AqsaTube praising deceased Chechen terrorist Kuttab. Now that revelation may have, when brought to the attention of the new Russian service provider, caused some consternation at the Moscow-based 2X4, as Kuttab was one of the main figures behind the Chechen fighting against Russian soldiers. After he was killed by the Russians he was glorified by to Hamas make the site more compatible with the global Islamic jihad, ITIC says. Some of the new videos were produced by the information bureau of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ military-terrorist wing. The new site has tried to represent itself as reflecting all the Palestinian terrorist organizations by adding videos associated with other Palestinian terrorist. Videos of global jihad organizations were also added. The new version of AqsaTube also had videos supporting Al-Qaeda and Chechen terrorism, and others preaching to European and American Christians that they convert to Islam.

Several hours after ITIC’s report [to be found at http://www.terrorism-info.org.il] was released to the media, including to the Russian press, AqsaTube was again offline. The Jerusalem Post has not been able to reach representatives of the Russian 2X4 firm, and cannot say with certainty that it was the service provider who removed AqsaTube, or whether the Hamas site is experiencing temporary technical difficulties. 2X4’s site’s Contact US page is blank.

For the second time in one week, ITIC director Reuven Erlich was smiling. “They seem to be having technical problems, and who knows, we seem to be making their lives harder,” he told the ‘Post on Thursday.

Still, based on this week’s events, the people behind AqsaTube seem determined to keep the site alive, and Erlich is not ruling out the possibility that the site could reappear in the very near future hosted by a new service provider. “The fight has no end, but it makes Hamas’ life harder, and that’s the value of taking them on. For technical reasons, Hamas prefers to make use of Western Internet service providers, and that’s where we focus our energies on [OVH, the French firm, pulled the plug on AqsaTube after media attention in this paper, and the BBC]. So sure, they could just go from one provider to another, and they could end up with a Malaysian provider for example, who won’t feel the need to kick them off, but Hamas wants Western providers, and while they do, they are vulnerable,” Erlich adds.

Furthermore, AqsaTube is not “a regular” website that can be ignored, Erlich says, pointing to the increasing use of online video to train terrorists.

While the second removal of AqsaTube on Thursday signals perhaps a temporary tactical victory for the ITIC, Erlich believes that shedding light on the subject could help mobilize more international cooperation to fight sites that spread incitement and terrorism. “These kinds of sites are like pedophile sites, and the fight against them needs to be coordinated internationally, just like authorities do against pedophiles,” Erlich says.

The AqsaTube story comes at a time of heightened counter-terrorist activity on the Internet aimed at al-Qaida websites.