The Blanche Report: Israel & Hackers, Margaret Thatcher, Wikileaks, Duck!

Anti-Israel hackers attempted to pull down Israeli sites over the weekend, with numerous attempted denial of service (DDoS) attacks against Israeli government sites. A denial of service attack is designed to bring a network to its knees by flooding it with useless traffic. Nearly all the sites the hackers claimed to have taken down were operating normally. We saved the best part for last:

Israeli hackers began to retaliate against the anti-Israel hack attacks, called #OpIsrael, with an operation of their own against sites in countries associated with the anti-Israel groups. Another group called the Israel Elite Strike Force disabled dozens of sites in Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and several north African countries over the weekend. Now get this: The IES group started attacking sites in Pakistan Friday but shut down operations for Shabbat.

Just before candle lighting time came in, the Israel Elite Strike Force sent this message over twitter: “We wish all our JEWISH brothers a Shabbat Shalom. This was just a little taste before the day of rest. Hell’s Fire To Come.” They continued working on Saturday night to pull down more sites. 

Margaret Thatcher passed away this week. If you recall, we recently mentioned what vision she had in not lumping Great Britain with the rest of the countries who took on the Euro. Brilliant move. She was loved and loathed in equal measure. She was a feminist without any of the whining and carrying on, got elected on her own merit and stood behind her convictions, even if they were unpopular.

We do not usually publish stories, but this one about Margaret Thatcher is worth reading. It is about a young Jewish girl she saved just before the war:

In 1938, Edith Muhlbauer, a 17-year-old Jewish girl, wrote to Muriel Roberts, Edith’s pen pal and the future prime minister’s [Margaret Thatcher] older sister, asking if the Roberts family might help her escape Hitler’s Austria. The Nazis had begun rounding up the first of Vienna’s Jews after the Anschluss (the political union of Austria with Germany, achieved through annexation by Hitler in 1938), and Edith and her family worried she might be next. Alfred Roberts, Margaret and Muriel’s father, was a small-town grocer; the family had neither the time nor the money to take Edith in. So Margaret, then 12, and Muriel, 17, set about raising funds and persuading the local Rotary club to help. 

Edith wound up staying with more than a dozen Rotary families, including the Robertses, for the next two years, until she could move to join relatives in South America. Edith bunked in Margaret’s room, and she left an impression. “She was 17, tall, beautiful, evidently from a well-to-do family,” Thatcher later wrote in her memoir. But most important, “[s]he told us what it was like to live as a Jew under an anti-Semitic regime. One thing Edith reported particularly stuck in my mind: The Jews, she said, were being made to scrub the streets.” For Thatcher, who believed in meaningful work, this was as much a waste as it was an outrage. Had the Roberts family not intervened, Edith recalled years later, “I would have stayed in Vienna and they would have killed me.” Thatcher never forgot the lesson: “Never hesitate to do whatever you can, for you may save a life,” she told audiences in 1995 after Edith had been located, alive and well, in Brazil.

Bet you forgot all about Julian Assange. He’s the wikileaks dude holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Yes Blanche, he’s still there. But he’s been busy. Way too busy. Yesterday he published  more than 1.7million U.S. records covering diplomatic or intelligence reports on every country in the world from 1973 to 1976 – dealing with traffic of cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence.

What we want to know is who gives him the right to publish all of these documents? Since when did he become the international policeman in charge of deciding that the world needs to see other people’s private correspondence? He needs to be arrested. Wait! Worse than that – take away his computer.

In case you stopped ducking while going through tunnels or underpasses, may we suggest you bring out your hard hat again. We have another road issue in Quebec. And you thought it was over – ha! Pieces of the tiling on the walls of the Lafontaine tunnel started falling onto the roadway. Cars had to dodge around the tiles and around each other – a harrowing drive.

Fear not ladies and gentlemen,  we can rest easy.  Sarah Bensadoun with the transport department says falling tiles are common. “It happens all the time,” Bensadoun says. “[But] it’s not structural damage.” Now don’t you feel better? And if you believe that, we have some swamp land in Florida to sell you. We wonder if princess pauline will be avoiding this tunnel for a while. And now for our only in America story: A Cajun restaurant in Leesburg, Va., has become the latest eatery to offer discounts to gun owners, with its special “Open Carry Wednesday promotions.” Yes Blanche, if you carry a weapon, especially out in the open, you receive a 10% discount on your meal. And people are flocking to the restaurant. One customer said that she felt like she was in the safest place in America “Because if someone [threatening] comes through that door, good luck!” Like we said, only in America.