State Dept Hacking Yemeni Sites?

The blogosphere was beset with stories last week of a speech by American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who claimed that the State Department hacked Yemeni tribal websites, replacing Al-Qaeda propaganda that bragged about killing Americans.

Clinton's words:

"Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll al-Qaida attacks have taken on the Yemeni people...Within 48 hours, our team plastered the same sites with altered versions of the ads that showed the toll al-Qaida attacks have taken on the Yemeni people," "Extremists are publicly venting their frustration and asking supporters not to believe everything they read on the Internet."

The story was everywhere: Huffington Post, Slate, Washington Post,  Politico, Times of India,  New York Magazine, etc. It was picked up by the AP - everyone carried it. 

We were pretty surprised to hear such news, considering our previous experience with فريق التواصل الالكتروني , the State Dept's Digital Outreach Team. They're the folks who go onto Arabic (and presumably other language) forums to comment officially in the name of the USA. They may not have a lot of resources behind them, which would explain why they have sometimes been rather inept. A great example of that can be found here on Abu Mahjoob forums, where several users demonstrate their frustrations with the team's lack of dialogue and with the fact that they constantly bring up terrorism and Al-Qaeda in any given subject. This team really deserves their own post....maybe later. Anyway, we've never seen the team do anything near actually HACKING into websites. The only offensive action noticed by us here at the blog was a video they made at the beginning of the Arab Spring, comparing Al-Qaeda ideology to the peaceful action of the Arab revolutions by splicing an Ayman Al-Zawahiri video with scenes from Tunis and Cairo. That video was actually pretty awesome. 

It was hard to believe that they had moved on to hacking websites. And we were right - they didn't. Wired got the story right - their piece on the story gives a great summary of what went wrong: either Clinton misspoke or the story was misreported, but either way, State did not "hack" websites, it simply posted their ads on forums. Now that sounds more like the tactics of the good old فريق التواصل الالكتروني. However, making parodies of AQ banners/ads was new....we decided to check it out. 

We looked at المجلس اليمني Ye1.org/vb , the largest Yemeni focused forum, and we would argue, the largest and most active Arabic forum in the game right now. It didn't take too long to find the State Department's handywork. Enjoy:

Image reads: "Ansar Al-Sharia  Al-Qaeda: This is our gift to the Yemeni people, if you are part of the popular committees*, we are Al-Qaeda, we bring mercenaries to steal your sons and destroy your homes."

We're not sure, but we think the above State Dept ad was designed to counter this ad made by Ansar Al-Sharia (Al-Qaeda in Yemen):

Image reads: "Popular Committees: We made your masters cry. How can you be such mercenaries to America? For God we've moved and for his religion we fight. But you, what are you fighting for, you committees of shame?" As you can see, the soldier on the left is clearly meant to be an American soldier. Jihadi authors on Ye1 claim that the popular committees are slaves of the Americans. 

There's more State Dept. images online. We'll bring them to you...more on that in a later post. 

*Note: "Popular Committees" refers to groups of local, tribal forces who are currently fighting AQ in Yemen. They're civilians who are against AQ's rule of territory there...reminiscent of the Anbar Awakening Sunnis in Iraq. 

UPDATE:
More accurately, the State Dept.'s image may have been in response to this particular image from Ansar Al-Sharia:

Taylor Swift in Arabic Music Video

After a late night, we at the blog came home and did what anyone else would do….put on some Arabic satellite TV and relax.  What channel did we put on? Well, after checking out Dream 1, Dream 2, and OTV (the three channels with those best coverage of the most interesting topic currently, the Egyptian elections) we realized that they were playing either soap operas or boring morning religious programing. 

With Arabic satellite, when all else fails, put on the music channels. We checked out Mazzika Zoom, an Egyptian music channel. After a few popular music videos (best of which was طال السهر by Dina Hayek and Tony Hena) the channel showed a rather interesting video by Sandy, an Egyptian singer. 

In Sandy's video عايز اقولك A3iz A2olek "I Want to Tell You," there were a number of things that caught our eye. The overall theme of the music video is not unusual: it's a high school type of scene, with Sandy playing a nerdy-type of student and a blonde/American-looking type of guy playing her love interest. The look of the male character was the first unusual element…most Arabic videos don't include main characters that are obviously non-Arab, especially as a love interest (3aib!). 

Another thing was that Sandy's love interest wears a letterman jacket, an almost exclusively American style of jacket worn during the high school years. When Sandy goes home to her bedroom, we notice she has a Taylor Swift poster on her wall and an Angry Birds doll on her bed.  Her blonde crush (who happens to live next door) has a Cincinatti Bengals poster hanging on his wall. 

What's with all of the American paraphernalia in this video? After some quick Arabic social media research, we learned that her director is American…and that her videos with him have received criticism for imitating the styles of American artists.