ALKHOBAR, 17 February — I think it’s only a matter of time now before premium online greeting card sites become popular. Last Thursday, Feb. 14, proved that the e-greeting has truly come of age. Friends told me that in many cases it had taken them more than an hour using a free site to send an e-greeting and from my side, I frequently was unable to access the sites to retrieve the greetings due to the heavy volume of traffic. One friend, who waited till Thursday, was actually turned away from the sites, which gave out messages that “due to overwhelming demand we are unable to process any more requests.”
Now I’ve started to receive e-greetings for Eid Al-Adha. Please folks, I beg you. Don’t make me go out on the Internet to retrieve your e-cards and please don’t send me homemade e-cards packed with tons of graphics. Just drop me an e-mail that says, “Happy Eid. I thought of you.” That will be perfect and I will actually appreciate it more because it will torture me less.
Last week I took a plane to Riyadh and met with some of the people who put out the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. The magazine will celebrate its 20th anniversary in April 2002. If you’re a regular reader of Arab News you will know that on Friday we printed an article featuring the founders of the Washington Report — Andrew I. Killgore, its publisher, and Richard H. Curtiss, its executive editor. If you missed the story go and read it at http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=12890.
Some of you may not know about the Washington Report, so I’ll explain that it’s a publication that attempts to provide balanced and accurate information concerning US relations with Middle Eastern states. In addition to its feature articles, the magazine has a popular readers’ forum and also publishes shorter reports that give details of happenings in the USA which are of concern to US residents with an interest in the Middle East. The hard copy publication is produced 9 times a year and all back issues are archived at the Washington Report’s website, wrmea.com.
A few years ago, Killgore and Curtiss realized the value of the information contained in nearly two decades of the magazine and also noted the ever-increasing importance of the Internet. Thus they immediately began the arduous process of bringing the Washington Report’s archive online. It took several years to scan so many articles but now the process has been completed and all 20 years of articles from the magazine are accessible over the Internet. Currently, as soon as the latest issue of the Washington Report is sent out to subscribers, the previous issue, without photographs, is added to the online archive. When the original project started to move the archive online, no one had considered such tragedies as those of Sept. 11. After that date wrmea.com became more important than ever before as hundreds of thousands of people reached out over the Internet to try and find a reason for the attacks. Since August 2001 the website has attracted, at minimum, 800,000 visitors from all over the world; receiving inquiries from the USA, Middle East, Australia, Russia, Japan, Canada and Europe.
Delinda Curtiss Hanley, executive director, Washington Report, has been a strong supporter of the website’s development as she feels it allows the organization to be more accessible to an international audience. Hanley is the daughter of Richard Curtiss. Before she joined the Washington Report’s management team, Hanley spent years working outside the organization, gaining the skills needed to help bring the Washington Report into the 21st century. Hanley is proud that the unbiased information the Washington Report provides has taken on increasing importance as people try to stay more informed about the true situation in the Middle East.
“Many people have come to realize that the information they are being inundated with by many mainstream US media organizations is just a regurgitation of the US government’s point of view,” explained Hanley. “These days there are more people who want the facts so they can develop their own thoughts on the issues.”
When the Washington Report first went online they used a part-time Webmaster, but as the site grew and became more sophisticated it was necessary to hire staff dedicated to the online operation. Emad Fraitekh, a Palestinian-American, is the current Webmaster. Since July 2001, Fraitekh has put all his time and talents into making the website more alive and interactive. Since he began working on wrmea.com, Fraitekh has added features such as a news-feed, updated hourly, to inform readers about current events in the Middle East as they happen.
In order to attract Internet surfers, Fraitekh has signed up three harvesting companies to gather articles published in the Washington Report and place them on other news and information websites.
“This has resulted in a certain number of smiles from our side,” said Hanley. “To their dismay, many Israeli and Zionist websites, as well as mainstream media websites, which subscribe to the harvesting sites for their news feeds, have found themselves carrying articles first published in the Washington Report with titles such as — “Ariel Sharon is a War Criminal.”
The Washington Report’s staff could use a few smiles. While the website has received a lot of fan mail since Sept. 11, plenty of venomous diatribes have come in, too. And, as a result of their new high profile, several Zionist-inspired campaigns have been launched to destroy the website. In the past, the magazine received daily threatening telephone calls, some from a paid harasser. There have also been sporadic attacks from the Zionist Organization of America, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish anti-peace groups in America. However, with the establishment of a powerful website that aims to counteract the Zionist lobby’s lies, adversaries are making greater efforts to bring the website down.
Recently an unidentified hacker took the site’s server offline for about 8 hours. This affected many other businesses that were hosted on the same server. That resulted in wrmea.com creating a more sophisticated protection system, which includes greater redundancy and stronger firewalls. While Hanley knows that no technology yet created can make the site completely immune to attackers it is much more difficult to damage it now. The improved network activity logs will also help in tracing any future attacker.
“We must try to protect the site ourselves in every possible way,” said Hanley. “We have had some experience with how little US law enforcement will do to prosecute those who would harm us. In the past, we complained to the FBI and the Washington D.C. police about the obscene phone calls. Officers came in and took down reports and went through the motions but the harassers were never even brought in for questioning. Through our own investigations we have discovered the names and addresses of some of the criminals who have been threatening us and even though we gave them to the FBI, they chose to do nothing.”
The attacks from the Zionist organizations are not necessarily direct.
“Enemies of wrmea.com have contacted our advertisers,” explained Hanley. “Stock brokerage companies, travel agencies, and other businesses advertising their products or services on wrmea.com were pressured to stop working with us. These companies received numerous telephone calls that made it quite clear that if the company advertised on the Washington Report’s website or allowed wrmea.com to advertise on theirs, they would lose Jewish patronage. While the loss of advertising revenue is disappointing, this campaign proves beyond a doubt that the website is deeply disturbing to the Zionist lobby and its supporters.”
With the help of contributions from people in the United States and abroad who freely use wrmea.com, the Washington Report is convinced that it can continue to plague advocates of Zionism. It is hoped that in coming months the website will be upgraded even further. There are plans to introduce a better search engine that will make the 20 years of articles in the archive more accessible. The group also wants to subscribe to special services that will allow visitors to wrmea.com to send an article or letter of their choice directly to the e-mail of elected officials with a mouse click. Visitors could also use such a service to follow specific issues through the US government processes. According to Hanley once the site has the funds to subscribe to the service, all news relating to specified issues would land on the website automatically. In this way it would be more difficult for the Zionist lobby to push legislation through the US government system without the awareness of those with opposing interests.
“Another area where we would also like to invest is in the purchase of more key words at various search engines,” said Hanley. “It’s almost unbelievable but some of the Zionist groups have paid search engines to make it possible that when people search for information on the Middle East or Palestine, for example, they are directed to the Zionist sites. We need to put funds into this area to counteract the trend and give people a greater chance to be directed to wrmea.com.”
There is a fear that in the future, pressured by the Zionist lobby or by the threat of Zionist attacks, it may be difficult to find hosting services willing to host not only the wrmea.com website but other Middle Eastern websites that oppose the Zionist agenda. In addition to their main site, the Washington Report has a very popular Book Club (middleeastbooks.com), which sells a huge volume of books on the Middle East and Islam. With adequate funds, the Washington Report could purchase their own leased lines, equipment and hire staff to operate their own hosting service. This would enable them to not only ensure the future of their own sites, but they could lease space on their servers to other like-minded companies to recover some of the operating costs.
“Because we are based in Washington, D.C., we constantly receive requests from talented young people who want to do internships with us,” said Hanley. “We would be pleased to have them join us but we must have larger operations and a program in place where their skills could be developed and utilized. Part of such a program would include a more powerful website and network which could be used to reach out with greater influence globally. The Zionist organizations are very well funded. We have accomplished much on a small budget, with a small staff. However, it is apparent that if we want to seriously challenge the Zionist interests we need to make a stronger stand and be more proactive. That takes money.”
The Zionists know this and they are spending millions of dollars in their media campaign to drive a wedge between the United States and many long-term friends in the Arab World. As the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs celebrates its 20th anniversary it is gratifying to see the important work this magazine and its indomitable website have accomplished with a very limited budget, a dedicated staff, and assistance from loyal champions. With additional financial support this plucky website could become a tougher media force to help defeat global promoters of “Israel-right-or-wrong.”
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