Tuesday, January 31, 2006
CyberHamas
Hello, good morning and welcome to Cybersurf – your weekly look at what’s new on the Internet. I am your Cybershost – Steven Lang
The biggest international news event of the past week has been the astonishing victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. Not even the movement itself expected to do as well as it did – and the surprise win combined with the illness of the Israeli Prime Minister has put yet another convoluted twirl into the normally hazardous Israeli/Palestinian relations.
Now if you would like to read up on how the latest events are likely to impact on the Middle East – I have a few very interesting sites coming up.
First of all I tried to find the official results of last week's elections and thought I'd try the site of the Palestinian National authority located at www.pna.gov.ps – not much luck there – while the site is quite extensive it does not appear to be regularly maintained and when I typed in “elections” in the search field I only found the results of the 1996 vote.
\nDigging around some more I found the Central Elections Commission Palestine – which appears to be the authority that manages local elections – something like our Independent Electoral Commission – at the following address: \nwww.elections.ps. \n \nThis site had just about everything you wanted to know about elections in Palestine – including turnout figures for last week\'s voting – but it did not have the full results.\n\n \nHowever, I was able to find full results in anther web site known as the electronic intifada – to get to this site, type in electronicintifada dot net that is electronic intifada one word\n dot net. \n \nThere is a very official looking scan of a document that appears to contain the official results – and I have no reason to believe that\n I can\'t say. ",1]
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Digging around some more I found the Central Elections Commission Palestine – which appears to be the authority that manages local elections – something like our Independent Electoral Commission – at the following address: www.elections.ps.
This site had just about everything you wanted to know about elections in Palestine – including turnout figures for last week's voting – but it did not have the full results – yet!.
However, I was able to find full results in another web site known as the electronic intifada – to get to this site, type in electronicintifada dot net that is electronicintifada - one word - dot net.
There is a scan of a very official looking document that appears to contain the official results – and I have no reason to believe that the results are anything but official.
Electronicintifada dot net is a very interesting site that carries far more useful information and interesting content than the official PNA site. If you wish to understand the thinking behind the intifada this site is a must.
Finding out more about Hamas online was not very difficult provided you take American and Israeli sites at face value – but if you want to read about HAmas from a Hamas point of view it is not that easy; especially if you are Arabic challenged.
However, I did eventually find an English language site called hamasonline.org – it appears to be the real McCoy – so to speak – and it is the official Hamas site but it has not been very well maintained.
In fact, in a rather bizarre turn of events – while still on the Hamasonline.org site I clicked on a button called “newsletter” and it took me to another site called hamasonline dot com that had a category for Jewish singles. How weird is that?
At that point my overheated grey matter just crashed, so this is a good point to end Cybersurf this frisky Monday morning.
Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Monday for more on the best of the Web
The biggest international news event of the past week has been the astonishing victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections. Not even the movement itself expected to do as well as it did – and the surprise win combined with the illness of the Israeli Prime Minister has put yet another convoluted twirl into the normally hazardous Israeli/Palestinian relations.
Now if you would like to read up on how the latest events are likely to impact on the Middle East – I have a few very interesting sites coming up.
First of all I tried to find the official results of last week's elections and thought I'd try the site of the Palestinian National authority located at www.pna.gov.ps – not much luck there – while the site is quite extensive it does not appear to be regularly maintained and when I typed in “elections” in the search field I only found the results of the 1996 vote.
\nDigging around some more I found the Central Elections Commission Palestine – which appears to be the authority that manages local elections – something like our Independent Electoral Commission – at the following address: \nwww.elections.ps. \n \nThis site had just about everything you wanted to know about elections in Palestine – including turnout figures for last week\'s voting – but it did not have the full results.\n\n \nHowever, I was able to find full results in anther web site known as the electronic intifada – to get to this site, type in electronicintifada dot net that is electronic intifada one word\n dot net. \n \nThere is a very official looking scan of a document that appears to contain the official results – and I have no reason to believe that\n I can\'t say. ",1]
);
//-->
Digging around some more I found the Central Elections Commission Palestine – which appears to be the authority that manages local elections – something like our Independent Electoral Commission – at the following address: www.elections.ps.
This site had just about everything you wanted to know about elections in Palestine – including turnout figures for last week's voting – but it did not have the full results – yet!.
However, I was able to find full results in another web site known as the electronic intifada – to get to this site, type in electronicintifada dot net that is electronicintifada - one word - dot net.
There is a scan of a very official looking document that appears to contain the official results – and I have no reason to believe that the results are anything but official.
Electronicintifada dot net is a very interesting site that carries far more useful information and interesting content than the official PNA site. If you wish to understand the thinking behind the intifada this site is a must.
Finding out more about Hamas online was not very difficult provided you take American and Israeli sites at face value – but if you want to read about HAmas from a Hamas point of view it is not that easy; especially if you are Arabic challenged.
However, I did eventually find an English language site called hamasonline.org – it appears to be the real McCoy – so to speak – and it is the official Hamas site but it has not been very well maintained.
In fact, in a rather bizarre turn of events – while still on the Hamasonline.org site I clicked on a button called “newsletter” and it took me to another site called hamasonline dot com that had a category for Jewish singles. How weird is that?
At that point my overheated grey matter just crashed, so this is a good point to end Cybersurf this frisky Monday morning.
Thanks for listening and please tune in again next Monday for more on the best of the Web
