For the first time since the war in 1973, Israel has fired on Syrian territory. As is usually the case, the incident provoking the attack is unclear: the initial attack might have been fired by the Syrian army or by the rebels. Regardless of the source, the opening of armed hostilities in a conflict already joined by Lebanon and Turkey is a very destabilizing event.
Another European state, Poland, has experienced an outbreak of right-wing violence. In a parade marking Polish Independence Day, some protesters became violent and chanted anti-Jewish slogans. Parts of Polish society are deeply conservative, and some Poles feel quite threatened by the Polish accession to the EU. The right-wing will always have strong local roots even if some of the right-wing themes are shared across borders.
We live in a world of cyberwarfare, but we never hear about the computer attacks the occur on a daily basis against virtually all governments and corporations. The US and Israel developed a computer virus called Stuxnet to disrupt the computers in Iran’s nuclear program, and, at the time, it was viewed as a peaceful solution to a serious problem. However, Stuxnet has made it into the wild, and it now appears to be infecting many non-Iranian computers. I’m not sure how the US and Israel believed that such a consequence was not going to happen, but both states sowed the wind and are soon to reap the whirlwind.
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