Having previously proven himself completely incapable of grasping the simplest of scientific theories, the serial gobshite and religious nutter Galloway has again demonstrated that while he may be as cunning as a shithouse rat, he is not cut out for brain-work.

Not only do we have our young people organising this meeting, we have them filming it, and this will be on Youtube before many hours have passed. And by the internet they can repair the cables which have mysteriously been cut, almost entirely throughout the Arab and Muslim world–internet cables that should should withstand earthquakes [a knowing smirk] have been cut–three! four! of them in the last week. Virtually all of the Arab world is without internet this evening–Iran is completely internet free. I wonder if something is going on, I wonder if they’re planning something for the future. But when those cables are repaired, and through the internet wing the messages of this great meeting here today … (partial transcript from Respect meeting 2 February 2008).

Who are ‘they’ George? A crack team of perfidious assault-diving mohalim? Sinister CIA ‘cable-splicers’?

In the circumstances, Occam’s izmel is as useful as ever. Optical fibre cables are flexible, but will fail if cut (that much is self evident) or bent too sharply. There were massive storms in the area at the time the first two cables were damaged. Not only anchors, but trailing trawler cables, shifting rocks and other large objects of greater density than sea water–things fall off ships all the time–can cause submarine fibreoptic cables to break. Subsequently, further problems were caused in the Gulf by power failures, affecting internet traffic and telephony. So was Iran ‘completely internet free’? Uruknet–no friend of the United States or the ‘Entity’–reports that while there was around 20% degredation in internet services, Iran was most emphatically not ‘disconnected’:

It’s said that “the first casualty of war is truth.” Something similar can probably be said with regard to catastrophic failures. Truth might not be first, but it is a very close second.

Ah yes, but the Zionist Entity’s traffic was unaffected! A benefit arising as an unintended consequence of anti-Semitism. Because Israel’s neighbours will not allow them to rent bandwidth on the damaged SeaMeWe4 or FLAG Europe-Asia cables, Israel is connected via the MedNautilus cable which is owned by Spanish telco Telefonica. The disruptions have not been confined to the Middle East either, as outages have had a serious impact on communications with data processing–’backend’–services and call centres in India. The notion that ‘they’ would throw a spanner in the wheels of international capital as a ’stunt’ runs counter to any serious analysis of imperialism–as the losses to communications and financial services greatly outweigh the sabre-rattling value of any such stunt.

We are left with nothing but the paranoid ranting of an oleaginous and self-serving old crank.