In the story Al-Jazeera — a Threat to Western Media, Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for the web site for Al-Jazeerah, one of the most popular and trusted news networks of the Arab World, states the following:

As I write, the Al-Jazeera website has been down for three days and few here doubt that the provenance of the attack is the Pentagon. Meanwhile, our hosting company, the US-based DataPipe, has terminated our contract after lobbying by other clients whose websites have been brought down by the hacking.

For those of you without a dictionary handy, provenance means source or origin.

That's right. Faisal Bodi, a senior editor for the web site for Al-Jazeerah, is claiming in the Guardian (syndicated in the Arab News and elsewhere), that the Pentagon is the source/origin of the crash of Al-Jazeerah's web site.

Not a massive amount of traffic generated by worldwide publicity.
Not independent hackers working on their own despite warnings by the Pentagon not to.
Not incompetent web managers failing to budget and implement the necessary server space, bandwidth, or security measures.
Not this latest Microsoft server security hole. (Are they running on Windows servers?)

That's right. It had to have been The Pentagon.

I, for one, am stunned at this claim. Shocked. Gobsmacked. Beside myself and kicking myself silly, even. For once, an individual speaking on behalf of the Arabic press has failed to blame the Jews for something.

Maybe peace isn't so far off after all?