Of all the horrible and bizarre things to come out of Iraq, this has got to be one of the strangest I've seen (from the New York Times, typos preserved):

In an Internet posting, an insurgent group, the Victorious Army Group, set a Jan. 15 deadline for a contest to design its Web site "worthy of the group's reputation and the reputation of the jihad and the mujahideen," according to a translation provided on Saturday by the SITE Institute, which monitors jihadist Web site. The winner of the contest is promised "Allah's blessings" and the opportunity to fire three long-range rockets at an American military base "by pressing one button with his blessed hands."

I wonder if they also are looking for someone to write blessed HTML. Perhaps pure-of-heart javascript? Does including CSS hacks for proper IE display make one an American sympathizer? How totally, completely weird.

Actually, there are some interesting questions here. When everything one does is infused with religious fervor, how can one even begin to use technology given that virtually all of it is secular (and either Western or northeast Asian) in origin? Do they know that using AIM means they are probably utilizing code written for ICQ, a instant messaging product purchased by AOL a few years ago but developed by an Israeli company?