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===========================================
The Gaza Flotilla: A World Reichstag Fire
[July 4, 2010]
===========================================
Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the flotilla that tried to break the Gaza blockade is that from the moment of confrontation, virtually all Western media and key political leaders forcefully put forward and acted in accord with the position taken in the following May 31st headline from the Daily Mail, the well-known London tabloid:
“Israeli commandos gun down 19 peace activists in raid on Gaza ships with 28 Britons on board”
-- Daily Mail, 31st May 2010
To 'gun down' is to shoot helpless people dead, without giving them a chance to surrender. So this
headline, and variations of it from Italy to the USA, called
forth the image of gangsters, swarming onto the Mavi Marmara,
guns blazing, shooting to kill.
If the Daily Mail's indictment were true -- for
this is the headline of an indictment, not a news report -- it
would be remarkable that virtually all the media
and most national leaders knew it was true,
and acted on it immediately after the boarding of the Mavi
Marmara.
Why remarkable? First because
this is so different from the speed and intensity with which
they responded to the real horror of the last year in
Iran.
The Vatican, which did not
utter a single word of criticism over the thousands of Iranians whom
the IR (the clerical fascist regime in Iran) has beaten, tortured and
murdered since last June, immediately sent condolences to the
families of the Marmara dead. France and the UK, which
said at first little and then nothing about the Iranian blood
bath, issued ultimatums to Israel. Likewise, Denmark, Spain,
Greece. And so on.
How could they immediately
know
Israel was guilty, and knowing, act with such
hostility towards Israel, and so fast? And given all the
huffing and puffing originating from Turkey's Prime Minister
Erdogan, even if Israel had been guilty, and the Western
establishment miraculously, immediately knew it, why wouldn't
they try to turn down the heat instead of fanning the flames
with statements and actions that might have brought masses of
people into the streets calling for Israel's blood? (As
testimony to ordinary peoples' good sense, all the anti-Israel
demonstrations in Europe fizzled.)
However, the reaction of the
Western establishment is all the more remarkable because the
charges are false.
Since we
are witnessing a thousand-voiced indictment, dominating the mass
media, with relatively little heard from the other side, before
I consider why Western leaders and the media are
behaving so remarkably, let me present some of the evidence that
the charges against Israel are a frame-up.
==========================================
Is the IDF Naval blockade legal?
==========================================
Let us begin with a brief
discussion of the blockade. The claim we have all heard is
that because Israel stopped the flotilla outside territorial
waters, the boarding was illegal. This is not true.
Israel maintains a formally announced blockade of Gaza. As
explained
by the legal
department of the IDF, and confirmed in an unusually fair report
by
Reuters (archived
here),
in a properly run blockade, the blockading party has the right
to seize boats in international waters, once it is clear that
they intend to violate the blockade.
The Gaza blockade, announced January 3, 2009, involves a change in Israel's policy. Whereas
before declaring the blockade, Israel permitted ships carrying
humanitarian aid to dock in Gaza, once the blockade was
announced, Israel was required, under international law
governing blockades, to turn away all vessels, and
was required to do so
effectively. (In other words, as the IDF legal report
states, quoting the international law, "an
ineffective blockade would expire.")
Equally
important, for a blockade to be legal under international law, the blockading power must
arrange for humanitarian aid to be delivered to the blockaded territory,
subject to various measures to guarantee that
the blockaded power does not abuse this requirement.
Israel has posted evidence that, contrary to the flotilla
organizers' claims, they deliver about 15,000 tons of aid (in
addition to heating oil and fuel) to Gaza every week. That evidence can be read
here
and
here.
(I participated in a marathon debate on the blockade on a legal
website. For links, go here.)
==========================================
The Mavi Marmara was owned and controlled by
the IHH, a terrorist
organization
==========================================
The reason for the blockade is obvious: Hamas, a terrorist group, controls
Gaza and has waged war on Israel non-stop, lobbing about 9,000 rockets into southern Israel since
Israel removed all citizens and military forces from Gaza in
2005.
All Hamas' weapons (rockets, mortars, etc.) have to be smuggled in. In November
2009,
Israel found 500 tons of
weapons from the clerical fascist regime in Iran (the IR) on a ship destined for
Hamas and Hezbollah. So
the blockade is based on realistic concerns, although this
seems not to impress some Western leaders, such as Mr. Cameron
of the UK.
Because under international law a blockade
can only legally exist if the blockading country refuses passage
to all ships, the Gaza
flotilla presented Israel with a dilemma. If the IDF permitted
the flotilla to reach Gaza, aside from the secondary concern
that there might be weapons on board, the blockade would be
legally destroyed. But if the IDF stopped the vessels,
Israel would be attacked as a cruel bully. Was this the
intention of the IHH, the Turkish organization that owned three
of the vessels, including the Mavi Marmara, and which was one of
the main organizers of the flotilla? Not according to
Reuters, which claims the IHH is nothing
more than a charity with no grudge against Israel. It just wants
to help people in distress:
"Serkan Nergis, a spokesman for IHH, told Reuters: 'We don't have anything against Israel. Our only aim was to carry aid to the people of Gaza. But for Israel, regardless of your religion or your nationality, if you help the people of Gaza you will be declared a terrorist.' "
But the Israeli government says the IHH is terrorist; and it is not just
the Israeli government.
One of the countries whose
government reacted with alleged outrage against Israel (alleged
because outrage can be real or feigned) was
Denmark. The Danish Foreign Minister and head of Denmark's Conservative
People's Party, Lene Espersen, condemned Israel and demanded the Israeli
ambassador meet and explain himself. FM Espersen then failed to show up
at the meeting, instead sending a subordinate. For this the opposition
Socialists accused her of incompetence. However, to paraphrase the great
Lou Costello, maybe Espersen wasn't incompetent; maybe she was hiding.
Could it be that the Foreign Minister was afraid the Israeli ambassador
might show her a copy of a report on Islamic extremist use of charity
front groups, which the Danish Foreign Ministry commissioned in 2005,
when Espersen was Minister of Justice? According to the Danish report:
"Turkish authorities began their own domestic criminal investigation of IHH as early as December 1997, when sources revealed that leaders of IHH were purchasing automatic weapons from other regional Islamic militant groups. IHH’s bureau in Istanbul was thoroughly searched, and its local officers were arrested. Security forces uncovered an array of disturbing items, including firearms, explosives, bomb-making instructions, and a 'jihad flag.' After analyzing seized IHH documents, Turkish authorities concluded that 'detained members of IHH were going to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya.' "
-- "The Role of Islamic Charities in International Terrorist Recruitment and Financing," Danish Institute for International Studies, DIIS, pp.14-15. The PDF file can be accessed here and is archived here.
On June 7, the main German public TV station, ARD, did an investigative report on the flotilla. Below is a video of that program, with English subtitles. The group referred to in the video, Die Linke, is a fairly large German party that pays lip service to some traditional left wing ideas while supporting Islamic political extremism.
So, the Turkish component of the flotilla was recruited from Turkish fascist circles, people who believe not only in political Islam but "the Fuehrer principle," which puts them in the same camp as the German neo-Nazi party, the NPD; and a flotilla participant from Bundestag faction of Die Linke says the organizer of the supposedly left-wing component of the flotilla was Pax Christi, the main Vatican organization dealing with the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Turkish flotilla supporters sang: "Oh you Jews, the army of Mohammad is coming."
What a stew. Shades of the 1930s, rebroadcast as a tragic farce.
==========================================
Who attacked whom?
==========================================
The video below makes clear that, contrary to most media, the
IDF soldiers
did not initiate the use of force. They were attacked by a lynch
mob.
As is evident from the video above, the IDF Navy soldiers were
beaten with steel poles, knifed and thrown from deck to deck and
overboard; this particular video does not show that they were
also shot at and attacked with stun grenades and fire bombs.
Only after lethal attack did they defend themselves.
In an all-too-rare moment of
UK media sanity, Channel 4 (BBC) broadcast a British military expert's
analysis of some of the IDF footage. Here is a video of
his remarks, which were kept inordinately brief by the
interviewer:
The video
below, consisting of film shot by one of the passengers further documents that lethal weapons were used in the attempted
lynching of the soldiers:
Below is a video of an Israeli Channel 2 TV news broadcast, using film shot by a passenger on the Mavi Marmara. It shows an IDF Naval soldier being beaten with steel clubs, then stabbed. The news broadcaster does a replay of the knifing, because it happens very quickly and is easy to miss:
Al Jazeera, which, by the way, is a creation of the BBC, not Arab states, played a big role in the anti-Israel media attack, complete with a TV crew broadcasting from the Mavi Marmara. One Al Jazeera cameraman provided a bit of unwitting although exquisite comic relief, which was, rather stupidly, posted on the Al Jazeera web page featuring supposed minute-by-minute live coverage of the capture of the Mavi Marmara. As far as I know its significance has until now gone unappreciated; you saw it first on Emperor's Clothes.
Please note: all the brackets in the text are from Al Jazeera. TENC contributed only the notation, "sic!"
[Excerpt from Al Jazeera page starts here.]
11:45am: Issam Zaatar, an Al Jazeera cameraman -- one of several Al Jazeera staff who were on board the flotilla -- spoke with our Arabic channel earlier this morning about the Israeli raid. He describes the moments after commandos landed on the ship:
I was filming, he [an Israeli solider (sic!)] ran after me with an electric stick [stun gun]. He could not catch me. One of his colleagues hit my hand from behind with a stick [stun gun]. My camera fell down. He ran to crush the camera with his feet. I told him, don’t break my camera. If you want the tapes, I will give them to you. I told him these are media equipment. They had no limits. They used rubber bullets. They used tear bombs. It was an unbelievable scene.
[Excerpt from Al Jazeera page starts here.]
The story about the camera, expounded in
excessive, not to say breathless detail, has all the earmarks of
the melodramatic lie. Surrounded by a violent sea of
attackers, as shown in the IDF video
above,
why would two -- not one but two -- of the handful of besieged
soldiers devote their time to getting hold of and destroying
this guy's camera? If their motive were to prevent the
cameraman from filming scenes of carnage, why not use some
carnage on him, rather than this Keystone Cops mock fight, first
trying to knock the camera out of his hands with stun guns, then
jumping up and down on the thing -- and this while a mob was
beating them with steel poles? ========================================== [Excerpt from Al Jazeera starts here]
The Israeli military said four soldiers had been wounded and claimed
troops opened fire after "demonstrators onboard attacked the IDF Naval
personnel with live fire and light weaponry including knives and clubs".
[Excerpt from Al Jazeera ends here] OK, so a flat-out disagreement; can we tell who is
lying? Quite easily, actually. Because while telling Westerners
that the IDF massacred helpless peaceniks, the IHH organizers wanted to
tell their supporters on the Turkish fascist right that the flotilla passengers had crushed
the evil Jews. To that end, the IHH gave the Turkish paper
Hurriyet a number of photos. Here is the caption that accompanied
the photos in Hurriyet's English edition:
(You can view all nine pictures
here or
here.)
==========================================
However, aside from the preposterousness of the camera
battle, there is something worth noting about Mr. Zaatar's account.
This poor character, trying hard to do his job (i.e., to
convince people that the IDF behaved viciously), had exhausted his imagination in creating
the epic of the camera, and now had to fall back on the truth: rubber
bullets and tear gas! In other words, as reported on
Al
Jazeera, the IDF is accused of being as vicious as -- are
you ready? -- the Toronto police at the G20 demonstrations in June, 2010.
Except for these two differences: 1) as far as I know, small
groups of Toronto police were never ambushed by hundreds of
members of a fanatical lynch mob, armed with knives, steel
poles, guns, chains and stun grenades. And 2) contrary to Mr.
Zaatar, the IDF men didn't use rubber bullets. As noted by the
British military analyst (above) the soldiers
rappelled down onto the deck mainly armed with paintball guns.
The ultimate proof that the charges against the IDF are lies
==========================================
On May 31, the day the flotilla was captured, Al Jazeera,
the flotilla media participant, reported:
Free Gaza Movement, the organisers of the flotilla, however, said the
troops opened fire as soon as they stormed the convoy.
Our correspondent said that a white surrender flag was raised from the
ship and there was no live fire coming from the passengers.
And here are a few of the pictures:
Note the two characters in
the first picture, armed with steel pipes, exactly as the IDF
said they were. Do they look like peace demonstrators or
thugs?
Note the two Israeli
soldiers, wounded and being shoved/dragged downstairs.
Now really, if the IDF soldiers had
rappelled down with automatic rifles blazing, as Al Jazeera claims, does
anyone believe the
flotilla passengers would have been able to wound and capture
these soldiers? And remember, these pictures were supplied
by the IHH, not the IDF.
How did the nine Mavi Marmara
passengers die?
==========================================
The
soldiers had every right to fire their sidearms -- the only real
weapons they carried -- in self-defense.
However, since mob-members were firing at the soldiers; since it
was night time; and since mob-members were surging all around
the soldiers, it is certainly possible that some mob members
were accidentally shot by their own people.
And the IHH terrorists may have shot some people
whom they
brought on the voyage for the precise purpose, unbeknownst to the chosen
victims, of murdering them
if their deaths could be blamed on Israel.
Lest you think this
is an extreme accusation, consider: the
IHH is a long-established terrorist organization; indeed,
it is a coordinator of terror. (See p. 14 of this
link,
which is archived
here.) Terrorists and those using them
for propaganda purposes routinely treat people as expendable in
pursuit of propaganda gains, including by sending children
and mentally disturbed
adults on suicide missions.
Obviously, when such people are sent on suicide missions, even if they believe they are
doing it 'willingly' (perhaps because they have been told they
will have wonderful toys and candy and no school or, if they are
adults, because they have been convinced this is the only way to
amount to something), they are in fact being murdered by the
people who sent them. So why not be more direct and
simply murder a few of the more delusionary followers, then reap
propaganda gains by saying Israel did it?
By way of illustrating the
mindset of terrorist leaders, listen to the
discussion on the video below, taken
from a January 15, 2002 Palestinian Authority TV (PATV) interview
with Yasar Arafat. The
interviewer asks Arafat what message he wants to give children:
If the IHH killed some of its supporters -- perhaps picking
people from countries where the deaths would yield maximum
propaganda effect -- why would that be more horrifying than, for
example,
Arafat using the TV to recruit children to die for the propaganda effect?
And remember, Arafat was supposedly the
moderate terrorist -- some oxymoron, eh?
The IHH is close to Hamas and to the Islamist regime that
controls Iran (IR). Nobody calls them moderate.
Perhaps IHH organizers would not have needed to keep their
murderous intentions secret from all the chosen victims. Perhaps
some would have been happy to be killed for propaganda. Below is a video
featuring film footage that the IDF removed from one of the cameras
collected from passengers arrested on the Mavi Marmara.
Note how calmly this so-called "peace activist" tells
the interviewer, apparently from PressTV, that he hopes that on
this trip he will be lucky enough to be a Shahid, i.e., to die
for Islam:
"Khaibar is the name of the last Jewish village defeated by Muhammad's army in 628. Many Jews were killed in that battle, which marked the end of Jewish presence in Arabia. There are Muslims who see that as a precursor to future wars against Jews. At gatherings and rallies of extremists, this chant is often heard as a threat to Jews to expect to be defeated and killed again by Muslims."
-- "Gaza flotilla participants chanted Islamic battle cry invoking killing of Jews and called for Martyrdom," PMW
Two points about the video above:
A) While Al Jazeera broadcast this message in Arabic,
it told English-speaking audiences that the Mavi Marmara
passengers were peace activists.
B) Probably some or all the people in the video above,
"enthusiastically" (as the Al Jazeera reporter cheerfully puts
it) screaming for Jewish blood, would later be among those
trying to lynch the Israeli soldiers. And obviously Al
Jazeera reporters and flotilla spokespersons like Greta
Berlin are lying cynically when they depict the people on the
Mavi Marmara as just plain ol' folksy peaceniks:
" 'This is not a confrontation, this is a massacre. We have no weapons. We are standing there with our backpacks and jeans and we have been attacked, it’s not the other way around. ' "
[My emphasis. -- J.I.]
-- Greta Berlin, interviewed by France 24
Going back to the video
just before the last one, as you listened to that gentleman
saying that he hoped his luck would improve so he finally might die
for Islam, did it occur to you how difficult it must have been for those IDF
soldiers, rappelling into a crowd of homicidal maniacs, who were armed
with lethal weapons and worshipped death?
And did you consider that the surviving maniacs are now enjoying
the out-of-body experience of being transformed
into suffering heroes of the Western world, so that now they
are not only maniacs; they are maniacs with extravagantly
swelled heads?
By staging this ambush of Navy
soldiers who
thought they were just conducting a routine police
action (hence their main weapons were paintball guns), the IHH wanted to achieve one of two goals:
1)
Either to get Israel to agree, under pressure, not
to block ships bound for Gaza, thus ending
the blockade (the organizers' stated goal). This would allow
Hamas to ship in strategic weapons that are too big and heavy to
be smuggled in via tunnels from Egypt, such as medium-range
missiles from Iran. A bad defeat for Israel, forcing it either to go
into Gaza and destroy Hamas once and for all, or risk the
destruction of population centers.
2) Or, if Israel was not
intimidated by the threat of bad publicity from the all-to-eager
international media, and did board the ships, the IHH planned to a) sacrifice some of
the disturbed lambs they had brought from various countries and
b) attack the soldiers boarding the Mavi Marmara with lethal violence,
pressing the
soldiers to put down
their paintball guns and pull their handguns to defend themselves,
so that whatever deaths
occurred (maybe from the soldiers defending themselves, and
maybe some or all from IHH 'friendly' fire) could be presented to the
very receptive international media and Western leaders as an
unprovoked massacre of peaceniks. You know, people in jeans, carrying
backpacks.
This
second scenario, in which Israel enforced the blockade, has
occurred. This was used by Turkish PM Erdogan
(head of the extremist AK Party, whom George W. Bush helped make Prime
Minister of Turkey) to hit the Turkish secular majority (Erdogan
is still prime minister, but he has done increasingly poorly at
the polls) over the head with
the stick of supposed Israeli misdeeds, pressuring the
secular-oriented Turkish military to take the undesired step of
confronting Israel.
In general, the current hysterical media campaign against Israel
has the goal of putting pressure on forces
everywhere that oppose Islamism, the Islamic version of clerical
fascism. The idea is to intimidate them into denouncing Israel,
for fear that otherwise they will be isolated. In fact, if they
denounce Israel they would only strengthen
their deadliest enemies.
And it has the specific goal of creating a false
impression of balance between the IR butchers and Israel, thus
putting a fresh coat
of whitewash on the image of clerical fascism,
so tarnished by the IR's brutal repression of the Iranian democracy
struggle. The underlying message
of the current media onslaught is: "See? Both sides are bad, but the Israelis are
so much worse."
This is precisely how the Western media
attacked the Krajina and Bosnian Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims
who were loyal to Yugoslavia, from 1992 to 1996. And, by the way,
according to a 1996 CIA report (see scanned excerpt from CIA
document at bottom of
this
page), the IHH had offices in Sarajevo (in Bosnia), an
important headquarters for the attack on Yugoslavia, and Zagreb, capital of Croatia, the main center of that
attack.
It is my hypothesis that the
IHH
(see p. 14 of this
document) picked this particular time -- shortly before June
12th, the first anniversary of the start of the great Iranian
rebellion -- in the hope of demoralizing the Iranian rebels and
diverting public attention from the monstrous repression in
Iran. If that is the case, perhaps the IHH reached the
blockade area at the end of May instead of a couple of days
before June 12th due to incompetence.
================================================
Does Israel Fulfill its
Obligation to Deliver Aid?
================================================
IDF unloads material from the flotilla,
loads it onto trucks, and attempts to deliver it in Gaza
Before
boarding the Mavi Marmara, the
IDF contacted
it by radio, asking it to dock in Israel
and stating that the IDF would deliver all legitimate aid
material to Gaza, as required under international law governing
naval blockades, and offering, as is not required, to let flotilla personnel
witness the delivery. The
organizers refused.
Despite the subsequent attempt
to lynch the IDF soldiers, Israel, as shown in the video above,
unloaded the aid material, loaded it on trucks, and attempted to
deliver it. And then? Then the trucks
were turned back by Hamas.
First the Mavi Marmara refuses to let the IDF deliver the aid by land, even though they
only came to
Gaza to help the people, right? And then Hamas rejects
the aid. So now, who did you say was keeping aid out of Gaza?
================================================
How much aid gets into Gaza?
================================================
Regarding aid
delivery, based on
official reports, from May 23-27,
2010, Israel moved an average of 3275
tons of aid per day into Gaza; this
apart from cooking and diesel fuels. It is all free (for the Gazans) including
food from Israel, which country has plenty of poor citizens who could use that food. In addition, Israel provides most of
Gaza's electricity and cares for Gazans at its top-notch hospitals
(an average of 70 people
per day from May 23-27), and again, it is all free. Gazans may be the most aided people on earth.
However, lest you think Gaza knows how to receive but not to
give, you should know that Gaza sends Israel two things:
missiles and terrorists. Two terrorists infiltrated last
week (they got into a firefight with IDF troops, which they
lost) and Gaza terrorists fired a rocket that exploded in the Western Negev
area.
Israel spends huge sums on aid for Gaza even though the Gaza 'government' is
at war
with Israel, firing about 10,000 rockets, plus mortars, into
southern Israel since 2005. (That was the year that the Israeli
government succumbed to U.S. pressure and forced all Jews to
leave Gaza.)
Is it unreasonable
that Israel would act to prevent Hamas from smuggling in
weapons, which Hamas attempts to do daily? Weapons which will kill,
maim or traumatize Israeli civilians?
================================================
And now, a word on Cameron & Clegg
================================================
The UK's
Cameron-Clegg
government has been among Israel harshest attackers this past
week.
Would Messrs. Cameron & Clegg pay for an expensive operation to
aid a neighboring territory whose 'government' was lobbing thousands of rockets
plus infiltrating terrorists into southern England? It sounds like a joke,
does it not? But it is exactly what Israel is doing, in
observance of the international law governing blockades.
==========================================
If the UK were being attacked by a terrorist-controlled statelet such as Gaza, would Cameron & Clegg
allow such
a territory to trade freely, knowing that the only thing the terrorists
were interested in trading was strategic weapons from Iran? Not if they cared about the UK's continued existence. Yet Prime Minister Cameron, head
of the UK's Conservative Party, has demanded that Israel "open
up Gaza" -- his exact
words -- indicating that he is not troubled about Israel's
continued existence.
I suppose I should not be
amazed. Yet, I am amazed.
-- Jared
Israel
Editor, Emperor's Clothes
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