Sim-O

Well, bugger me. We’ve heard nothing from The Savior of the Middle East for months and then what a coincidence, up he pops just after Isreal board a civilian boat and shoot some people, with an idea about getting stuff through to Gaza.

Nice timing Tony.

The Daily Mail reports that the activists from the Gaza Aid Flotilla have been returned to Turkey, welcomed by cheering supporters.

But…

Their arrival was marred by Israel’s decision to drop plans to prosecute dozens of pro-Palestinian activists – reportedly sent to attack Israeli forces on the Mavi Marmara on Monday – involved blockade, opting instead to deport them.

Eh?

Lenins’ Tomb…

[R]ecall that for weeks the Israeli state has been declaring that the aid flotilla constitutes a violent attack on Israeli sovereignty, though Israel has no sovereign right to police the borders of Gaza. They claimed that the convoy was bringing assistance to terrorists, and warned that it was being funded by the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood. They claim that such aid vessels help keep Hamas in power and Gilad Shalit (who he?) locked up. They claim that the convoy, rather than the blockade itself, constitutes a violation of international law. Israel’s ability to exhale falsehoods and absurdities seamlessly, poker-faced, and then to suddenly and without missing a beat alter its story when it becomes clear that not even its loyalist drones are gullible enough to believe it, is not unique but it has a unique pedigree. For the Israeli state is singular in its self-righteousness. This is built in to official doctrine and practise, entrenched in its forms of governmentality. It is always the victim, no matter what it’s doing today – whether slaughtering refugees in Sabra and Shatilla, or murdering sleeping families in Dahiya, from Nakba to Cast Lead – it is always on the precipice of being exterminated by a new wave of Arab Nazis. Given this, any effort to undermine its ‘defensive’ actions is an attack not only on its expansive notions of sovereignty, but on the ‘Jewish state’.

By the logic of Israel, any abridgment of its right to murder Palestinians constitutes an act of antisemitism, an existential attack on the Jewish people, whom they represent by proxy. Its job, then, is to do whatever it deems fit in discouraging and punishing said ‘antisemites’ while aggressively retailing whatever they do to an increasingly hostile world which, at any rate, they insist is driven by exterminationist antisemitism anyway. If the two ends – the violent preservation of Israeli supremacy in the Middle East, and the global PR – increasingly come into conflict, this is only because of a ‘new antisemitism’, not because of anything Israel actually does.

Read the whole thing.

How I see it.

A gang of men break into a house, the owner of the house goes at the intruders with whatever comes to hand, a broom handle maybe or a kitchen knife, and beats the fuck out of the intruders. The intruders are armed and start shooting, killing the owner and injuring other memebers of the household.

Whose side are you on?

For a more informed take on the situation, Craig Murray…

Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place
on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.

There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.

Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.

Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.

In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

antiwar.com:

After ordering a cameraman to turn off his camera, Israeli Ambassador to Australia Yuval Rotem engaged in a very frank discussion about the recent Israeli war in the Gaza Strip, calling it “a preintroduction” to an attack on Iran that Israel apparently expects within the year.

Before the camera was turned off, Ambassador Rotem said “the best thing to do is to have a very open dialogue if there are no reporters or journalists here,” adding “I am far more reserved in the way I am saying my things (on camera).” Unbeknownst to him however Sarah Cummings, a reporter for Australia’s Seven News service, was actually in attendance at the meeting after having been “accidentally” invited.

Israel has repeatedly threatened to attack Iran, and while its officials have repeatedly attempted to tie the Iranian government to its war on the Gaza Strip this is the first time one of their officials has publicly (if inadvertently so) suggested that the attack on the strip was a warm-up to its long talked about attack on Iran.

Via

Adbusters:

On February 29 last year the BBC’s website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a ‘holocaust’ on Gaza. Headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust,’” the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster.’” (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai’s comments). An Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s criminal behaviour. With the ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militants’ instead.

One could argue that the BBC’s radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel lobby’s well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as I will show in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel’s image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship. To establish evidence of the BBC’s journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict BBC’s coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. More so than the quantitative bias – which was meticulously established by the Glasgow University Media Group in their study Bad News from Israel – it is the qualitative tilt that obscures the reality of the situation. This is often achieved by engendering a false parity by stretching the notion of journalistic balance to encompass power, culpability and legitimacy as well. The present conflict is no exception.

Read the rest

Related: Beau Bo D’Or – The BBC reinforces the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza

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Stop the War Coalition
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STOP THE WAR WEBSITE AND EMAIL ATTACKED

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