Yet another NY Times pro-Israel propoganda piece

I almost did a spit-take with my coffee while perusing the New York Times this morning.  For a split second, the following headline provided a glimmer of hope that perhaps the editors were asleep at the switch.

Trapped by Gaza Blockade, Locked in Despair

Wow!  That headline does look promising.  Did the New York Times actually call out Israel for its murderous apartheid policies?  Did they really allow a story to slip through the cracks that didn’t completely ignore the fact that Israel has been illegally occupying Palestinian land for over 60 years, committing war crimes, running over peaceful protesters with bulldozers and shooting them in the face with high velocity tear gas canisters, storming humanitarian aid ships with guns blazing in the dead of night, and all sorts of other jollity?

Really???

Nope.

As I said here:

“Poor Israel.  Nobody understands that they have no choice but to create a walled ghetto for the Palestinians, flatten their buildings, choke off their supplies, label them as “terrorists” when they fight back, and then attack civilian ships in international waters as they attempt to deliver humanitarian aid, killing as many as…   Oh, why even bother to count?  They’re just a bunch of antisemitic radical activists anyway.  They got what they deserved, right?”

See the most recent New York Times propaganda piece below in its entirety.   My comments are bracketed in red…

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN and ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 13, 2010

GAZA CITY — The women were bleary-eyed, their voices weak, their hands red and calloused. How could they be expected to cook and clean without water or electricity? What could they do in homes that were dark and hot all day? How could they cope with husbands who had not worked for years and children who were angry and aimless?

[This is a good start.  At least we’re not being told that the Palestinian women were sewing razor blades into yarmulkes.]

Sitting with eight other women at a stress clinic, Jamalat Wadi, 28, tried to listen to the mental health worker. But she could not contain herself. She has eight children, and her unemployed husband spends his days on sedatives.

[Uh oh.  Eight kids and an unemployed husband?  So she’s basically a sex maniac, married to a dead beat.]

“Our husbands don’t work, my kids are not in school, I get nervous, I yell at them, I cry, I fight with my husband,” she blurted. “My husband starts fighting with us and then he cries: ‘What am I going to do? What can I do?’ ”

The others knew exactly what she meant.

The Palestinians of Gaza, most of them descended from refugees of the 1948 war that created Israel, [No details about this war.  It just, you know … happened, and Israel was just sort of created … like magic!] have lived through decades of conflict and confrontation. Their scars have accumulated like layers of sedimentary rock, each marking a different crisis — homelessness, occupation, war, dependency.

Today, however, two developments have conspired to turn a difficult life into a new torment: a three-year blockade by Israel and Egypt [Why the blockade?  Is it legal?] that has locked them in the small enclave [Ghetto] and crushed what there was of a formal local economy; and the bitter rivalry between Palestinian factions, which has undermined identity and purpose, divided families and caused a severe shortage of electricity in the middle of summer.  [The electricity shortage is THEIR fault, because the Arabs can’t even play nice with other Arabs, for Pete’s sake.]

There are plenty of things to buy in Gaza; goods are brought over the border or smuggled through the tunnels with Egypt. That is not the problem.  [See?  There’s PLENTY of stuff to buy.  Sure, Israel’s illegal blockade prevents lots of important stuff from reaching Gaza, but those shifty Arabs are just smuggling it in through tunnels anyway.  By the way, smugglers can’t be trusted.  Pretty soon they’ll be using those tunnels to smuggle weapons.  Because smugglers are bad people.   And don’t forget that they just want to kill lots of Israelis for no good reason whatsoever.]

In fact, talk about food and people here get angry because it implies that their struggle is over subsistence rather than quality of life. The issue is not hunger. It is idleness, uncertainty and despair.  [Call the Palestinians anything you want, but never call them late for dinner.  Food and water aren’t the problem, it’s the boredom brought on by their previously mentioned shiftlessness.  Smuggling does provide some much-needed excitement, but the prospect of getting caught is stressful, and it’s really more like temping than full-time work.]

Any discussion of Gaza’s travails is part of a charged political debate. No humanitarian crisis? That is an Israeli talking point, people here will say, aimed at making the world forget Israel’s misdeeds. Palestinians trapped with no future? They are worse off in Lebanon, others respond, where their “Arab brothers” bar them from buying property and working in most professions.  [Arabs treat Arabs even worse than the Israelis do.  Some unnamed persons apparently said so.  Leave Israel alone, you haters!]

But the situation is certainly dire. Scores of interviews and hours spent in people’s homes over a dozen consecutive days here produced a portrait of a fractured and despondent society unable to imagine a decent future for itself as it plunges into listless desperation and radicalization. [Radical = terrorist.]

It seems most unlikely that either a Palestinian state or any kind of Middle East peace can emerge without substantial change here. Gaza, on almost every level, is stuck.

Disunity

A main road was blocked off and a stage set up for a rally protesting the electricity shortage. Speakers shook nearby windows with the anthems of Hamas, the Islamist party that has held power [They were democratically ELECTED, but let’s not quibble] here for the past three years. Boys in military camouflage goose-stepped.  [You know, like Nazis!] Young men carried posters of a man with vampire teeth biting into a bloodied baby. 

The vampire was not Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. It was Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.  [If a Palestinian leader is a vampire, then by contrast, Netanyahu must be a good guy who’s simply protecting his people from terrorist heathens.  Haven’t you figured out how this works yet?]

“We stand today in this furious night to express our intense anger toward this damned policy by the illegitimate so-called Fayyad government,” Ismail Radwan, a Hamas official, shouted.

As if the Palestinian people did not have enough trouble, they have not one government but two, the Fatah-dominated one in the West Bank city of Ramallah and the Hamas one here. The antagonism between them offers a depth of rivalry and rage that shows no sign of abating.  [This division probably has nothing to do with the fact that they’ve been geographically separated by the state of Israel, which, as we noted earlier, just magically came into existence in 1948, to the detriment of absolutely nobody.]

Its latest victim is electricity for Gaza, part of which is supplied by Israel and paid for by the West Bank government, which is partly reimbursed by Hamas. But the West Bank says that Hamas is not paying enough so it has held off paying Israel, which has halted delivery.

“They are lining their pockets and they are part of the siege,” asserted Dr. Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader and a surgeon, speaking of the West Bank government. “There will be no reconciliation.”  [Again, someone else is bad, so Israel is off the hook.  It’s just those damn self-hating Arabs again.]

John Ging, who heads the Gaza office of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, known as U.N.R.W.A., says the latest electricity problem “is a sad reflection of the divide on the Palestinian side.”

He added, “They have no credibility in demanding anything from anybody if they show such disregard for the plight of their own people.”  [Since the U.S. Senate just torpedoed the extension of unemployment benefits, I guess Americans have no credibility in demanding anything from anybody either.  So again, by logical extension, Israel must be awesome!]

Today Hamas has no rival here. It runs the schools, hospitals, courts, security services and — through smuggler tunnels from Egypt — the economy.  [It’s all the fault of Hamas.  They run EVERYTHING!  Did we mention that they’re smugglers?]

“We solved a lot of problems with the tunnels,” Dr. Zahar said with a satisfied smile.

Along with the leaders has come a new generation that has taken the reins of power. Momen al-Ghemri, 25, a nurse, and his wife, Iman, 24, an Arabic teacher, are members of it.

University educated, the grandchildren of refugees, still living in refugee camps, both of the Ghemris got their jobs when Hamas took over full control by force three years ago, a year after it won an election. Neither has ever left Gaza.

Mr. Ghemri works as a nurse for the security services, earning $500 a month, but is spending six months at the intensive care unit of Shifa Hospital.

Spare parts for equipment remain a problem because of the blockade. But on a recent shift, the I.C.U. was well staffed. In the office next door, there was a map on the wall of Palestine before Israel’s creation.  [Wait, you mean Israel used to be a place called Palestine, and real, live, actual people lived there before Israel was conjured into existence, creating oodles of dispossessed refugees?  Sheesh, I bet those people must have been a trifle bit upset about that.]

Mr. Ghemri’s grandparents’ village, Aqer, is up there, along with 400 other villages that no longer exist. A wall in another office offered instructions on the Muslim way to help a bedridden patient pray.

Mr. Ghemri’s wife greets visitors at home wearing the niqab, or face veil, only her eyes visible. She believes in Hamas and makes that clear to her pupils. But her husband sees the party more as a means toward an end.

“You can’t go on your own to apply for a job,” he said. “For me, Hamas is about employment.”

He does like the fact that, as he put it, Hamas “refuses to kneel down to the Jews,” but like most Gazans, he is worried about Palestinian disunity and blames both factions.

In fact, there is a paradox at work in Gaza: while Hamas has no competition for power, it also has a surprisingly small following.  [Similar to Barack Obama’s 40% approval rating, I suppose.]

Dozens of interviews with all sorts of people found few willing to praise their government or that of its competitor. [Dozens!  ALL SORTS!!!]

“They’re both liars,” Waleed Hassouna, a baker in Gaza City, said in a very common comment.  [They must be the same people who run Crooks and liars.com, and say the same thing about lots of people in the United States government.  Of course, this only strengthens the argument that Israel is in the right.]

People here seem increasingly unable to imagine a political solution to their ills. Ask Gazans how to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — two states? One state? — and the answer is mostly a reflexive call to drive Israel out.  [Which is just antisemitic, and has nothing at all to do with the highly questionable origin of Israel, or their previously mentioned war crimes and illegal blockade, etc…]

“Hamas and Fatah are two sides of the same coin,” Ramzi, a public school teacher from the city of Rafah, said in a widely expressed sentiment. “All the land is ours. We should turn the Jews into refugees and then let the international community take care of them.”  [But, but, but, they are G-d’s  chosen people.  The Palestinians are just a bunch of Arabs.  Are you really suggesting that G-d’s chosen people aren’t totally more important than Arabs?]

Dried-Up Fortunes

Hamza and Muhammad Ju’bas are brothers, ages 13 and 11. They sell chocolates and gum on the streets after school to add to their family income. Once they have pulled in 20 shekels, about $5, they go home and play.

On one steamy afternoon they were taking refuge in a cellphone service center. The center — where customers watch for their number on digital displays and smiling representatives wear ties, and the air-conditioning never quits — seems almost glamorous.

The boys were asked about their hopes.

“My dream is to be like these guys and work in a place that’s cool,” Muhammad said.

“My dream is to be a worker,” Hamza said. He hears stories about the “good times” in the 1990s, when his father worked in Israel, as a house painter, making $85 a day. Later, their father, Emad Ju’bas, 45, said, “My children don’t have much ambition.”

The family is typical. They live in Shujaiya, a packed eastern neighborhood of 70,000, a warren of narrow, winding alleys and main roads lined with small shops.

The air is heavy with dust and fumes from cars, scooters and horse-drawn carts. Every shop has a small generator chained down outside. Roaring generators and wailing children are the sounds of Shujaiya.

Families are big. From 1997 through 2007, the population increased almost 40 percent, to 1.5 million. Palestinians say that large families will help them cope as they age, and more children mean more fighters for their cause.  [As I said earlier, the Palestinians are obviously uncontrollable sex maniacs.  They’re more like Islamic bunnies than actual people.]

Mr. Ju’bas and his wife, Hiyam, have seven boys and three girls. Two of their children have cognitive disabilities. Since Israel’s three-week war 18 months ago here aimed at stopping Hamas rockets, their children frequently wet the bed. Their youngest, Taj, 4, is aggressive, randomly punching anyone around him.  [Really??  I was under the impression that Israel broke the cease fire and attacked Gaza unprovoked.  It’s so odd that the Times would leave out this tiny detail.]

For six years Mr. Ju’bas worked in Israel, and with the money he bought a house with six rooms and two bathrooms. In 2000, when the uprising called the second intifada broke out, Israel closed the gates.

After that, Mr. Ju’bas found small jobs around Gaza, but with the blockade that dried up. His only source of work is at the United Nations relief agency, where two months a year he is a security guard.

He admits that at times he lashes out at his family. Domestic violence is on the rise. The strain is acute for women. Men can go out and sit in parks, in chairs right on the sidewalk or visit friends. Women are expected to stay off the streets.  [I hope you weren’t feeling sorry for Mr. Ju’bas, as he is clearly a wife beater, living in a radical society that is anti-woman.  This means, of course, that Israel is not at fault.]

The women at the stress clinic gathered about 10 a.m. They entered silently, wearing the ubiquitous hijab head scarf and ankle-length button-down overcoat known as the jilbab. Two wore the niqab over their faces.  [See above comment.]

They spoke of sending their children to work just to get them out of the house and of husbands who grew morose and violent.

They blamed Hamas for their misery, for seizing the Israeli soldier, Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, which led to the blockade. But they also blamed Fatah for failing them.  [Israel turned Gaza into a ghetto in order to protect itself from savages who seize Israeli soldiers for no reason at all.  Even Palestinians understand this.  Israel is not to blame.]

“My own children tell me it is better to die,” Jamalat Wadi said to the group.  [Probably a future suicide bomber.]

Ms. Wadi’s home was next door and she ran over to check on the family. She found her eight children wandering aimlessly in an open paved area, a courtyard filled with piles of clothes and plastic containers. The house had one unfurnished room and her husband, Bahjat, 28, was on the floor, unconscious, his arm over his head, his mouth open.  [The children take after their lazy, shiftless father.  And you want to give these people their own sovereign state?]

“He sleeps all the time,” Ms. Wadi said, motioning as though throwing a pill in her mouth.

The Wadis are refugees, so they receive flour, rice, oil and sugar from U.N.R.W.A. Tens of thousands of others here receive salaries from the Ramallah government to stay away from their jobs in protest over Hamas rule. They wait, part of a literate society with nothing to do.

Ms. Wadi said that when she visited her mother, her two brothers fought bitterly because one backs Hamas and the other backs Fatah. Recently they threw bottles at each other. Her mother kicked them out.  [Not quite as romantic as the stories of American brother fighting American brother during the American civil war, but hey, they’re dirty Arabs, right?]

In another meeting, Mr. Ju’bas was unshaven and unwashed. The previous night he had hit his wife, one of his children said. The washing machine had broken and he had no money to fix it.  [Sounds a lot like Mel Gibson, doesn’t he?  REMINDER:  Israel is not at fault.]

He told his wife to use the neighbors’. But she was embarrassed. She stayed up all night cleaning clothes and crying.

“My only dream,” Mr. Ju’bas said, “is to have patience.”

Inside Looking Out

The waves were lapping the beach. It was night. Mahmoud Mesalem, 20, and a few of his friends were sitting at a restaurant.

University students or recent graduates, they were raised in a world circumscribed by narrow boundaries drawn hard by politics and geography. They all despaired from the lack of a horizon.

“We’re here, we’re going to die here, we’re going to be buried here,” lamented Waleed Matar, 22.

Mr. Mesalem pointed at an Israeli ship on the horizon, then made his hand into a gun, pointed it at his head. “If we try to leave, they will shoot us,” he said.

There are posters around town with a drawing of a boot on an Israeli soldier, who is facedown, and the silhouette of a man hanging by his neck.  [There is no reason at all for any of this Palestinian anger towards the Israeli occupying soldiers.  None.  The Palestinians should just eat their white phosphorous shit sandwiches and like it.] The goal is to get alleged collaborators to turn themselves in. The campaign has put fear in the air.

Israel is never far from people’s minds here. Its ships control the waters, its planes control the skies. Its whims, Gazans feel, control their fate.  [Which is exactly how it should be.  Haven’t you read a single word of this article???]

And while most here view Israel as the enemy, they want trade ties and to work there. In their lives the main source of income has been from and through Israel.  [Because the Palestinians are so lame that they’re incapable of establishing a robust economy inside of a walled ghetto with import/export restrictions from hell, but you just can’t help someone who won’t help himself.]

Economists here say what is most needed now is not more goods coming in [Bullshit], as the easing of the blockade has permitted, but people and exports getting out [This part is actually true.  Go figure.].  

That is not going to happen soon [This part is true too.].

“Our position against the movement of people is unchanged,” said Maj. Gen. Eitan Dangot, the Israeli in charge of policy to Gaza’s civilians. “As to exports, not now. Security is paramount, so that will have to wait.”

Direct contact between the peoples, common in the 1980s and ’90s when Palestinians worked daily in Israel, is nonexistent.  [This is exactly as it should be.  If the Palestinians can’t give up their land and surrender their most basic human rights without turning into “terrorists” and attempting to fight back, then I’m afraid the ghetto conditions must stand, even as the Israelis occupy, oops, I mean settle even more Palestinian land.  Speaking of terrorists, didn’t good old Bibi Netanyahu recently CELEBRATE the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946?  Ninety-six people died in that attack, but that’s ok, though.  The Irgun were fighting for the right of G-d’s chosen people to steal Arab land. Irgun were Freedom Fighters, not terrorists.  You say tomato…]

Jamil Mahsan, 62, is a member of a dying breed. He worked for 35 years in Israel and believes in two states.

“There are two peoples in Palestine, not just one, and each deserves its rights,” he said, sitting in his son’s house. He used to attend the weddings of his Israeli co-workers. He had friendships in Israel. Today nobody here does.

The young men sitting by the beach contemplating their lives were representative of the new Gaza. They have started a company to design advertisements, and they write and produce small plays.

Their first performance in front of several hundred people involved a recounting of the horrors of the last war with Israel, with children speaking about their own fears as video of the war played.

Their second play, which they are rehearsing, is a black comedy about the Palestinian plight. It assails the factions for fighting and the Arabs for selling out the Palestinians.  [Again, self-hating Arabs have no right to criticize anyone, especially Israel.]

“Our play does not mean we hate Israel,” said Abdel Qader Ismail, 24, a former employee of the military intelligence service, with no trace of irony. “We believe in Israel’s right to exist, but not on the land of Palestine. In France or in Russia, but not in Palestine. This is our home.”  [OMG!  Somebody call the Helen Thomas police!  Oh and yeah — Israel is totally awesome, and obviously NOT at fault in any way.]

Witness to the Israeli assault on humanitarian aid ship

Last week, I posted excerpts from Iara Lee’s footage of Israel’s attack on the humanitarian aid ship that was attempting to break the illegal blockade of Gaza.  Today, I’m posting all of the raw footage.

The following text is the video description as posted on the Cultures of Resistance Youtube page:

On the night of Sunday, May 30, showing a terrifying disregard for human life, Israeli naval forces surrounded and boarded ships sailing to bring humanitarian aid to the blockaded Gaza Strip. On the largest ship, the Mavi Marmara, Israeli commandos opened fire on civilian passengers, killing at least 9 passengers and wounding dozens more. Others are still missing. The final death toll is yet to be determined. Cultures of Resistance director Iara Lee was aboard the besieged ship and has since returned home safely.

Despite the Israeli government’s thorough efforts to confiscate all footage taken during the attack, Iara Lee was able to retain some of her recordings. Above is raw footage from the moments leading up to and during the Israeli commandos’ assault on the Mavi Marmara.

In addition, here is a terrific Dave Lindorff piece based on the testimony of Mavi Marmara eyewitness, Kevin Neish.

What Kevin Neish Saw
Eyewitness to the Israeli Assault on the Mavi Marmara
DAVE LINDORFF

Kevin Neish of Victoria, British Columbia, didn’t know he was a celebrity until he was about to board a flight from Istanbul to Ottawa. “This Arab woman wearing a beautiful outfit suddenly ran up to me crying, ‘It’s you! From Arab TV! You’re famous!’” he recalls with a laugh. “I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she told me, ‘I saw you flipping through the Israeli commando’s book! It’s being aired over and over!’”

A soft-spoken teacher and former civilian engineer with the Canadian Department of Defense, Neish realized then that a video taken by an Arab TV cameraman in the midst of the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza of him flipping through a booklet had been transmitted before the Israelis blocked all electronic signals from the flotilla. The booklet had pictures and profiles of all the passengers, and he’d found it in the backpack of an Israeli Defense Force commando.

Neish, 53, was on the second deck of the flotilla’s lead ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, with a good view of the stern, when the IDF, in the early morning darkness of May 31, began its assault with percussion grenades, tear gas and a hail of bullets. He then moved to the fourth deck in an enclosed stairwell, from which he watched took photographs as casualties were carried down past him to a makeshift medical station. Several IDF commandos, captured by the passengers and crew, were also brought past him.

“I saw them carrying this one IDF guy down,” he recalls. “He looked terrified, like he thought he was going to be killed. But when a big Turkish guy, who had seen seriously injured passengers who had been shot by the IDF, charged over and tried to hit the commando, the Turkish aid workers pushed him off and pinned him to the wall. They protected this Israeli soldier.”

That was when he found the backpack which the soldier had dropped. “I figured I’d look inside and see what he was carrying,” Neish says. “And inside was this kind of flip-book. It was full of photos and names in English and Hebrew of who was on all the ships. The booklet also had a detailed diagram of the decks of the Mavi Marmara.”

Meanwhile, he says, more and more people were being carried down the stairs from the mayhem above—people who’d been shot, and people who were dying or people already dead. “I took detailed photos of the dead and wounded with my camera,” he says, adding, “There were several guys who had two neat bullet holes side by side on the side of their head–clearly they were executed.”

Neish smuggled his photos out of Israel to Turkey despite his arrest on the ship and imprisonment in Israel for several days. “I pulled out the memory card, tossed my camera and anything I had on me that had anything to do with electronics, and then kept moving the chip around so it wouldn’t be found,” he says. “The Israelis took all the cameras and computers. They were smashing some and keeping others. I put the chip in my mouth under my tongue, between my butt cheeks, in my sock, everywhere, to keep them from finding it,” he says. He finally handed it to a Turk who was leaving for a flight home on a Turkish airline. He says the card ended up in the hands of an organization called Free Gaza, and he has seen some of his pictures published, so he knows they made it out successfully.

Neish says that claims that the Israeli commandos were just armed with paint guns and 9 mm pistols are “Bullshit–at one point when I was in the stairwell, a commando opened a hatch above, stuck in a machine gun, and started firing. Bullets were bouncing all over the place. If the guy had gotten to look in and see where he was shooting, I’d have been dead, but two Turkish guys in the stairwell, who had short lengths of chain with them that they had taken from the access points to the lifeboats, stood to the side of the hatch and whipped them up at the barrell. I don’t know if they were trying to hit the commando or to use them to snatch away the gun, but the Israeli backed off, and they slammed and locked the hatch.”

“I never saw a single paint gun, or a sign of a fired paint ball!” he says.
He also didn’t see any guns in the hands of people who were on the ship. “In the whole time I was there on the ship, I never saw a single weapon in the hands of the crew or the aid workers,” he says. Indeed, Neish, who originally had been on a smaller 70-foot yacht called the Challenger II, had transferred to the Mavi Marmara after a stop in Cyprus, because his boat had been sabotaged by Israeli agents (a claim verified by the Israeli government), making it impossible to steer. “When we came aboard the big boat, I was frisked and my bag was inspected for weapons,” he says. “Being an engineer, I of course had a pocket knife, but they took that and tossed it into the ocean. Nobody was allowed to have any weapons on this voyage. They were very careful about that.”

What he did see during the IDF assault was severe bullet wounds. “In addition to several people I saw who were killed, I saw several dozen wounded people. There was one older guy who was just propped up against the wall with a huge hole in his chest. He died as I was taking his picture.”

Neish says he saw many of the 9 who were known to have been killed, and of the 40 who were wounded, and adds, “There were many more who were wounded, too, but less seriously. In the Israeli prison, I saw people with knife wounds and broken bones. Some were hiding their injuries so they wouldn’t be taken away from the others.” He also says, “Initially there were reports that 16 on the boat had been killed. The medical station said 16. There was a suspicion that some bodies may have been thrown overboard. But what people think now is that other seven who are missing, since we’re not hearing from families, may have been Israeli spies.”

Once the Israeli commandos had secured control of the Mavi Marmara, Neish says the ship’s passengers and crew were rounded up, with the men put in one area on deck, and the women put below in another area. The men were told to squat, and had their hands bound with plastic cuffs, which Neish says were pulled so tight that his wrists were cut and his hands swelled up and turned purple (he is still suffering nerve damage from the experience, which his doctor in Canada says he hopes will gradually repair on its own).

“They told us to be quiet,” he says. “But at one point this Turkish imam stood up and started singing a call to prayer. Everybody was dead quiet–even the Israelis. But after about ten seconds, this Israeli officer stomped over through the squatting people, pulled out his pistol and pointed at the guy’s head, yelling ‘Shut up!’ in English. The imam looked at him directly and just kept singing! I thought, Jesus Christ, he’s gonna kill him! Then I thought, well, this is what I’m here for, I guess, so I stood up. The officer wheeled around and pointed his gun at my head. The imam finished his song and sat down, and then I sat down.”

While the commandeered vessels were sailed to the Israeli port of Ashdot, the captives were left without food or water. “All we were given were some chocolate bars that the Israelis pilfered from the ship’s stores,” says Neish. “You had to grovel to get to go to the bathroom, and many people had to just go in their pants.”

Things didn’t get much better once the passengers were transferred to an Israeli prison. He and the other prisoners with him, who hadn’t eaten for more than half a day, were tossed a frozen block of bread and some cucumbers.

On the second day, someone from the Canadian embassy came around, calling out his name. “It turned out he’d been going to every cell looking for me,” says Neish. “My daughter had been frantically telling the Canadian government I was in the flotilla. Even though the Israelis had my name and knew where I was, they weren’t telling the Canadian embassy people. In fact the Canadians–and my daughter–thought I was dead, because people had said I’d been near the initial assault. The good thing is that as they went around calling out for me, they discovered two Arab-born Canadians that they hadn’t known were there.”

“Eventually they got to my cell and I answered them. The embassy official said, ‘You’re Kevin? You’re supposed to be dead.’”

After being held for a few days, there was a rush to move everyone to the Ben Gurion airport for a flight to Turkey. “It turned out that Israeli lawyers had brought our case to the Supreme Court, challenging the legality of our capture on international waters. There was a chance that the court would order the IDF to put us back on our ships and let us go, so the government wanted to get us out of Israel and moot the case. But two guys were hauled off, probably by Mossad (the Israeli intelligence agency). So we all said, ‘No. We don’t go unless you bring them back.’”

The two men were returned and were allowed to leave with the rest of the group.

“I honestly never thought the Israelis would board the ship,” says Neish. “I thought we’d get into Gaza. I mean, I went as part of the Free Gaza Movement, and they had made prior attempts, with some getting in, and some getting boarded or rammed, but this time it was a big flotilla. I figured we’d be stopped, and maybe searched. My boat, the Challenger II, only had dignitaries on board including three German MPs, and then Lt. Col. Ann Wright and myself.

At one point in the Israeli prison, all the violence finally got to this man who had witnessed more death and mayhem than many active duty US troops in Iraq or Afghanistan. “I broke down and started crying,” he admits. “This big Turkish guy came over and asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘Sixteen people died.’”

“He said to me, ‘No, they died for a wonderful cause. They’re happy. You just go out and tell your story.’”

New video from Israeli attack on Gaza humanitarian flotilla

Democracy Now! is previewing exclusive video from Israel’s attack on the Free Gaza humanitarian flotilla.  Here’s a synopsis of the new video:

In a Democracy Now! exclusive we bring you a sneak preview of previously unseen raw footage from the Mavi Marmara that will be formally released at a press conference at the United Nations later in the day. The footage shows the mood and the activities on board the Mavi Marmara in the time leading up to the attack, and the immediate reaction of the passengers during the attack. We are joined by filmmaker and activist Iara Lee, one of the few Americans on the Mavi Marmara ship. Her equipment was confiscated but she managed to smuggle out an hour’s worth of footage.

Oh, and no sarcasm from me today.  I’m leaving that to the brilliantly talented Arthur Silber, whose biting essay on the topic is featured below the videos.

A Friendly Note to Many of Israel’s Defenders

Arthur Silber

June 08, 2010

From the sickeningly rancid, foully infected underbelly of the Outraged Furor! over Helen Thomas’s violation of The Sacred Rules Concerning What Is Permissible to Say About Israel, there is one “argument” offered by Israel’s defenders that might be among my favorite debating tactics of recent years.

In their efforts to prove beyond all dispute that Thomas is a vicious anti-Semite who loathes every Jew who has ever lived and longs for the day when every single one of them is dead, these defenders of notably horrifying and murderous State terrorism gleefully spit out: “It’s just like saying, ‘Hey, all you Black Americans! Go back to Africa!’ And we all know what it would mean if someone said that!”

I’ve heard and read this a huge number of times in the last several days. I am forced to admit that the comparison is staggering in its power. It makes the point with concision, and the historic parallels are overwhelming. To review briefly, and despite the very painful familiarity of these facts: significant numbers of Africans voluntarily, indeed enthusiastically, migrated westward and took over large parts of the eastern seaboard of what was then the United States beginning in the mid-1800s. They were able to do this because they had the unending support in a multitude of forms of the most powerful Nation-States of the time. The Africans claimed that a special dispensation from … well, something or other … ordained that the land mass designated by the name “United States” was uniquely theirs. The Nation-States that made possible the Africans’ conquest and domination agreed.

In the ensuing century and a half, the Africans slaughtered most of those they found living in the United States, beginning in the eastern states and then steadily continuing their campaign of murder and destruction across the continent. The few survivors fled further and further west. The Africans inexorably pursued them, all still with the backing of certain immensely powerful Nation-States. Eventually, the Africans drove the remaining previous inhabitants of the United States into just three or four very small areas in (what were then called) Arizona and New Mexico. From that point on and continuing to the present, the Africans forbade virtually anyone and anything from moving into or out of these impossibly restricted areas. Although it is rarely talked about or admitted, people will eventually acknowledge, when pressed, that the Americans forced to remain in these concentration camps must endure conditions that are among the most nightmarish on earth.

Given this history, well-known to every young school child in the world, it is indeed exactly the same to say that the Israelis should “get out of Palestine” and to demand that the Africans should “get out of the United States.” The argument is unanswerable to a degree that causes me profound embarrassment and distress. I greatly resent having the pathetic shabbiness of my views revealed in this manner.

But perhaps I might offer an exceedingly minor piece of unsolicited and doubtless unwanted advice to many of those who regularly defend Israel’s systematic State terrorism, extended entirely free of charge and only because I’m a hell of a sweet guy:

You don’t need to work at making yourselves stupid. Seriously.

On a related note: it is not “brave” or “courageous” of you in the slightest degree to side with unanswerable power, or to act as enforcers of permissible speech. To the contrary, that decision is one of the least courageous choices imaginable. It is also remarkably, astonishingly … well, stupid. But I’ve told you that you don’t need to work at that.

I have a number of other, considerably more complex points I want to make about this Helen Thomas episode. I’ll get to all that in the next day or so. But I came across this particular “argument” several times again this morning. So I wanted to get this out of the way.

For me, one of the more gut-wrenching aspects of today’s monstrous culture, a culture that kills each and every manifestation of empathy, understanding and compassion with relentlessly systematic determination, is the combination of unending destruction, cruelty, violence and murder with the most abysmally wretched depths of stupidity.

In certain respects, that is my own personal nightmare. And so, so many people work with such diligence to make it real every single day. They needn’t work at that, either, and I desperately wish they would stop.

Assuredly, they will not.

Greenwald, Finkelstein, and Gunness on the Israeli terrorist pirates

Poor Israel.  Nobody understands that they have no choice but to create a walled ghetto for the Palestinians, flatten their buildings, choke off their supplies, label them as “terrorists” when they fight back, and then attack civilian ships in international waters as they attempt to deliver humanitarian aid, killing as many as…   Oh, why even bother to count?  They’re just a bunch of antisemitic radical activists anyway.  They got what they deserved, right?

</sarcasm>

Glenn Greenwald, as usual, hits all of the nails squarely on their heads.

Norman Finkelstein and Chris Gunness make a whole lot of sense in this RT interview, as well.

Orwellian Nazis, or … denying humanitarian aid to Gaza

I’ve been sick for the past two days.  Literally sick, as in ill, but also sick to fucking death of the acts of arrogance and unconscionable evil that take place every single day as the death spiral tightens on what passes for our civilization.  And as if the acts aren’t bad enough, the few among us who still remember what life was like in 1983, pre-newspeak, are being prodded by the Goebbelsian swagger stick known as the corporate media into believing that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and last but certainly not least, that the sorry fucking excuses for human beings who run poor little Israel have a free pass to do whatever the fuck they please.

I apologize for the hackneyed nature of my Orwellian Nazi mixed metaphor, but really, what else is there to say when a ship full of unarmed civilians, in international waters, attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the modern-day equivalent of the Warsaw ghetto, is stormed in the dead of night by commandos with automatic weapons?  Oh, and I almost forgot to add the irony of all ironies, which is that the stormtroopers work for the very people who made the humanitarian aid necessary in the first place with their theft of Palestinian land in 1948, and their apartheid policies since then leading to a population of starving people, walled-in and deprived of basic human needs, based entirely on their non-Jewishness.

It really and truly can’t get any more completely fucked up than this, right?

But wait, it does!  This is all the fault of the people attempting to bring humanitarian aid.  Israel was just defending itself, just as it was doing with Operation Cast Lead, and when peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed under an IDF bulldozer in 2003, and when 34 U.S. sailors were killed and another 173 were wounded when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.

It’s never Israel’s fault.

Oh for fuck’s sake now I’m exhausted again.  Just read Mark Steel’s piece below.

Of course, they were asking for it

by Mark Steel

Wednesday, 2 June 2010

It’s time the Israeli government’s PR team made the most of its talents, and became available for hire. Then whenever a nutcase marched into a shopping mall in somewhere like Wisconsin and gunned down a selection of passers-by, they could be on hand to tell the world’s press “The gunman regrets the loss of life but did all he could to avoid violence.” Then various governments would issue statements saying “All we know is a man went berserk with an AK 47, and next to him there’s a pile of corpses, so until we know the facts we can’t pass judgement on what took place.”

To strengthen their case the Israelis have released a photo of the weapons they found on board, (which amount to some knives and tools and wooden sticks) that the naive might think you’d expect to find on any ship, but the more astute will recognise as exactly what you’d carry if you were planning to defeat the Israeli army. It’s an armoury smaller than you’d find in the average toolshed in a garden in Cirencester, which goes to show the Israelis had better destroy Cirencester quickly as an essential act of self-defence.

It’s a shame they weren’t more imaginative, as they could have said “We also discovered a deadly barometer, a ship’s compass, which could not only be frisbeed at someone’s head but even had markings to help the assailant know which direction he was throwing it, and a set of binoculars that could easily be converted into a ray-gun.”

That would be as logical as the statement from the Israeli PM’s spokesman – “We made every possible effort to avoid this incident.” Because the one tiny thing they forgot to do to avoid this incident was not send in armed militia from helicopters in the middle of the night and shoot people. I must be a natural at this sort of technique because I often go all day without climbing off a helicopter and shooting people, and I’m not even making every possible effort. Politicians and commentators worldwide repeat a version of this line. They’re aware a nation has sent its militia to confront people carrying provisions for the desperate, in the process shooting several of them dead, and yet they angrily blame the dead ones. One typical headline yesterday read “Activists got what they wanted – confrontation.” It’s an attitude so deranged it deserves to be registered as a psychosis, something like “Reverse Slaughter Victim Confusion Syndrome”.

Israel and its supporters claim that Viva Palestina, made up of people who collect the donated food, cement and items for providing basic amenities such as toilets, and transport them to Gaza, wanted the violence all along. Because presumably they must have been thinking “Hezbollah couldn’t beat them, but that’s because unlike us they didn’t have a ballcock and several boxes of plum tomatoes”.

One article told us the flotilla was full of “Thugs spoiling for a confrontation”, and then accused them of being “Less about aid and more about PR. Indeed, on board was Swedish novelist Henning Mankell.” So were they thugs or about PR? Did they have a thugs’ section and a PR quarter, or did they all muck in, the novelist diverting the soldiers with his characterisation while the thugs attacked them with a lethal spirit level?

But some defenders of Israel are so blind to what happens in front of them there’s nothing at all they wouldn’t jump to defend. Israel could blow up a cats home and within five minutes they’d be yelling “How do we know the cats weren’t smuggling semtex in their fur for Hamas?”

If this incident had been carried about by Iran, or anyone we were trying to portray as an enemy, so much condemnation would have been spewed out it would have created a vast cloud of outrage that airlines would be unable to fly through.

But as it’s Israel, most governments offer a few diplomatic words that blame no one, but accept the deaths are “regrettable”. They might as well have picked any random word from the dictionary, so the news would tell us “William Hague described the deaths as ‘hexagonal'”, and a statement from the US senate said “It’s all very confusing. In future let’s hope they make every effort to avoid a similar incident.”