Saturday 14 August 2010

FLOTILLA MURDERS: ISRAELI HASBARA IN FULL SWING


from Al Jazeera.net

by Richard Lightbown, source

The hasbara industry is in full swing at the moment as Benjamin Netanyahu’s government pulls out all the stops to create a smokescreen to cover its crimes. Leading from the front Mr Netanyahu sat in front of the Turkel Commission for four hours on Monday, although anyone hoping to hear anything of interest would have been disappointed.

Mr Netanyahu only spoke in front of the public for ninety minutes of that time during which he regaled the committee with complaints about Hamas, Sderot and Gilad Shalit.

Broken record. Broken record. Broke......

Mr. Netanyahu said he is sure the Israeli panel investigating the raid will find that military forces acted according to international law. The United Nations is due to begin its own inquiry into the raid on Tuesday. That panel will be led by former New Zealand leader Geoffrey Palmer and outgoing Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, and will include one Israeli and one Turkish member.

Israel says its forces acted in self-defense after they were attacked by activists wielding clubs and knives. The military held its own investigation and defended the use of force.

He told the committee that Israel had a right to search for weapons on board the flotilla. (Israel has since announced that it found no weapons for Hamas. Did nine people really have to die so that Israel could confirm the certification the flotilla already had?)

International loss of face and credibility, lie after lie exposed. He still defends this preplanned massacre in which the lies still abound.

He further told them that there was no humanitarian crisis in Gaza as a result of the blockade it was just a ‘bogus rationale […] to break the blockade’. So there we are. The International Committee of the Red Cross was lying on 14 June when it said:

“The closure therefore constitutes a collective punishment imposed in clear violation of Israel’s obligation under international humanitarian law.”

How can there be a "humanitarian crisis" when your firm belief is that Palestinians are cockroaches, animals, "beasts with two legs". Recently one rabbi opined that Palestinians only walked on two legs to serve the Jews better than if they had four like other beasts. They are not considered human at all by such as Netanyahu so how could he possibly see a "humanitarian crisis"? Palestine is just a pen full of hungry animals.

Or when in 2008 the same august institution said 70% of the Gazan population suffers from food insecurity.

Food shortage? We let then have 1/5 of their needs every month! So we have them on a diet? That is not the same as a shortage.

That Judge Turkel allowed him to drone on in this way bodes ill for the end result. As though nine dead (and it could yet turn to eleven), fifty-five injured and the rest of the 700 people abducted, abused, humiliated and subjected to cruel and sadistic behaviour was not important enough for the committee to concentrate on.

They are lucky we did not slaughter them all, daring to challenge US, God's chosen people. What we choose to do, we do. I do not care about international laws and regulations. Those are for lesser creatures, not Israel. This is a sentiment often expressed by Israeli leaders.

But that as always is the name of the game.

Only Israeli victim hood is of any consequence.

Only Jews are close enough to god to understand true suffering.

Nine Israeli hoods got a legal beating.

That’s important.

Nothing else matters.

The execution of a teenager does not matter.

The kind acts of the victims to injured IDF do not count.

So we’ve had Prof Ruth Lapidoth prostituting herself on 12 July by cherry picking the San Remo Manual to make it all seem right.

She told us Gaza is a state because the Israel Supreme Court said so. Does she recognize no higher authority on international law?

Of course not! No true Zionist would consider international law valid unless it worked in their favour.

There was no mention of course that San Remo takes six articles to explain that any maritime attack should be solely against military targets for the purpose of gaining a military advantage.

That precautions must be taken to ensure that civilians are not harmed.

That merchant vessels are civilian objects.

That vessels engaged in humanitarian missions are exempt from attack.
Article 102 states absolutely, that a blockade is prohibited if the damage to the civilian population is excessive in relation to the military advantage of the blockade.

Article 103 allows the right of passage, subject to search (but not murder) if the civilian population is inadequately provided with food and other objects essential for its survival.

Article 119 declares that a neutral merchant vessel may be diverted ‘with its consent’.

Article 124 encourages certification (exactly as the flotilla had done) to avoid the necessity for visit and search. None of this gets a mention in the professor’s assessment.

Mr Netanyahu behaves as though it does not exist.

President Obama of course is in on the scam too. Surprise Surprise!

Refusing to condemn Israel on 31 May until he knew the facts, he is now doing his best to see that they are not revealed. Thus the UN Human Rights Commission’s Fact Finding Mission is now deemed surplus to requirements.

Never mind that it is chaired by a judge who served on the International Criminal Court, or that it includes the former Chief Prosecutor of the UN backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, who has extensive experience on human rights, war crimes and terrorism.

This is a committee eminently qualified to investigate the facts so it is being sidelined and told it is irrelevant by Susan Rice, who was speaking as though she owned the United Nations.

Just for the record China and Russia voted for this commission, France and Britain abstained, and the other permanent member of the Security Council, without a veto at the UNHRC, could only vote against.

The late Charles Wheeler, a redoubtable BBC journalist, once observed that American presidents get worse and worse. Sadly we don’t seem to have reached the nadir yet.

So what is the invertebrate in the White House trying to palm us off with instead? A committee chaired by a law professor who was prime minister of New Zealand for thirteen months, and representative to the International Whaling Commission. Alongside him will be a man whose period of rule in Columbia was strongly criticized for its abuses of human rights, democracy and the rule of law; and whose main arms supplier was the state of Israel.

This Panel will receive reports from Israel and Turkey. But it will not be able to subpoena witnesses (and Mr Netanyahu has made it clear that it will not be able to subpoena anyone from the IDF). Neither will it venture out of New York (to go to Iskenderun for example to look over the three Turkish ships that have been released).

So we must hope that Sir Geoffrey Palmer is his own man, and that he is a man of courage and imagination. We must hope that he is a man able to appreciate that it was not self defence to shoot Cevdet Kiliclar through the forehead from a helicopter before a single Israeli had even started to descend from a helicopter or disembark from a zodiac. Mr Kiliclar was taking a photograph at the time of his assassination and the bullet entered through the top of his skull.

Let us hope that Sir Geoffrey will ask for proof of the Israeli allegation that their commandos were shot at, and that he will wonder why the infra red footage from the helicopters have not picked up the flashes from the passenger’s guns. Come to that why have we seen so little of the enormous amount of footage that Israel stole from press and passengers on the flotilla along with many many many thousands of dollars worth of equipment? Many passengers were simply handed empty suitcases when they were freed?

But even the Israeli film footage provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs can be quite revealing. Take a look at the arms cache that Israel made such a fuss about. I have counted the following:

• about 16 kitchen knives,
• three pocket knives,
• fifteen pickaxe handles,
• about twenty lengths of metal bar,
• two ring spanners,
• one pipe wrench,
• four small hammers,
• two sledge hammers,
• four fire axes,
• one paint roller handle,
• ten disc-cutter discs,
• two round files in handles,
• a short length of cord and
• two kaffiyehs.

(There was no blood on any of these ‘weapons’.) This is hardly the equipment prepared by a well-organized terrorist cell that had readied itself to face one of the elite units in the Israel Defence Forces.

Also take a close look at the Israeli infrared film taken from the sea towards the Mavi Marmara. The film unfortunately starts after Mr Kiliclar has been shot dead and other passengers have also been injured and maybe killed.

Look close and you can see the pistols being thrown over the side after the commandos are disarmed. Look closely too at the last frame of the infrared footage. There at the side of the ship is a commando with a pistol raised ready to fire.

Mostly likely this is a Glock pistol with a magazine holding 17 rounds which can be fired as fast as the trigger can be pulled. Now do you understand why the film stops there? The next sequence shows a small bottle of mace-like self-defence spray, and then a small folding saw with a single 5cm long blade. Yet look behind this primitive weaponry and there inside the door to the bridge lounges a commando with what looks like a submachine gun.

The Israeli military said it would do whatever was necessary to stop the flotilla. When it got to the Mavi Marmara the commandos first tried to board at the stern from zodiacs. They were unable to do this principally because of the fire hoses trained on them, although there were a lot of things like plates and tomatoes thrown at them too.

Oh dear lord! Tomatoes! Now that is a serious charge, throwing tomatoes at fully armed IDF!

In fact they never did board the ship from this point until after the bridge had been taken and the ship surrendered. The next move, almost certainly with the full authority of Admiral Marom, was to fire live ammunition onto the upper decks from more than one of the four helicopters, and this was probably sniper fire to begin with. Only then did the commandos start to fast rope onto the deck.

But even then the defence did not crumble and the first rope was tied up by the defenders and then abandoned so that the commandos only used one rope and were picked off as they came down. It looks pretty brutal on the film (which is why we are allowed to see it). But if they did not disable those commandos quickly the men on that upper deck were going to get shot, and shortly afterwards this is exactly what happened.

However it was a close thing. Perhaps if they had tied up both ropes they may have prevented the landing. And then what: what was Israel’s next line of attack, bearing in mind that they had warships and submarines in the near vicinity?

If the boarding had failed would the IDF have sunk the ship? One thing is for sure, that would have took a lot of ingenuity for Mr Netanyahu and Prof Lapidoth to explain. It would have needed a lot of excuses from Mr Obama too.


A LITTLE MORE FROM THAT LOVELY MR. NETANYAHU

Benjamin Netanyahu's 1993 book, "A Durable Peace," reads like the ravings of a madman. Just try to follow the serpentine logic below.

According to Netanyahu, the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank would have grave repercussions in the United States, provoking the Latino minority to demand a state of its own in the Southwest ~ a hostile “second Mexico” that will make Anglos fear for their lives. To avoid this “potential nightmare,” America has only one choice: join Israel in stifling the Palestinians’ national ambitions.

How did Netanyahu justify his seemingly paranoid logic? At the time he published his book (with considerable help from neocon former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, as he notes in his acknowledgments), the Palestinians comprised a bare minority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. For this reason, Netanyahu characterized them as “a minority” no different than the Mexican-American citizens of the US.

In Netanyahu’s view, the Palestinians had stubbornly refused to give up their national ambitions and take up citizenship in Jordan, a move that he claimed would allow them to become resident foreign nationals under Israeli law. He claimed this proved “they were not interested in civil rights…the Palestinians demand unlimited self-determination, with no limitation of potentially destructive sovereign powers.” He called this, “the Palestinian Principle.”

Netanyahu resented international acceptance of the Palestinian demand for statehood, lamenting that

“Israel is now being told by virtually the entire world that it must accept a confined and stifling existence on the narrow shoreline dominated by a hostile, Judenrein Palestinian state on these same mountains, the very heart of the Jewish home.
So much for the “two-state solution;” in Netanyahu’s Holocaust-obsessed worldview, Palestinian statehood was a recipe for wide-scale pogroms.

To convince his American counterparts that crushing Palestinian national ambitions was in their best interest, Netanyahu linked Palestinian statehood to American anti-immigrant fears.

On pages 164-165, Netanyahu wrote:

“The United States is not exempt from this potential nightmare. In a decade or two the southwestern region of America is likely to be predominately Hispanic, mainly as a result of continuous emigration from Mexico. It is not inconceivable that in this community champions of the Palestinian Principle could emerge.

These would demand not merely equality before the law, or naturalization, or even Spanish as a first language. Instead they would say that since they form a local majority in the territory (which was forcibly taken from Mexico in the war of 1848), they deserve a state of their own.

‘But you already have a state ~ it’s called Mexico,’ would come the response. ‘You have every right to demand civil rights in the United States, but you have no right to demand a second Mexico.’

This hypothetical exchange may sound far-fetched today. But it will not necessarily appear that way tomorrow, especially if the Palestinian Principle is allowed to continue to spread, which it surely will if a new Palestinian state comes into being.”

Was Netanyahu sincere in arguing that US interests dovetailed with those of Israel? Not really.

Later on in his book, in a chapter entitled “Jewish Power,” Netanyahu assailed Israeli policy makers who had attempted to meet American land-for-peace demands, describing them as weaklings bent over in a “submissive posture.”

“It does not cross the minds of these advocates of capitulation,” Netanyahu wrote, “that the task of Israel’s leaders is to try to convince the American government that it is in the interest of the United States to follow policies that cohere with Israeli interests, not vice versa.”

For the Israeli prime minister, his meetings with Obama have represented a test of wills, not a negotiation between allies.

As Netanyahu wrote, “In international politics, in fact in domestic politics too, strength attracts and weakness ultimately repels.”

In his mind, to “convince” Obama is to defeat him.

Considering his ravings about the danger of a Palestinian state, his mind may not be functioning on the most rational level.

1 comment:

  1. Salams Noor! Ramadan Mubarak!

    Only the IsraHellis are so full of chutzpah that they try to blame their victims for the crimes the ZioNazis commit against those innocent victims.

    The racist ploy that the ZioNazis use is as old as the Zio-Communista anti-Americanski nonsense. the problem is that the Zionist controlled government of the U.S. now resembles that.

    Free Palestine! Free the Middle East! Free the United States! - from all ZioNazis.

    ReplyDelete

If your comment is not posted, it was deemed offensive.