On the Israeli Military Siege of the Gaza Aid Flotilla

This is a compilation of my blog posts on Israel and Gaza following the May 31, 2010 Israeli military siege of the Gaza aid flotilla from Turkey.

June 1st: Americans and Israelis Are Generally Good People, But Our Governments’ Actions Are Counter-Productive

There was an attack Monday by the Israeli military on a 6-ship flotilla, a part of the Free Gaza Movement, which was bringing much needed humanitarian supplies to the people of Gaza. The humanitarian activists of the flotilla were warned by Israel to not attempt to get through the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Israel had said that it would allow the transportation by land of the humanitarian aid, following inspection for security reasons. Israel had allowed some shipments of humanitarian aid to get to Gaza between 2007 and the Gaza War of 2009-09, but not since the war. On the one hand, we have an economically collapsed and impoverished Gaza and their desperate supporters who want to help the people there, and who perhaps should have listened to the Israelis’ warnings, and now over 15 of them are killed. On the other hand, we have an overly-militaristic and somewhat paranoid Israeli government that goes overboard in its attempt to protect Israelis from possible terrorist attacks, a result of government-monopolization of territorial security.

It is extremely difficult to know what to believe when both sides give differing accounts of specific events. And the videos I’ve seen are not helpful. Of course, Israel’s radio jamming and censorship regarding this fiasco doesn’t help matters. When the Israeli government has to do radio jamming and censoring, immediately that makes me suspicious. Why do they have to do that, except to engage in covering up information, covering up the truth, and helping their own propagandizing? And it makes me more skeptical of the legitimacy of reports that the Israeli government found a weapons cache on board the ships. While some have accused the flotilla of smuggling weapons to Hamas, the Turkish PM stated that the flotilla was inspected for weapons before being allowed to take off.

The flotilla contained 600 people, mostly activists.  However, there is reason to believe that, while most of the intent was to bring tons of humanitarian aid to the Gazans, some of the intent may have been to “bring attention to the Israeli siege of Gaza.” Which does deserve attention, in my opinion, as such a siege and blockage (one might describe more accurately as “sanctions”) have received condemnation from many major international human rights organizations. The Israeli government’s treatment of the people of Gaza has been described as a “collective prison.”

Meanwhile, Turkey accuses Israel of “state terrorism,” as reported by the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, and Israeli PM Netanyahu claims the military acted in “self-defense,” according to the pro-Israeli government Jerusalem Post. The U.K. Guardian compares the Israeli action to Somali pirates. And Salon’s Glenn Greenwald notes,

….The flotilla attacked by Israel last night was carrying materials such as cement, water purifiers, and other building materials, much of which Israel refuses to let pass into Gaza.  At the end of 2009, a U.N. report found that “insufficient food and medicine is reaching Gazans, producing a further deterioration of the mental and physical health of the entire civilian population since Israel launched Operation Cast Lead against the territory,” and also “blamed the blockade for continued breakdowns of the electricity and sanitation systems due to the Israeli refusal to let spare parts needed for repair get through the crossings.”

It hardly seemed possible for Israel — after its brutal devastation of Gaza and its ongoing blockade — to engage in more heinous and repugnant crimes.  But by attacking a flotilla in international waters carrying humanitarian aid, and slaughtering at least 10 people, Israel has managed to do exactly that.  If Israel’s goal were to provoke as much disgust and contempt for it as possible, it’s hard to imagine how it could be doing a better job….

Mondoweiss’s Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz had this early report, and Moshe Yaroni calls the action “Israel’s Kent State”, an example of government’s overreaction to civil disobedience:

….We begin with the point that these were civilian ships and Israel boarded them with commandoes—soldiers who are disposed toward combat situations and are not meant to police unarmed civilians. They’re fighters, that’s their purpose. But the IDF claims that an assortment of international activists deliberately provoked a violent confrontation (using potentially deadly weapons, but which still leave them ridiculously overmatched) against heavily armed and trained soldiers in order to “lynch them.”

Does that seem remotely credible? It only seems so if you believe the activists on board these ships were willing to risk and actually sacrifice their lives in order to create a scandal for Israel. Of course, Israeli hasbara (propaganda) is well-practiced in casting all Arabs and Muslims as suicidal lunatics, aided by the suicide bombers who represent an infinitesimal percentage of those populations. But this collection of international activists, including many Jews, Americans and Europeans, apparently are also willing to give their lives, and rather cheaply, according to this story.

No, the IDF version of these events doesn’t begin to pass the laugh test.

When I first heard confirmed reports of this massacre, I thought of the Kent State shootings in 1970….

But at Kent State, the shootings resulted from high tensions and one person losing control, causing others to follow his lead. Was that the case here? I suppose one must allow the possibility, but the quick response of the government certainly gives the appearance that it was not that simple….

While the aid flotilla is of the Free Gaza Movement, which is an international human rights organization to shine the spotlight on the Israeli blockade of Gaza that prevents humanitarian aid from getting to Gaza, Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick nevertheless refers to it as a “Hamas flotilla” and the killed civilian activists as “Hamas supporters.” That is pure propaganda, given that the purpose of the flotilla primarily is to get the tons of humanitarian supplies to the Palestinians in Gaza, and, in fact, the Free Gaza website doesn’t even mention Hamas, except in some posted news items. And some of the more conservative opinion-oriented websites I’ve seen have the words activist and humanitarian aid in quotation marks, to show their blind trust in the Israeli government’s and mainstream media’s reporting on this fiasco.

The situation in Gaza is that the Israeli military caused much of Gaza’s destruction during the  ‘08-’09 war, and with the blockade they have been preventing the rebuilding of the area as well as preventing basic medical supplies and foods to get into Gaza. It is very similar to the U.S. government’s bombing of Iraqi infrastructures including water treatment and sewage facilities, followed by U.S. and U.N.- imposed sanctions that prevented the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructures and deliberately promoting disease including cancer and increased child mortality rates throughout the 1990s.

To some people, unfortunately, any criticism of the Israeli government just sticks in their craw, and is seen as literally blasphemous, as anti-Semitic, as “pro-terrorist.” They just cannot fathom the possibility that the Israeli government and military themselves are capable of committing terrorist acts, and of persecuting a segment of a population. Well, let me tell you something. The Jews do not own “being persecuted.” The Jews do not own “prison camps.” It actually can happen to people among other religions, other races and cultures, and it actually can be committed by Jews.

There is a problem among many people, however, and that is the inability to distinguish between people of a particular territory and their government. Neoconservatives such as Glick mentioned above do not seem to distinguish between the Gaza Palestinians in general and the Gaza territory’s governing agency Hamas. It is a tiny minority of extremist groups such as Hamas who have been committing the terrorist acts, and it is Hamas whose charter includes specific references to the destruction of Israel. Likewise, it is necessary to distinguish between the people of Israel and the Israeli government, just as it is necessary to distinguish between Americans and their government. It is not Americans who have been intruding and destroying Middle-Eastern countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but the U.S. government.

And it seems that so many war supporters in the U.S. do not want to recognize that a major motivation for the terrorism or terrorist attempts against the U.S. has been the terrorists’ reaction to the intrusive and violent actions of the U.S. government in the Middle-East. This analysis is not one of “Blame America.” Rather it is “Blame the U.S. Government,” a group of professional career politicians and parasitic bureaucrats who have no sense of long range planning, no sense of national sovereignty and no sense of morality. The same can be said of the Israeli government. The terrorist acts against the U.S. are examples of blowback for invasive and destructive U.S. policies, and terrorist acts against Israel have been blowback for the Israeli government’s destructive and immoral policies, particularly with Gaza. And we are already seeing the blowback of the Israeli government’s actions this week in Turkey.

A lot of people will feel offended by my description of the Israeli government’s apartheid of treating Palestinians or Arabs as second class citizens. They either do not know about it, or they do know but don’t care or feel it is justified. There is a double standard by those who say, “Never Forget” about the way Nazi Germany persecuted the Jews and others, but who look the other way when it is the Jews doing the persecuting. The problems we face are caused by State’s governments. It is the agents of the State who are doing the persecuting.

This situation this week is a typical example of the State vs. the people. The one big difference between governments and other institutions is that governments (or “States”) have the power of compulsion over others, and have government- and police-protected monopolies of various endeavors, especially territorial protection. That’s where we go wrong. First of all, no institution should have the power of compulsion over others, because that’s simply immoral, no matter how it is rationalized. And second, anyone who understands economics and basic human action knows that any monopoly which is protected by the State, by aggression, will be automatically corrupted by power, and thus its effectiveness diminished and its ability to provide actual quality of service smooshed. The bigger and more powerful the State, the more totalitarian will be its treatment of the people over whom the State rules. That is an inherent part of compulsory, monopolistic States. Israel is no different.

June 2nd: Why Don’t the American Israel Loyalists Ever Question Whether Israel Is On Our Side?

In the recent weeks before the Gaza Freedom Flotilla siege, some people have been accusing Barack Obomber of being anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish as well as anti-Israel in general. And his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has been accused of being an anti-Semite and a “self-hating Jew,” although the truth about Emanuel is just that he’s a big jerk as is his boss, our little Marxist dictator in the White House. And if you think that Emanuel is a big jerk, then watch out for his brother, the literally crazy Zeke who also works in the White House, and who will probably have much clout in the forming of National Health Policy now that their Health Care Fascism is law. Some people don’t understand why, if Obomber is such an anti-Semite, then why would he appoint Emanuel as his chief of staff? Well, I think it’s because our Schlep of State Thunder-Thighs Rodham Clinton blackmailed pressured Obomber to do that. Rahm is a faithful Hillary guy, you know.

I don’t know if Obomber is anti-Jewish, but there are plenty of good reasons to believe that he is. My biggest problem has been with neoconservatives and otherwise war supporters and staunch Israel supporters who are the “Israel-Firsters,” and who would never question the Israeli government and its actions, such as the flotilla attack and killings of civilians. I think with some of the Israel loyalists, their priority is Israel ahead of the U.S. As Justin Raimondo noted today, the Israeli government has spied on the U.S., and done a number of other things that have gone against America’s interests. It is difficult to say for sure that the Israeli government really is on our side. While some people who have commented about “Israel-Firsters” have been seen as “conspiratorial,” I will have you know that I am NOT conspiratorial—just trying to be realistic about some people who have a lot of power and influence.

I don’t know whether the American Israel-loyalists have guilt feelings about the Holocaust, much like the “lily-white liberals” seem to have guilt feelings about anti-Black racism, but on some occasions I have sensed a “some of my best friends are Jews” subtlety when hearing some discussions of these matters on the radio. However, regarding the well-known Jewish neoconservative Israel-Firsters, the Kristol-Podhoretz-Perle-Wolfowitzes, I see more of a desire to love the U.S. government, love centralism and its bureaucracy, and the idea of U.S. government expansionism abroad, particularly in the oil-rich Middle-East, of which Israel is at the heart.

The American Israel-loyalists never seem to want to question the actions of the Israeli government, which tends to go with their attitude regarding anyone who questions the policies of the U.S. government’s “War on Terrorism.” Interesting how the conservatives and neoconservatives would say, “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists,” and if you question the Bush policies and their constitutionality or morality, then you’re “with the terrorists.”

Their pro-government authoritarianism retreats, however, when it is Obomber in charge, and the policy is something they don’t like, and then it’s okay to question the government.

With the neoconservatives and Israel-Firsters, there do not seem to be absolute laws of right and wrong, and, well, the U.S. government can do this or that abroad like use remote-control drones to bomb and kill innocent civilians because times are different now, we have do win the war on terrorism, or abandon the idea of presumption of innocence and violate a suspect’s rights even though it is just a suspect and his guilt has not been proven and it turns out the suspects are innocent in many cases. And we shouldn’t hold Israel up to any standards of international law, because, well, it’s Israel.

Israel actually didn’t have any moral authority to attack the flotilla in international waters, and didn’t even have any jurisdiction to give the flotilla the warnings that were given. Someone gave the suggestion (I don’t know if it was a caller to the Michael Savage show or it was on one of those other shows last night) that, while it was suggested that the flotilla ships were deliberately acting in a way as to dare the Israeli military to attack (to make Israel look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world), that, as absurd as it might sound, the Israeli government might have ordered the military and those helicopters to use the commandos to deliberately provoke the passengers as a way to make the Gaza aid activists look bad. I’m not suggesting that, I’m saying someone on the radio suggested that.

I don’t know why it’s considered anti-Israel to want to expose Israel’s apartheid of treating Palestinians as 2nd and 3rd class citizens, and how the blockade really is preventing necessary foods and medical aid from getting to the Gazans, despite what some people have been claiming to the contrary. Gaza is a “collective prison,” as the Israeli government has been persecuting and punishing a whole territory of civilians because of what a tiny extremist minority, Hamass, have been doing. And that is immoral and Israel should continue to be condemned for that.

Either Israel considers Gaza part of Israel and should “govern” accordingly, or Israel considers Gaza an independent sovereign nation and over which the Israeli government would have no jurisdiction or authority. You can’t have it both ways. What Israel has had is a material property ownership of human beings, imprisoned within an entire territory.

Unfortunately, some people take the word of government officials as the word of God, whether they be the Bush-Cheney officials, the Obama-Pelosi officials, the Netanyahu-Barak officials, etc. But, as Ronald Reagan has said, “Government is the problem.” It is the governments who cause conflicts, and it is the governments who do the persecuting of people, of minorities such as the Palestinian minority in Israel. It was the German Nazi regime that persecuted the Jews, and it was the Soviet regime who persecuted virtually everyone, and the U.S. government destroys entire countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan (and is destroying its own country as well), and it is the Israeli government who is persecuting the Palestinians. Governments are doing the invading and persecuting, not private organizations who don’t have the power of compulsion over others and legal authority and officialdom, and it certainly isn’t businesses who are expected to follow the rule of law, and have to answer to the bottom line, while governments do not.

June 3rd: Violence Begets Violence In Soviet Israel

I am referring to it as Soviet Israel because of the prison where the Israeli government has the entire population of the Gaza Strip locked up. In my previous post, I referred to Gaza as a “collective prison,” because the Israeli government and military really are keeping the entire population in a prison as a “collective punishment” for the crimes of Hamas. Some people object to the label of “collective prison.” The restrictions imposed on the Gazans’ movement by the Israeli government are severe, and they are literally forbidden from leaving the area. When you are held inside an area against your will, even though you are innocent of any wrongdoing, as are most of the population of the Gaza Strip, that is a prison. The Soviet Union literally kept people from escaping. Ronald Reagan wasn’t mincing words when he lectured Mikhail Gorbachev, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” What the Soviet monsters did to their own people is exactly what the Israeli government is doing to the Palestinians (and to some extent, the Israelis as well, because their freedom of movement is restricted, too).

The problem with the Israeli government is similar to the problems and dysfunction of the United States government. They consist of professional career bureaucrats and parasites who can’t see something that’s right in front of them. The U.S. bureaucrats can’t see that the increase in extremism and terrorism against the U.S. and the West in general over the past two decades is a direct result of the U.S. government’s intrusions, interventions and interferences of Middle-Eastern territories. The people of those territories have been reacting to those invasive actions by the U.S. government. It actually isn’t the other way around, despite what the self-centered, short-sighted politicians in Washington have convinced so many Americans to believe. The same thing goes for Israel. For decades, the Israeli government has been restrictive of Arabs and Palestinians and treating them as 2nd class citizens.

But if I go over onto my neighbor’s property and into his home to fix something I think should be fixed, against his will and without his consent, of course he’s going to react to my intrusions, no matter how well-meaning I might be.

Believe it or not, the parasitic politicians in Washington and Israel do not make decisions on a moral, economic or practical level, but rather on a political level. The Economist today reveals a little of that in Israel:

Within the cabinet, recriminations have begun. There were even brief mutterings among Binyamin Netanyahu’s aides about the impetuosity of Ehud Barak, the defence minister, who had decided on the operation. But these were quickly squelched. Plainly the prime minister is not prepared to target, and risk losing, the leader of the Labour Party who has become his close political ally.

The violence of U.S. government interventionism and interference, and trespassing in the Middle-East, and propping up dictators and oppressors, begets the violence of blowback against the U.S. And the Israeli government’s various contributions to the beginnings of Hamas have begotten  their own blowback, especially these past 3 years since the election of a group of murderous gangster thugs called Hamas as Gaza’s ruling government. If Israel is worried about arms smuggling to Hamas, they might consider arming the general civilian population of the Gaza Strip, and knowing that anyone around might blow their brains out if they act up, Hamas thugs might decide to not act up. I don’t know, it’s just a suggestion. “More guns, less crime,” as they say.

The U.S. government’s interferences and trespassing abroad go against the morals and principles of the American Founders. They believed in having respect for others, having respect for your neighbors and their lands—the Founders believed in the philosophy of Live and Let Live. They were against the U.S. government engaging in foreign entanglements with other governments. But the violence of interventions and intrusions begets violence. That’s how human nature works. We don’t like our lives and properties aggressed against and intruded upon.

But the difference between governments and private organizations is that governments have the power of compulsion over others. I know, I keep repeating these things, and I’ll continue to repeat these things until it really sinks in with people. The U.S. federal government’s intrusions into the lives of us Americans and into territories abroad is wrecking the United States of America. Our government is destroying us. The Tea Party movement protests Big Government—but, unfortunately, not when it comes to their beloved parasitic socialist military-industrial-complex. The Tea Party movement needs to stop loving THAT Big Government as well.

I am supportive of the Israeli people, but not their government. And I am supportive of the Palestinian people, but not their government. And I am as pro-America as anyone could possibly be, but I am not supportive of the U.S. government—an institution of parasitism, aggression, trespass and immorality.

June 5th: Useful Idiot? Who, Me?

These people are occupied.

–White House correspondent Helen Thomas, commenting about Gaza and Israel

Last night on his radio show, Michael Savage must have played the tape of Helen Thomas telling the Jews in Israel to go back to Poland and Germany, or come to America, about a thousand times. His comments about Thomas were not what you would expect of someone of his intelligence and advanced scholarship (Ph.D., 2 Masters degrees, an educated and trained botanist and an epidemiologist, and historian and sociologist, author of many books). Savage referred to Thomas as “Hitler in a girdle,” and talking of her and Jewish anti-Israel abettors, as being “useful idiots” and “useful tools” for an “International Communist Conspiracy.”

I think that Savage and others should give Helen Thomas a break. She’s almost 90. She said that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine,” referring to the land of Israel as being of the Arabs, and probably referring to the Jewish mass immigrations throughout the late 19th and 20th Centuries to the land of Israel. Savage made the point that the Jews were actually there thousands of years before that (at least as a majority). Well, if Savage wants to use that argument, then he would have to admit that the white Europeans came over to the North American continent and usurped and expropriated the lands here away from the natives who were originally here (presumably, for the same “thousands of years,” etc. etc.), but I don’t think he wants to do that. It’s complicated. Savage was also hypothetically comparing that to telling the black people in America to “go back to Africa,” which is an awful comparison. People have very good arguments on their side that lands in Israel were owned by Arabs, but were expropriated by the British Mandate and later the UN to house or relocate the immigrating Jews, but to compare that to Blacks who were brought over to America as property and made to be slaves? I don’t think so.

Savage is correct, in my opinion, that the leftist Obama supporters in America are “useful idiots” in promoting the Obommunists’ agenda in—and I’ll be blunt—organizing the government’s apparatus and its authority and power of compulsion over others to further enslave Americans more than they already are, and expropriate property and wealth from the working class and the producers to redistribute it (further) to the parasites, the professional bureaucrats, and the otherwise criminal class which is growing day by day now.

Now, I must object strongly to any characterization of ME as a “useful idiot” for Hamas, jihadists and Islamic extremists, etc., in my criticism of the Israeli government and what it has been doing to the Arabs and Palestinians of Israel and Gaza, and in my defense of the recent “Freedom Flotilla’s” right to pass through international waters and not be attacked by a gang of commando attackers (who actually began shooting from those helicopters), and the flotilla’s right to transport needed humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza Strip, who are only getting a pittance of aid from the Israeli government. (Among other things, Karen Kwiatkowski wondered whether the Israelis had heard of tasers.) The people who are siding with Israel on this matter are really siding with the Israeli government, and do not know just how badly the government has been treating the Arabs there, and such ill treatment has been going on for many decades. I acknowledge that, while most of the people on board those flotilla vessels were genuinely there to transport aid for Gazans, that there were some “jihadists,” and Hamas supporters there, and that there may have been an intention among some there to deliberately provoke the Israeli military. However, if you are in international waters, and you are attacked, then you have a right to defend yourself. It may very well be that the real “useful idiots” are the Israeli government who may be playing into the hands of Hamas.

Many people who support the Israeli government are the same people who support the U.S. government’s war on terrorism abroad, and, like saying that what motivates the terrorists and extremists against the U.S. is because “they hate us for our freedom and our values,” they would be saying that what motivates Hamas and other Palestinian anti-Jewish organizations against Israel is because of their being Jewish. It may be that the extremist Islamist Arabs just “hate Jews” and “want to destroy them,” but, if you have any knowledge of post-1948 Israel and have a capacity for long-term thinking, you would understand that what motivates the Palestinians against Israel is because of how—and I’ll be blunt about this, too—the Jewish majority has been literally persecuting the Arab minority there, and such ill treatment has only been increasing in the last decade, and especially since nudnik Ariel Sharon forced the Jews out of Gaza in 2005. Within the Jewish Israeli community, anti-Arab racism/ethnicism/religionism has been on the increase, including the anti-Arab racism in Israeli schoolbooks, just as you would see the anti-Jewish racism in the Palestinian schoolbooks. Israel has become a society divided culturally, racially, religiously and ethnically. So what motivates the Arabs is primarily their reaction to the way they have been treated over generations now. It can compare to what motivates the Islamic terrorists against the U.S: it’s not because “they hate us for our freedom,” but because of many, many decades of intrusions into their territories and their societies by the U.S. government.

Many people in America get their information on the events in Israel from the Israeli media, who get their information, or more accurately, propaganda, from the Israeli government. Because of this, people just don’t know that the Israeli government have been literally preventing the Gazans from rebuilding their water and sewage treatment facilities, and, besides the economic sanctions imposed on the people of the Gaza Strip that have impoverished them, and the police state with which Israel has the Gazans locked in so no one can leave the area, the people there are living in unsanitary conditions with untreated water. I mentioned this a few days ago in this space, but I will repeat it. This is exactly like what the U.S. government did to the Iraqis in the 1990s following the elder President Bush’s invasion in 1990-91 of Iraq, the destruction of Iraq’s water and sewage treatment infrastructure, and subsequent sanctions and literally preventing the Iraqis from rebuilding the damaged infrastructure. And that was before the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq that further destroyed that country. The treatment of the Gazans by the Israelis now is as disgusting and rotten as was the treatment of Iraqis by the U.S. government throughout the 1990s!

There are some people who have been calling neoconservatives “useful idiots” for their support of the socialist military-industrial-complex, but it may be that the neoconservatives could be “useful idiots” for both the communistic one-world-government crackpots and the Islamic extremist nutsos as well. Just as the Israelis may be playing into the hands of Hamas as mentioned above, the American neoconservatives may have been playing into the hands of the Islamists and Al-Qaeda, by, instead of recognizing that the terrorists have been reacting to all the intrusions and trespassing into their territories by the U.S. government for many decades and thus stop doing that, the neoconservatives have been supporting MORE intrusions and invasions into the Middle-East with such actions not only eliciting MORE motivations against America but ending up wrecking the United States of America, which is what Al-Qaeda and other wackos want. Additionally, after the neoconservatives transferred their (alleged) hate of communism to Islamic extremists because of the end of the Cold War, the neoconservatives have actually become the communists they hate by engaging in such a Big Government socialist expansionism of the centralized, bureaucratic U.S. government at home and abroad, expanding the reach of the U.S. government into other territories just as the Soviet communists did, AND the neoconservatives having the U.S. government spy on (and engage in assassinations, torture and indefinite detention without due process) their fellow citizens which the Soviet communists also did. Such actions have been feeding the One-Worlder wacko New World Order commie-fascists (like the Bushes and the Wolfowitz-Perle-Kristol-Podhoretzes, as well as the Krugman-Alinsky-Clinton Obommunists).

I hear so many conservatives preaching about “moral values,” but I haven’t been hearing any of them speaking out against the terrible, immoral treatment of the Palestinians especially in Gaza by the Israeli government, or speaking out against the CIA’s use of remote-control drone bombings and murder of innocent human beings in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

June 6th: You Should Believe the Israeli Military Edited Videos

For those people, such as particularly Glenn Beck, who have been criticizing critics such as myself of the Israeli government’s siege of the Gaza aid flotilla, who really believe that the video produced and distributed by the Israeli government speaks for itself, I have this to say. The video of the incident was edited and shown by the military soon after the siege, and it lacks the context of what exactly led up to the shootings. Witnesses claimed that the Israeli commandos began shooting from the helicopters before boarding the ship, as could be evidenced by one of the shooting victims who was shot in the top of the head, and the commandos were then shooting at close range.

Too bad that some people immediately rush to believe everything that the government tells them, and dismiss those who believe that it is always necessary to question government officials’ word, including videos that THEY produce, edit and distribute. If you don’t think the Israeli military should be questioned on this, then why was it necessary for them to confiscate all of the passengers’ cameras, cell phones, laptops, etc. (as opposed to just confiscating weapons, etc.) and engage in radio jamming to shut off passengers’ communications with the outside, and engage in the censorship that the military did?

When Obama, Cass Sunstein, Elena Cajun, the FTC and FCC begin to censor conservative Internet websites and blogs, you’ll be whistling a different tune, and maybe THEN you’ll begin to question the validity of what governments and their agents do or tell you — in the name of security, or whatever — and maybe THEN you’ll stop blindly accepting the word of government officials.

June 6th: Equality For Israel and Iran

A few days ago I posted a link to Stephen Kinzer’s article that suggested we hold Israel to the same standard as Iran.

…It is always difficult to compare the danger one country poses to global security with that posed by another, and it is natural to treat old friends differently from longtime enemies. Israel is a far more open and free society than Iran. Millions of Americans feel personally tied to its fate. Nonetheless the contrast in American attitudes toward the two countries is striking. Toward Israel the attitude is: You may be rascals sometimes, but whatever pranks you pull, you’re our friend and we’ll forgive you. Toward Iran, it’s the opposite: You are our implacable enemy, so nothing you do short of abject surrender will satisfy us….

…Treating Israel and Iran more equally would also mean judging their nuclear programs by equivalent standards. If Israel and Iran are placed under the same set of rigorous nuclear safeguards, the Middle East will quickly become a safer place.

In the same spirit of equality, the world should do whatever possible to encourage higher human-rights standards in Israel and Iran. Ruling groups in both countries treat some honest critics as traitors or terrorists. They rule without the tolerance that illuminates Jewish and Persian history…

I have heard people say that such a suggestion of holding Israel up to the same standards as Iran is an insult to Israel, and an absurd suggestion. However, I happen to be someone who does not believe in the moral relativism of expecting some groups to follow rules but not other groups. I believe in equal justice under the law. We should all be expected to follow the same rules with no exceptions.

Hasn’t Glenn Beck been emphasizing “equal justice” a lot recently? He’s been criticizing the Obommunists and their views of social justice, which is not equal justice. I assume that Beck is referring to “equal treatment under the law,” at least I hope so. That applies to individuals, and I believe that the same kind of equal treatment should be for nations, like Israel, Iran and the United States. Israel should follow the same rules regarding nuclear weapons as the U.S. is pressuring on Iran. However, Israel has not been wanting to even admit publicly that their country possesses nuclear weapons, and refuses to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Unfortunately, governments of countries such as Israel and the United States have been excused from various violations of laws, rights and procedures that they expect others to follow. I wonder how the U.S. government would react if they heard that the Iranian military were killing innocent civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan with remote-controlled drone bombs. And I wonder how the world would react if a country were to “lock in” their Jewish population, as the Israeli government has locked in the Gaza Palestinians so they are prevented from getting out.

And how much does the history of Jews being persecuted play a role in the Israeli government’s getting away with its treatment of the Palestinians and especially Gazans (as discussed in this space in recent days)? In the U.K. Independent, Antony Lerman wrote,

…A team led by Professor Daniel Bar Tal of Tel Aviv University, one of the world’s leading political psychologists, questioned Israeli Jews about their memory of the conflict with the Arabs, from its inception to the present, and found that their “consciousness is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering”. The researchers found a close connection between that collective memory and the memory of “past persecutions of Jews” and the Holocaust, the feeling that “the whole world is against us”….

…Early in January this year, Israel’s former Mossad chief and former national security adviser, Efraim Halevy, said: “If Israel’s goal were to remove the threat of rockets from the residents of southern Israel, opening the border crossings would have ensured such quiet for a generation.” Daniel Levy, former adviser in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, shows clearly where the wrong choices were made: withdrawing from Gaza without co-ordinating the “what next” with the Palestinians; hermetically sealing off Hamas and besieging Gaza after the 2006 elections instead of testing Hamas’s capacity to govern responsibly…

…(I)f we pause to think of the suffering of a dying Jewish child in the ghetto and a dying Palestinian child in Gaza, who would dare to suggest that their suffering is any different. Yet, as Professor Baron seems to imply, we fall all too easily into the trap of thinking that there is something unique about Jewish suffering. There isn’t.

While there probably are Nazi Holocaust survivors and Soviet Gulag survivors  still living in Israel, much of Israel’s population never did experience actual persecution. Rather, those who do not know what it’s like to be the victim of actual persecution were taught about that history from schools and from their elders. But what further teachings were or are instilled in Israeli Jews during their upbringing? If there is such a condition as a “persecution complex,” could that make it easier for someone to himself persecute those among a particular minority? And how much far off could a persecution complex be from a superiority complex?

I ask those questions, because, while we tend to hear so much of how Iran or more specifically Iran’s leader Ahmadinejad wants to “wipe Israel off the map” (which itself may not be accurate), apparently with nuclear weapons, I have seen suggestions that Israel should initiate not only an attack on Iran but a nuclear strike on Iran, and I’ve seen a lot of nasty versions of those calls in comments sections of articles such as at the Jerusalem Post. Such an action may now be closer to reality. Now in the 21st Century and supposedly a modern era of great progress since the times of the neanderthals, I can’t remember hearing such attitudes of dehumanizing aimed towards others of different ethnic or nationalistic heritages, with the most simple-minded rationalizations of such attitudes, and calls for violence to be initiated against them.

There are people who, for some reason, think it is less immoral to mass murder innocent Iranians or Pakistanis than it is to mass murder innocent Israelis or Americans.

I, however, stand for equality and equal justice.

June 9th: The Police State of Israel

The nearly unanimous backing of the Israeli military’s siege of the Gaza aid flotilla last week by America’s conservatives is continuing this week. As I wrote in this space a few days ago, many people have been persuaded by the Israeli government’s careful manipulating of events since the beginning of the siege, especially from the Israeli-produced video of the events that did not include the actual beginning of the actions (video of the commandos already shooting from their helicopter before landing on the ship). It seems to be more of an emotional tie to Israel, rather than a rational and objective view of both Israel and Gaza, that keeps so many people believing of the Israeli government’s propaganda, and conservative talk host and columnist Dennis Prager is no exception:

…Though Hamas runs a theocratic police state based on torture and terror, though it recognizes no freedom of speech and no freedom for any religious expression outside of radical Islam, though it seeks to annihilate the Jewish state, and though its state-controlled media depict Israelis and Jews as worthy of death, the world sees Israel, not Hamas, as the villain.

Let’s hope the world is right…

…Turning to American newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, in its editorial, posed some deep questions. Here are three:

“Were the boats ferrying novelists and Nobel Peace Prize winners and elderly Holocaust survivors, as news accounts have suggested, or seething Israel haters, as defenders of the raid would have us believe?”

Apparently, the Los Angeles Times believes that novelists, Nobel Peace Prize winners, and elderly Holocaust survivors cannot be “seething Israel-haters.”

A lot of the support for the Israeli government’s actions really was based on the edited video that the Israeli military produced and provided to the news media. Those who try to be objective in all this have asked: if this situation of commandos approaching the ship (albeit already shooting) and then being beaten by ship’s passengers and in turn commandos shooting at the beaters is such a clear-cut case (even though the commandos’ shooting preceded the beating), then why was it necessary for the commandos to confiscate all the passengers’ cameras, cell phones radios and laptops? Investigative journalist Philip Weiss had this update yesterday on that situation:

Today I tuned in on an Institute for Middle East Understanding presser that included Huwaida Arraf, longtime Palestinian-American activist, and filmmaker Iara Lee relating their experiences in Israeli custody following their arrests on the flotilla.

Both women said that their recording equipment had been seized by the Israelis: blackberries, laptops, hard-drives, cameras, phones. And held by them. “We demand that all our equipment get returned to us,” Iara Lee, who is described online as being Korean-Brazilian, said, and then she said that some of the passengers’ recordings were being used, heavily edited, on the Israeli hasbara youtube broadcasts aimed at painting the flotilla as jihadists.

Arraf, who has American and Israeli citizenship, told of being freed at the port and refusing to get into an Israeli truck until her computer and phone were returned to her. She sat down on the floor. Then she was beaten and dragged and forced on to the truck, and dumped outside the port. Later she was treated for her injuries, which she now dismisses, as others suffered more.

What is our government doing about this? When will the passengers get their equipment back? What shape will it be in? Look, here is the Committee to Protect Journalists denouncing Israel’s use of confiscated footage. And how can anyone trust the Israelis to conduct an investigation of this episode if they have already seized and misrepresented evidence so as to manipulate the court of international opinion?

Lee will be having a press briefing showing some uncensored footage of the flotilla tomorrow afternoon at the U.N. in New York.

I really don’t understand the Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. people, who will believe whatever the Israeli government tells them, just like those who will believe whatever the U.S. government tells them. And it seems that, no matter how many cases of Israeli spies against the United States that come up, that’s okay, because Israel is our “friend” in the Middle-East. There has been an ongoing case of a young Israeli named Anat Kamm who is on trial for espionage against her own country, because, during her time as a military clerk, she burned classified information to CD and made copies of material and gave them to a Haaretz newspaper reporter, Uri Blau, whose report of the military’s alleged wrongdoing was published by Haaretz. Ms. Kamm explained,

There were some aspects of the IDF’s operational procedures in the West Bank that I felt should be public knowledge…

…When I was burning the CDs I kept thinking that history tends to forgive people who expose war crimes…

Apparently, Kamm isn’t being accused of spying on behalf of another country, but she is being accused of compromising Israel’s security by releasing those documents. It seems, however, that she genuinely believed that some of the military’s actions were wrong, even criminal, and she believed that it was her duty to make that public. If we citizens here in the U.S. suspect that government or military officials are engaged in some kind of wrongdoing, wouldn’t the moral thing be to expose those corrupt or even dangerous public officials? I wonder what Dennis Prager thinks of this situation, given that he has spent much time on his radio show discussing issues of morality. British journalist Jonathan Cook puts it this way:

During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig. Gen. Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.

Really, Anat Kamm is on trial for embarrassing high officials, as well as exposing possible corruption, incompetence or high crimes. And similarly, the U.S. military is now charging a U.S. soldier for being a “whistleblower.”

Now, given that Israel has spied on the U.S. so many times now, there are times that the United States perhaps ought to exercise greater caution in the choosing of military advisors. For example, former CIA officer Philip Giraldi has raised doubts about a principle advisor to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, Dr. Lani Kass, who was born and raised in Israel and was a major officer of the Israeli air force and in more recent years has been working in the U.S. Department of Defense, apparently concentrating on cyber-warfare and issues related to possible war with Iran. Giraldi notes about Kass:

…She comes from a country that has a history of large scale and highly aggressive espionage directed against the United States and she appears to continue to have close ties to her birthplace.  Dr. Kass has become a naturalized American while apparently retaining her Israeli citizenship and her three children were reportedly born in Israel, not the United States.  The information she has access to would be extremely valuable to Israel and potentially damaging to US interests, particularly as she likely knows what the US Air Force response to a unilateral Israeli attack on Iran would be…

So we have in Israel a young lady (Anat Kamm) who thought it was her duty to expose possible incompetence at best and war crimes at worst but who is herself being charged with espionage and is being called a traitor by many among the Israeli population, who apparently love their government more than they love their country and prefer to not question the judgment of military officials, just as many people in America do not want to question the judgment of government officials (including those who knowingly gave false information to get the U.S. to war with Iraq). And we have a very influential U.S. military advisor whose loyalty might be more to Israel than to the United States.

At the same time, we can’t question the judgment of the Israeli military who could very well have disabled the flotilla ship and prevented it from continuing to get through the Gaza blockade but instead chose to begin shooting from the helicopter and attack the ship and murder several passengers, including one American who was shot in the head five times. And many people are satisfied with the Israeli military’s edited video while at the same time could not have seen any other videos from passengers given that all the passengers’ videos and cameras and cell phones were confiscated by the military.

That reminds me of how, here in the U.S., we are not allowed to videotape police officers making arrests (or allegedly harassing citizens or worse), but at the same time, our government can have surveillance cameras and keep us under careful watch, and worse than that given there are government officials who want to force us to carry biometric IDs. As Justin Raimondo of Antiwar.com has noted, and several times, it’s a “bizarro world,” and this stuff with Israel, this Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. is probably the most bizarre I’ve seen yet.

The Israel-First-Above-the-U.S. crowd doesn’t want to deal with the fact that Israel is virtually a police state, just as is America, and more and more each day. The Soviet Union kept their people enslaved and they were made to be serfs of the State, kept in the tightly guarded prison and no one could escape—it is the same situation in which the Israeli government are keeping the Palestinians. And, just as the Soviet Union stifled dissent, so they do also in Israel. And if Barack Obomber, Peggy Cass Sunstein and Elena Cajun have their way, you betchya they’ll be stifling dissent in the good ol’ USA, big time.

As Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s own nephew, Jonathan Ben-Artzi, after having served 18 months in prison for being a military conscription conscientious objector, and now studying for a Ph.D. in the U.S., wrote,

…. Israel pumps drinking water from occupied territory (in violation of international law). Israelis use as much as four times more water than Palestinians, while Palestinians are not allowed to dig their own wells and must rely on Israeli supply.

Civil freedom is no better: In an effort to break the spirit of Palestinians, Israel conducts sporadic arrests and detentions with no judicial supervision…

…We must remove travel restrictions from West Bank Palestinians. How can we live in peace with a population where most children cannot visit their grandparents living in the neighboring village, without being stopped and harassed at military checkpoints for hours?…

…. If Americans truly are our friends, they should shake us up and take away the keys, because right now we are driving drunk, and without this wake-up call, we will soon find ourselves in the ditch of an undemocratic, doomed state.

It is inherent in totalitarian regimes to suppress speech, stifle dissent and the press, and throw in jail those who attempt to expose the incompetence, corruption and treason of the agents of the State and its hired guns the police and military. These are the reasons why Thomas Jefferson wrote the greatest document in the history of humankind, the Declaration of Independence, and why the writers of the U.S. Constitution were forced (kicking and screaming) by the States to include a Bill of Rights.

In America, the biggest threat to all those people in government is, yes, the Tea Partiers. The Tea Party movement will be the biggest threat to those fascist parasites, totalitarians and slobbering dirtbags of the State.

(Israel needs a Tea Party movement.)