Lies, Damned Lies, and the ACLJ

You know, if you want to defend the legality of an action, you should probably not make your argument so ridiculous that it hurts your credibility.

Yet here we are.

Never mind the whole "it's not collective punishment" bit; I wouldn't expect a lawyer to be able to explain how cardamon and margarine are used in the production of bunkers, but whatever. How on EARTH can he pretend that the Gazans isn't an occupied, subject people when Israel has completely military control over the territory?

Gaza is not sovereign, not even close, and if it isn't sovereign then by definition it is occupied. And, yes, sovereignty matters; the United States is not permitted under international law to do whatever it feels like on sovereign territory to chase Al Qaeda; it either works with the sovereign states that actually control the territory (like Pakistan or Afghanistan) or goes into conflict with the sovereign states because they're helping Al Qaeda.  Either way, it all comes down to who controls the territory: and in the case of Gaza, Israel does.

I was also really amused by the selective quotation of San Remo. If he knew about San Remo, and was drawing on San Remo (which may not even apply: that's a state-to-state conflict doctrine), San Remo makes it perfectly clear that you can't blockade goods in a way that causes disproportionate harm to the military benefits. Anybody and everybody can see that the harm is disproportionate. Under the law that he cited himself, the blockade is illegal.

"Kill All Arabs! Kill All Arabs!"

This is a bit of video I wish I hadn't seen. It's from the port of Ashdod. The title quote is a direct one.
In addition to the "Kill all Arabs" bit, we also get to see one of the pro-IDF protesters harass a young, scared Arabic-looking woman, and another attempt to assault an Arabic-looking man.

Other choice quotes:
"You know what the Israeli Army is guilty of? It's not whipping off the whole ship and killing everyone".

"Next time it will be you", aimed at the girl. She was later told that she was a "cockroach" and to "go find a man to fuck".

My favorite, of course, "Death to the leftists! Death to the leftists!"

As I said in response to the Sully piece, this isn't new, or surprising, or rare. It's tribal identification: "us" vs. "them". Sooner or later "they" stop being people. They become "cockroaches".

Which, by the by, is the slander the Hutu inciters were using to egg on the slaughter of Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide.

No, it's not new, or novel, or surprising. But damned if it isn't depressing.

Sully on the "Israel Derangement Syndrome"

I'd missed this piece about how Israel is thought of in the United States, but it's also worth linking to and quoting. First, he gets into the religious right:

for much of the Republican right, Israel simply isn't a foreign country at all. For many Christianists, it is part of a civilizational war of Judeo-Christianity (an obvious oxymoron) against Islam. Not Islamism, Islam. Ever wonder why Sarah Palin, the next GOP nominee, wore a twinned Israeli-American flag lapel for an address to the Tea Party convention? Ever wonder why every rule we normally apply to foreign countries is automatically suspended when it comes to Israel?

This is undeniably true. If anything, it's understated: I suspect that the most important book for American foreign policy these days is not anything Morgenthau wrote, but Left Behind. Millennialism has more impact than we give it credit for.

But then he gets into the sensitive issue of Jewish Americans and their relationship with Israel:

The other dimension is the deep and understandable commitment of many American Jews, particularly of the older generation, to Israel, right or wrong. You listen to Anthony Weiner, for example, a left-liberal Democratic firebrand on almost every issue, suddenly becoming an uber-neoconservative in foreign policy in one area, and one area alone: Israel. The idea of a Jewish congressman actually taking Israel's policies on is close to absurd. Name one. This is not a conspiracy. It is a mindset.

I grabbed some food the other night with a longtime Jewish friend. We had an honest conversation - the kind you cannot have on US television. He's a big liberal but strongly sided with Israel in this latest incident. Why? "They're my people." But you're an American, I countered, you're not an Israeli, let alone a supporter of Netanyahu. None of that mattered to him. His attachment to Israel was indistinguishable from his attachment to America, and, if push came to shove, Israel came first, right or wrong. This had been dinned into him since childhood. His iPhone was deluged with texts from relatives and friends all appalled by any criticism of the commando attack, and immediately seeing it as anti-Semitic or designed to end the state of Israel for ever.

To charge dual loyalty is described as a blood libel, a vile anti-Semitic charge, and it often is. But my friend was very frank about it and unapologetic. That's just the way it is, he said.

This is a disturbing topic for me. I have no tolerance for this idea that "the jews did x", or "the jews feel y". Even in this time where Israeli public opinion is slamming rightward, there are still a LOT of Israelis who not only despise the IDF's actions aboard the flotilla, but are protesting against it.  And as Peter Beinart pointed out, claiming ubiquity of opinion among American Jews these days is even more wrongheaded, since a division is growing between younger liberal Jewish-Americans who have had enough of this tribalist cant, and their older counterparts who, in Beinart's opinion, "check their liberalism at Zionism’s door." (And the conservatives who only cheer Israel on.)

Yet I do think that Sullivan has a point. Culture does not impose ubiquity and does not justify stereotyping or collective punishment, but it can have an effect. 

Sullivan goes on to discuss the Shoah and its effects; I'll pick up afterwards.

But the fanaticism and emotionalism that many Jewish Americans have with respect to Israel is so intense that, for some, it overwhelms rationality, and makes a cool strategic analysis of America's national interest close to impossible. Their total identification with Israel is often emotionally as strong, if not stronger, as their identification with America.

And this tragically means that an honest disagreement with Israel's policies is sometimes taken as a breach of friendship, a profound personal betrayal, rather than a moral and political judgment about the actions of a foreign country. It means that the head of the Mossad can be more rational in his assessment of US national interest than Joe Biden. You reach a brick wall in this. And we might as well admit it.

It has pained me enormously to have obviously hurt my countless Jewish friends and colleagues because I cannot support, morally or strategically, the actions of Israel these past two years, and especially its virulent disdain for the new American president who represented, it seems to me, the best chance for Israel in decades. I realize that the difference is that while I admire and support Israel, I do not identify with it. For me, it is a foreign country and an ally. To them it is something far more profound and indelible. So when I attack Israel's policies, it feels as if I am attacking them. I really am not. But I cannot erase how they feel; and I understand why they feel it.

A lot of this is about identification. The people and places and things you identify with have a profound impact on what sorts of arguments you are going to find acceptable.  I don't necessarily agree that "their identification with Israel is stronger than their identification with America"; I think many of Israel's American advocates see no difference whatsoever. Israel and America are two sides of the same coin; two "shining cities on the hill" in a world of darkness.  They aren't just allies, but friends and brothers.  To benefit Israel IS to benefit America, and the rest of the world can go hang. (As we've seen here.)

That's how any conflicts or "libels" can be resolved: you don't have "divided" loyalties. You have one loyalty: to "Israel-America."

(This is, by the way, not to say that Israel dictates American foreign policy or domestic policy or any of that nonsense.  It's just about identification.)

Sully goes on again, discussing his own situation:

Tribalism, of course, is universal. It is by no means the exclusive property of Jewish Americans. Irish-Americans retain a similar knee-jerk alliance with entities that plenty of people in Ireland find repugnant - just as Israelis are far more candid in their debates than Americans are. Trust me, in my own family, I know the nature of this kind of identification and the righteousness of it in many instances.

People these days tend to forget the "Troubles", and what it meant to Irish-Americans. A lot of the accusations that are levelled at Jewish-Americans today about "divided loyalties" and an over-focus on what was going on in the Home Country were far more accurate when it came to Irish-Americans. Without Irish-American fundraising, for example, the various armed groups and militias (and, yes, terrorist orgs) that fought in Northern Ireland would have closed up shop long, long before that conflict ended.  People were openly supportive of the IRA and its various militant offshoots—and let us not forget, that was a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants.
That's something that a lot of Jewish-Americans who lose their minds at the accusation of over-identification with Israel seem to forget. While the Holocaust was a unique evil, and the plight of the Jews during their years without a homeland was tragic, this sense of nationalist identification isn't unique at all. It happens with Turks and Irishmen, Indians and Chinese, Serbs and Lebanese, Greeks and Colombians, Cubans and Bosnians. It happens with EVERYBODY. 

It's not special. It's common. Boringly, dully common.

Go read the whole piece. It's excellent, even if I disagree with a lot of it. There's an excerpt from Glenn Greenwald, for example, that I didn't cover but is worth checking out. I still have no idea what's happened to Sully, but I won't complain.

Sully on Krauthammer's "Derangement Syndrome"

So what the hell HAPPENED to Andrew Sullivan, anyway? I still don't get how the arch-Bush-apologist go to this point.

Anyway:

To read Charles Krauthammer today is to enter a twilight zone of an alternate reality. A country permanently occupying and colonizing a neighboring region, and treating its original inhabitants as dangerous interlopers, is the victim. An elite commando unit attacking a ship carrying toys and wheelchairs in the hours before dawn are those we should feel pity for. A country with 150 nuclear warheads and the strongest military in its region, the victor in every conventional war it has always fought, is somehow also always fighting for its very existence. A country backed by the sole superpower, supplied with aid by huge majorities in the US Congress, is facing extinction. Self-defense requires not civilly disabling and inspecting the cargo of an unarmed ship but raiding it at dawn and killing nine and injuring dozens. Basic human revulsion at a military that can kill over a thousand people - including scores of women and children in a trapped, impoverished enclave - can only be a function of anti-Semitism. A territory that is being systematically populated with Israelis in illegal settlements in contravention of the Geneva Conventions is merely a "buffer zone". You need to colonize buffer zones?

Invasion and occupation of neighboring countries is "forward defense". And asking that a two-state solution be moved forward by freezing illegal settlement construction and allowing a blockade that, while interdicting arms, doesn't seek to kill civilians and restrict the import of basic necessities is to deprive a country with 150 nuclear warheads of any legitimate form of self-defense.

This is a form of derangement, or of such a passionate commitment to a foreign country that any and all normal moral rules or even basic fairness are jettisoned. And you will notice one thing as well: no regret whatsoever for the loss of human life, just as the hideous murder of so many civilians in the Gaza war had to be the responsibility of the victims, not the attackers. There is no sense of the human here; just the tribe.

Something has been wrong here for a very long time, and now it is inescapable. Until the discourse is rescued from the victims of Israel Derangement Syndrome, Israel and America will slowly be drawn into wars they cannot ultimately win, lose every other ally they ever had, and embolden and fortify the very Islamist forces we are seeking to defuse and defeat.

Nothing to argue with here. Krauthammer's piece really is insane: the sort of "forward defense" he advocates is reminiscent of Stalin crushing Eastern Europe to keep his "buffer" against the West, and his version of "active defense" is near-Orwellian in its avoidance of anything like the words "attack" or "aggression"...despite the fact that it would just as easily justify a carpet-bombing campaign.

And then, naturally, he calls everybody who disagrees with him or criticizes Israel Nazis, who are absolutely panting for another Holocaust. Which is utterly offensive to both the Holocaust's survivors and everybody else. Nothing new there: it's Krauthammer.

Honestly. Krauthammer has been a nutball since the Cold War, but this is really beyond the pale.

That Audio Track That the IDF Released? Fake. (Edit: Longer Version Released. Still Fake.)

You may have heard it. (I won't link to it.) It was pretty transparently bullshit; the American accent at the end alone sounds like something a Brit would do when making fun of American accents. And no American ever says "We're helping the Arabs, don't forget 9/11." People on the American RIGHT are constantly invoking 9/11, so what the hell is THAT doing there?

(And, for that matter, why would he say "arabs"? There's no way flotilla activists would say that instead of "Palestinians". Pro-palestinian activists get really annoyed when you call Palestinians just another set of arabs.

But, anyway, now we have what appears to be confirmation.

Tel Aviv - Ma'an - The Israeli army released video footage Monday of the navy radioing the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara prior to the raid that took place in international waters and left at least nine activists dead.

But on Friday, it released a new version of the same footage — one that it says proves its claims that many aboard were religious extremists — but that some say has been very obviously tampered with.

In the first video released in the immediate aftermath of the violent raid, a soldier says, "Mavi Marmara, you are approaching an area of hostility which is under a naval blockade." There is no recorded response.

The soldier continues, "The Gaza area, coastal region, and Gaza harbor are closed to all maritime traffic." Again, no response.

The soldier radios once more, saying, "The Israeli government supports delivery of humanitarian supplies to the civilian population in the Gaza Strip and invites you to enter the Ashdod port …"

But an updated version, released five days later, includes three alleged responses from passengers who, according to the video, were supposedly on board the Mavi Marmara. This new clip shows only a still of the soldier who appears in the first footage.

The soldier, who is not named, does not address the Mavi Marmara as he did in the video released Monday. Instead, he says, "This is the Israeli navy; you are approaching an area which is under a naval blockade."

A man with an odd, indistinct accent responds, "Shut up. Go back to Aushwitz."

Then the voice of a woman follows. She states, "We have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter."

The third response, which seems entirely disconnected from the events, comes from a man with a heavy Southern accent. "We're helping Arabs go against the US. Don't forget 9/11 guys."

Ali Abuminah, founder of the website Electronic Intifada, reported on his blog that the woman's voice is that of Huwaida Arraf.

Arraf, a Palestinian-American who chairs the Free Gaza Movement, confirmed that it was her voice. But she emphasized that she was on the Challenger 1 boat, not the Mavi Marmara.

"I was by the radio the whole time there was any communication," Arraf told Ma'an. "Mine was the only boat in which I answered and not the captain and they all answered in a very professional manner."

Arraf told Ma'an that while she might have spoken of having permission from the Gaza Port Authority on a previous attempt to break the blockade, she is certain that she did not say it on Monday morning.

"When they radioed us, we were still 100 miles away," she said. "There's no doubt that this whole thing they put out is fabricated."

One HUNDRED miles away. And on a different day.

Now, let's remember this little incident the next time somebody cites the IDF's pre-packaged propaganda as proof of ANYTHING involving this incident.

Anyway, here's Ali Abunimah on the subject, and here's Max Blumenthal on what it means when the press "releases doctored audio as fact".

Edit: The IDF released a "clarification": that the audio was over an "open channel", so Arraf might have spoken. That might have helped resolve it; but considering she didn't say that on Monday morning, it doesn't really help much.

They posted a longer version of the clip that is supposedly "unedited". Seemed convincing at first, but unfortunately, it's not enough. All three clips (the Arraf clip, the "auschwitz" clip, and the "9/11" clip) are led and followed by completely dead air. It would be trivial to edit it in. The Arraf one, as we know, wasn't even from Monday, so it must have been edited in.

In fact, I'd say that if you just listen to them, they don't seem right. All three are far too loud, for one thing. The other comments are muted and indistinct. You can barely hear them. But these three are as loud and clear as if they were in the next room. The "9/11" one doesn't even sound like it's coming in over a radio; it sounds like it was recorded in a studio. They're louder and clearer than the Israeli speaker himself!

Listen to the languages, as well. Notice something? The only English spoken in that entire clip that I noticed, aside from the IDF guy, is spoken in those three clips. ALL of the rest of them were, I believe, in Arabic. (Possibly Turkish.) And yet, magically, there are these three English clips and ONLY these three English clips. (edit: okay, there was one other english clip. See below.)

Two had perfect audio, perfectly offensive comments, perfect english, and perfectly terrible accents. Another, apparently, traveled through time.

No, sorry, I don't believe it. Not after the IDF went to such immense trouble to steal activist reporters' footage and selectively use it for their own ends. Not after that BS about Al Qaeda ties. Not without independent confirmation that anybody would have said something as bizarre as "we're helping the arabs, remember 9/11" or "shut up, go back to Auschwitz" in such bizarre parodies of American and Arabic accents.

Sorry. Don't buy it.

Edit:  Apparently there was another English speaker on that recording. But, uh, there appears to be a problem...

In the new audio released on Saturday, a man's voice comes over the radio at 1:56 saying "Yeah go ahead, navy." Oddly, the same voice reappears at 2:24 saying the same thing. The intonation of his voice is the same in both places.

The Israeli military also did not explain the discrepancy between the video released on June 4th, and the one it released on May 31st, which depicts the same Israeli soldier apparently contacting the Mavi Marmara over the radio, in which the "Auschwitz" and 9/11 comments do not appear.

Bolding is mine.

Whoops.

See why you shouldn't seize recording equipment, guys? Yes, it does mean that you can doctor stuff. But it's not worth the embarrassment of being found out, and even if you don't doctor, you ain't gonna get the benefit of the doubt.

The "Rachel Corrie" Got Boarded (or Not)

The ship was taken over by the IDF without any violence. (For a change).

Or so the buzz seems to imply on Twitter, anyway. They shut off communications again, so who knows what's really going on. Other twitters seem to imply that the ship has NOT been boarded.

Either way, the autopsy of the dead activists is showing that they were not only gunned down from close range for the most part, but at least one was shot from behind. Lovely.

"Three Hours Later, They Ended Up Dying"

The account from Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal contains a chilling moment. It's at about 4:30 in this video.

They stood outside the cabin...people put up signs in English, in Hebrew, saying 'we have injured in here', they waved white flags, a Knesset soldier said 'they have injured' yet the Israelis refused...three hours later, they ended up dying.

He said "aside from bars, there were no weapons." I still don't buy that many had knives. If any did. (Yes, there is that one shot in that one video of a guy with a broken bottle prior to the raid; we don't know whether he ended up using it, or was told to throw it out.)

He also said that "once the three soldiers had been taken captive, the intensity of the fighting increased...the organizers said that the soldiers be released lest the passengers be inflicted more harm". This fits the "commandos tossed ROEs out the window" scenario; the soldiers became terrified that some of their own could become hostages, and discarded all concern for the other passengers' safety in their rush to "rescue" their compatriots.

(Who were having their wounds treated, actually, but never mind.)

The best part, though, was when the soldier told him to soil his own clothing if he needed to urinate. At least he wasn't kicked around for his daring to ask to use a toilet. He said that others were. The lack of legal representation or consular support is just par for the course...but I wasn't expecting that he would be told to piss himself.

Then again, he's one of those nasty browns, isn't he? The guard was probably surprised he even knew what a toilet is.

So Now We Know What's Happened to the Tapes

The IDF are deliberately re-editing and re-contextualizing the material, using it as propaganda.

Here is a good post regarding the IDF clips on the New York Times lede blog. Robert Mackey notes in it that the images the army released lack context. My only remark is that they were deliberately taken out of context.

The way Israel is withholding information is very troubling. If the army has nothing to hide, why not release the material? Naturally, Israel is also refusing to address the bigger questions, such as why the flotilla was attacked in international waters, and if so, whether the passengers actually had the right to resist the soldiers’ attempt to board their vessel.

The worse effect of this PR war is on the Israeli public, which now views the entire flotilla as a terrorist enterprise. One can see the effect of this nationalistic mood in the way the members of Knesset almost physically attacked MK Zoabi today (video here). In fact, the government’s campaign was so successful, many protested the release of the detained passengers, claiming “the terrorists” should be “brought to justice”.

All this leads to the conclusion that only an internationally led investigation might shed some light on the events on the Mavi Marmara. Even so, the chances the IDF will give full access to the materials and soldiers are slim at best.

We already know that they're willing to create misleading footage from the night-vision clip that's been seen everywhere. Now they've got a clip out of the activists repelling IDF attempts to storm the ship from the water showing, among other things, a stun grenade being thrown at the boat without showing where it came from. That's important, considering that the IDF were firing stun grenades at the people on the ship pretty much from the beginning. They were having their own stun grenades used against them. Not exactly unfair.

Thing is, even if the IDF has managed to bring the majority of Israelis onside, it's not going to work outside of the US-Israel axis. Everybody else is listening to the activists, and they aren't liking what they're hearing. It is transparently obvious that the IDF has something to hide.  By being so deceptive, they're only ensuring that they will have that much less real credibility.

This won't quell the anger. Nor should it.

Racist Treatment by IDF of Flotilla Prisoners?

This is from the Paul McGeough piece:

Several Europeans were distressed by the clear distinction the Israelis made between their ''white'' and ''brown'' prisoners.

The Norwegian activist Randi Kjos, a woman of some refinement, was genuinely shocked by what she observed. "They treated us with hatred - the old were made to kneel for long periods and women had to sit with their arms crossed. Some of the wounded were naked to the waist … many were in shock.

"Palestinians and Arabs were treated very differently to Europeans or Westerners. Palestinians who asked for anything were belted, pushed around or treated with contempt. People warned me of the hatred I would see - but still, I was shocked."

The Norwegian observed that many of the women prisoners were denied a phone call on the grounds that a functioning telephone ''was broken''' Others were furious on behalf of many Turkish women who were denied a call home because they could not satisfy their guards' demand that they converse in English.I wish I could be surprised, but I'm not. Stories are rife these days about tension between Ashkenazim and Sephardics in Israel. I just read a bit on CNAS that speaks to this:

I met for coffee one morning with a retired Israeli general officer to discuss the fighting in southern Lebanon during the 1990s, and before too long, the two of us were engrossed in conversation about guerrilla warfare, Lebanon, the learning process that militaries go through in combat, and a host of related subjects. One hour became two, and two hours became three. The two of us must have downed three cups of coffee apiece, and my hand cramped from all the notes I was taking. At the end of the conversation, though, this retired officer took my hand, squeezed it hard, and said, "Andrew, just remember one thing: the Muslims are like shit. They stink, and there are plenty of them for all of us."

Now in 3+ years of living in the Arabic-speaking world, I have to admit I have heard some pretty horrifically anti-Semitic things said in both polite and not-so-polite conversation. But pardon me if I was a little struck by hearing this language from a retired, educated military officer rather than from, say, a taxi driver in Beirut or some 16-year old Palestinian kid who grew up in Bourj al-Barajneh.

The author goes on to relate another incident:

Fast forward two days to another formal interview, this one at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv. I was meeting with a colonel there, again discussing southern Lebanon, and with us was a young PAO from the IDF. The PAO, I discovered, was of Iraqi Jewish descent. I had my notebook open, and the PAO had a tape recorder as well as a notebook. Again, the conversation was going great, and I was learning a lot about the learning process the IDF went through in southern Lebanon in the 1990s. But halfway through the conversation, with two notebooks open and tape recorder running, this officer then started on an off-color riff about why the Jews had managed to win so many Nobel Prizes and the Arabs and Muslims, despite their numbers, had won so very few. I was shocked -- not because someone might say such things but because someone might say such things to a visiting researcher with an open notebook. I looked at the PAO to my right, and this Iraqi-Israeli was obviously growing uncomfortable.

He does point out that this was notable precisely because he didn't normally hear that sort of thing. But he did leave those interviews wondering "whether or not anti-Arab or anti-Muslim sentiment was widespread within the officer corps and whether that might have an effect on Israeli operations in the territories."

It may not affect Israeli operations. But it looks like it might well affect Israeli corrections.

Collection of Flotilla Survivor Stories (Edit: Longer Paul McGeough Story)

Apparently there's a blog, gazaflotillasurvivors.posterous.com, that is collecting together all the flotilla survivors' stories. A good resource, check it out.

Edit: The first link is to a new amalgamation of the stories by Paul McGeough. There are new accounts I hadn't read, including discussions of their treatment at the Israeli prison and, well, this:

People were not allowed to go to the lavatories - they were made to soil their clothes. Gardel was especially horrified by witnessing the experience of a badly wounded man in his late 50s, who the Israeli troops forced to remain on the open deck. "Suddenly, his right eye exploded in a gush of blood - and a blob of something fell out of it..."

...The images broadcast around the world, despite Israel's best efforts, dovetailed with the colourful rhetoric of the likes of Anne Jones, a former American diplomat and US Army colonel who cut through efforts by some diplomats to find words with precise legal meanings to describe what Israel had perpetrated. "The Israel Defence Forces acted as pirates in shooting at us and stealing our ships in international waters," she told the Herald. "They kidnapped us and brought us to Israel; they arrested and imprisoned us; they paraded us before cameras in violation of the Geneva Conventions.''

Jerry Campbell awoke at 4am to attend dawn prayers but she had hardly bowed her head before she was dragged off to a nursing station to help treat four gunshot victims. Worse was in store for this naif from Queensland's Gold Coast - "I looked up as I was caring for a wounded Indonesian and saw my husband being carried in." That was Ahmed Luqman Talib, 20, who had been shot in the leg. She cut his blood-soaked clothing away but then followed his instructions to tend to others. "I'm OK," he told her.

She lost count of the number and nationalities of those she tended to - "I saw two men die out there … the floor was covered in blood and the IV units were tied to the ceiling with bandages."

Campbell went to and from her husband, who seemed to be deteriorating. "One man's stomach was opened - his intestines were out and the doctor reached inside and pulled out some bullets, before pushing everything back in and wrapping him up," she said. "I don't know if he survived."

Good question. We should find that out. It might help determine how many ribbons the guy who shot him gets on his new medal.

"Israeli commando who shot six passengers in aid convoy in line for medal"

Times Online.

Well, guess the "investigation" is over.

Hey, is he going to get any extra ribbons for making sure the American teenager was extra dead? Four bullet holes should get you something, at least.

Anyway, another eyewitness account:

Some Israeli officials have accused the Turks who attacked them of links to terrorist groups, although it was unclear why, in that case, the soldiers of Flotilla 13, the elite Navy Seals unit involved in the operation, were briefed only to expect peaceful resistance.

The question also remained as to why the passengers, if they were indeed terrorists, did not use deadlier weapons against the approaching naval launches and helicopters hovering overhead.

Alexandra Lort-Phillips, 37, an activist from Hackney, was on the Mavi Marmara when it was stormed and described seeing an Israeli soldier taken down into the stairwell below the deck where the soldiers landed.

“I went down the stairwell and there was a massive crowd of people and lots of shouting,” she said, after being deported to Istanbul.

“They had got a soldier who had boarded the ship from the roof. There was a sense of ‘My god, we’ve got an Israeli soldier’. I don’t think we really knew what we were going to do.”

“I saw a gun being taken. His gunbelt was removed and someone, I don’t know who, ran past me with the weapon and disappeared. They could have shot him but didn’t.” She said around 25 people were gathered around the soldier, who was held by his legs and stripped to his underwear as he was restrained.

“The women who were there were shouting ‘Don’t hurt him’.” Ms Lort-Phillips denied he was beaten, but said: “There were obviously some guys there who were extremely agitated by the situation. It is like you’d expect when there’s a fight between men.” As Israel desperately tried to limit the damage caused by the bloodbath on the high seas, the organisers of the aid flotilla said another boat was due to challenge the blockade and make for Gaza at the weekend.

See, maybe they should have shot him. Maybe they should have shot all of them.

You get medals for that.

Now the IDF is Saying That They Just Killed "Mercenaries"

Yeah, I wouldn't believe it either if I didn't read it.

The IDF has identified one of the passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara , which navy commandos commandeered earlier this week, as the ringleader of a group of mercenaries who were recruited from a city in northwest Turkey, according to new details from the military’s ongoing investigation of the Gaza flotilla.

The IDF identified a group of about 50 men – of the 700 on board – who were well-trained and were stationed throughout the ship, mostly on the upper deck, where they laid an ambush for the IDF soldiers who rappelled onto the deck from helicopters.

The members of this violent group were not carrying identity cards or passports. Instead, each of them had an envelope in his pocket with about $10,000 in cash. The defense establishment suspects the funding for the mercenaries may have come from elements within the Turkish government.

According to sources within the defense establishment, one member of the group, who appears to have been the ringleader, traveled to the city of Bursa in northwest Turkey and allegedly recruited mercenaries for the flotilla there.

They went on to say "there were no innocents among the dead".

So, let's leave aside the fact that all of this is totally unsourced, exceedingly implausible, and no excuse for gunning them down from helicopters. Let's also ignore the fact that the IDF (tried to) seized all the cameras, thus ensuring that there could be no independent verification of their claims.

Are they seriously trying to claim that the American teenager they shot four times in the head was not an innocent? Or the cameraman? Or the doctor?

Unless we see proof, REAL proof, and assertions from people who are willing to be more than just anonymous "sources", from an organization that may have had a hitlist...I'm not buying it.

And neither should you.

Edit: Wait, is this the line they were pushing that Blumenthal knocked down? The one I mentioned earlier? Sure, I mentioned that this was going to be a "zombie lie" that "can easily be revived over, and over, and over again." But usually you have to wait a little longer, guys!

Anyway, considering there are "sources" within the IDF that still insist that they won in Lebanon in 2006 and that Saddam shipped all his nukes off to Syria, I wouldn't pay too much attention to this, unless it gets traction elsewhere.

Israeli Commando Hit Lists and Friendly Fire

No source I can link to, unfortunately, but I'm hearing and reading a lot of discussion about whether or not there were deliberate "hits" done on some of the Turkish activists. There was a book of pictures shown on Al Jazeera's live feed; I hadn't realized what it was, but apparently others have.

One source I can link to, however, is a Palestinian blogger who is relating the story of one of the passengers, Shatha Barakat. The blogger is definitely an interested party, so take this with a large grain of salt, but I'll repeat it anyway. These stories need to be collated and recorded.

According to Flotilla passenger Shatha Barakat, Syrian national and one of the detainees who was released from the Ber Al-Saba, in hebrew Beer Sheva jail, "when I went to the top of the ship to help the sanitary unit to take care of the wounded people, I saw the commandos landing during heavy shooting toward our ship from the Israeli boots surrounding us and also from the helicopters". She confirmed that some Israeli soldiers were wounded on board the ship due to the indiscriminate shooting by the Israeli military helicopters and boats (friendly fire). She stated that all peace activists were unarmed and that nobody was carrying any kind or weapon.

These are possibilities I hadn't considered. I had thought that the shootings were due to panicked, frustrated commandos who had completely tossed out their ROEs, and that the injured commandos were really shot. That there might have been deliberate hits, and that the injuries were friendly fire, was not even a possibility in my mind.

Neither may be true, of course. But it's another reason why the IDF might have been so desperate to shut down independent records of the event.

"only to have the man's brains spill out onto his hands"

Yet another flotilla account, this time from Abbas Al Lawati. This one roughly corresponds with the Australians' story.

A red laser dot appeared on his head, and seconds later he was shot dead. A member of the organisers rushed to his aid, only to have the man's brains spill out onto his hands.

This was the first death in the deadly attack on the Mavi Marmara — lead ship in the Freedom Flotilla carrying 700 aid workers, journalists and diplomats.

Israeli forces first attacked the ship 74 nautical miles from Gaza — six miles from the extended Israeli zone.

Israeli troops attacked the boat in three stages. The first attack came during dawn prayers when smoke bombs were thrown on deck. These were thrown overboard by the defence teams on board the ship.

The Mavi Marmara tried to alter its course so that any further attack would occur during daylight, but the Israelis persisted and boarded the ship. They used paintball guns on passengers — the ammunition mixed with glass.

Israeli troops tried to board the ship from speedboats and the defence teams used hose pipes to prevent soldiers from boarding the vessel.

Makeshift weapons were fashioned from items lying on the deck, but there were absolutely no weapons on board the ship, as Israel claims. As chaos and panic swept the boat the Israelis began stage two, using rubber bullets. Once blood started flowing, anger mounted against the Israelis.

In the third attack, the injuries turned to deaths. Four people were killed instantly while 12 others bled to death. Finally, the captain surrendered and agreed to take the Mavi Marmara to the Israeli port city of Ashdod after an Israeli soldier pointed a gun at a one-year-old Turkish child.

This latter element, with the gun and the child, corresponds with the story I related by the Algerian activist "Sabrina" that was published in the Guardian.

That part I bolded about the ammunition mixed with glass...how absolutely devious. It looks like a harmless paintball gun. The only people who would ever know otherwise are the people being shredded by it.

Oh, and By the Way...

Kate Geraghty, the woman who smuggled out the only independent photos of the massacre and helped produce the story about what actually happened?

She got tasered.

I'm sure she was a deadly threat.

Now We Know What the IDF Was Hiding About the Flotilla

Two of the journalists who were in the flotilla, Paul McGeough and Kate Geraghty, gave an account of what they believe happened. Geraghty secreted SD cards with photos on her body, and got them away from the IDF's attempt to destroy the evidence of the battle (or massacre.) There are photos accompanying the story; you can see them on The Age's website, where I linked.

In the blackness before the rising of a burnt-orange moon, all that could be seen of the Israelis around us were pin-points of light, as warships sitting a kilometre or more either side of the flotilla inched in - seemingly to squeeze the Gaza-bound humanitarian convoy.

Then, the tightening noose. Sneaking up and around every boat, there were bullet-shaped hulks that soon became impossible to hide as the moonlight made fluorescent tubes of their roiling wakes. First one, then two and maybe four could be seen sneaking in from the rear.

They hunted like hyenas - moving up and ahead on the flanks; pushing in, then peeling away; and finally, lagging before lunging. But as they came alongside the Mavi Marmara, the dozen or so helmeted commandos in each assault craft copped the full force of the ferry's fire hoses and a shower of whatever its passengers found on deck or could break from the ship's fittings.

Suddenly, sound bombs and tear-gas were exploding on the main aft-deck, where prayers were held five times a day. The lifejacketed passengers on the rails at first seemed oblivious as those behind them donned the few gas masks that were on board and others, wearing asbestos gloves, sought to grab the devices and hurl them back at the Israeli commandos - before they exploded.

In failing to get their grappling irons to hold on the rails of the five-deck ferry, the commandos in their assault craft continued to be an irritant, or perhaps a decoy because at this point the Israelis opted for a critical change of plan - if they could not come up from the water, then they would have to drop from the sky.

Now the over-use of force makes sense.  They weren't scared. They were frustrated.
They had tried to use grappling hooks, and it hadn't worked. The activists on the Mavi were ready for them, and just removed them, while (non-lethally) pushing the commandos away with water cannons. They also tried tear gas, and that didn't work too well either; the activists simply threw the tear gas back, and knew that the gas was going to be used; that's why they brought the masks. (Which doesn't make them terrorists; it just makes them intelligent.)

As distress flares launched from the ship cut through the steel-beam spotlights on Israeli helicopters hovering overhead, the first Israeli commandos who slithered down ropes from the choppers were easy pickings for activists who rushed the upper decks on hearing the machines moving into place.
At this stage, Challenger I's British skipper, Dennis Healey, opted to gun the ship's engines, hoping to break away from the Israelis swarming the rest of the flotilla.

That's the end of what the journalists were able to recount. The rest comes from other activist sources:

On hearing the helicopters, activists on the upper decks rushed to the top level of the ship - grabbing the commandos even before they landed, disarming them; beating them till, according to some who were present, their leaders demanded that the Israeli's not be harmed; but in one case, one of the Israelis was hurled from one deck to the ship to the next.

Son of a BITCH. THAT is why we only saw that one snippet of video. THAT is why it is constantly repeated without context. THAT is why they were so fucking paranoid about seizing the journalists' video. If any other video had been shown, we would have seen that that soldier was never pushed into the water at all.

Go look at it again. At 0:36, the soldier is clearly pushed off the deck, but we never see him hit the water.That's because he didn't. He was pushed off the deck onto another one a few feet below, in order to keep him out of the melee!

You also never see that the activist leaders stopped the others before the Israelis could get seriously hurt. Notice how the video is noticeably cut at several places, most noticeably at 0:21 and 0:29?  And how there is a pan away from the melee at 0:26? It never pans back. We had no IDEA when that stopped. Now we do. It stopped as soon as it was clear that the commando was subdued.

There were conflicting accounts of the first commando's landing - some activists said he was injured and was being carried inside the ship for treatment by the flotilla doctors. However, a Serbian cameraman, Srojan Stojiljkovic, said that some of the activists had armed themselves with lengths of chain and metal posts.
''Some of the people caught the first commando before he touched the deck - a few started to hit him, but a lot of people moved in to shelter him with their bodies,'' the cameraman said. ''Another soldier with a bleeding nose was brought in … a few people threw punches, but not as many as I would have expected.''

Funny how this wasn't mentioned, huh? The activists treated the commandos' wounds. If they're murderous Islamists, they're really, really terrible murderous Islamists, aren't they? And that's not even getting into the guys who made sure to "shelter him with their bodies". I wonder how many of those guys got a bullet or two for their trouble?

Matthias Gardel, a leader of the Swedish Palestinian support group, confirmed that the soldiers had been beaten, but insisted that those involved were unarmed and that in keeping with the ship's non-violent charter, the soldiers' weapons were thrown overboard.Soon after the soldiers had been treated, the injured and dead from among the ship's passengers were brought in.

This is a consistent point as well. The IDF insists that they were shot at with their own weapons; but the activists insist that the weapons were thrown overboard.
And notice something else? They treated the soldiers first.

Mr Stojiljkovic said: ''Some were not badly wounded, but then a guy was brought in with a point-blank shot between his eyes - he was dead and I was told that another person was killed in the same way.''

The Turkish actor Sinan Albayrak said he had witnessed one of the most senior of the Turkish activists ordering passengers to cease beating two of the Israeli soldiers. Later, he saw a Turkish photographer who had been shot in the back of the head; and while he and others had been attempting to assist another injured activist, Israeli troops had opened fire on them.

Well, this corroborates the other stories I'd read about that Turkish photographer. I hadn't read about the other injured activist and his friends getting murdered—there is NO other word for it—but it hardly surprises me at this point.

Mr Gardel said that the bulk of the passengers had remained in the second deck saloons and had not been involved in resisting the Israelis. ''But a bunch of people tried to protect the bridge, the engine-room and the point from which we streamed the live video,'' he said.

Another activist, a Turk, lifted his shirt to reveal 10 puncture marks in a rough and black-bruised circle, about the circumferences of a tea cup, which he said had been inflicted when he was bitten by an Israeli security dog while assisting the Israelis as a translator.

Lovely. Puts those stories about humane treatment of prisoners in perspective.

The dead are believed to include Turkish journalist Chetin Genghis, whose head wounds suggested he had been shot from above - possibly from one of the Israeli helicopters.

Another of the dead was said to be an Indonesian cameraman, Sura Fachrizaz, who was shot in the chest. Also among the dead was a Malaysian doctor who, activists said, was shot while treating the wounded.

Shot from above. Shot while treated wounded. "Defense", that ain't. It is understandable: already-jumpy and frustrated commandos, who were nothing more than glorified prison guards to begin with, went completely apeshit when the "live fire" order went out. The ROEs went right out the window, if there were even ROEs to begin with, and they just started shooting everybody in sight.

(And, quite possibly, started dumping bodies over the windows when they realized how badly FUBAR the situation was. But that hasn't been corroborated yet.)

As the 100-plus reporters and other media workers on board followed orders to return to the ship's press room, after being told by the captain that his vessel was now under Israeli control and that all resistance was to cease, many were crestfallen by a sense that an Israeli blanket of ''white noise'' had prevented them from getting the story out.

But then one of their number flicked the switch on a large flat-screen TV on the wall. It burst into life with a Turkish channel, running the live-feed video that the ship had been transmitting to websites run by the Free Gaza Movement and the flotilla's other sponsors - it was scenes of the Israeli takeover of the Mavi Marmara. A resounding cheer went up.

Pity that most Americans haven't seen that video. They won't, of course. The narrative in the U.S. has already been set. We're already seeing the usual suspects make the usual apologias for the usual crimes. I doubt this very story will see much play in the U.S. at all. But outside of Israel and the United States, everybody is going to know what the score is. Especially now.

There's another story about the lengths that Kate Geraghty had to go to to keep those photos by the way.  She had to secret the SD cards around her body with gaffer's tape. The IDF was that desperate to make sure that we only saw their single, edited, out-of-context minute of footage.

Kudos to her. Kudos to both her and Paul McGeough for telling this story. Now we know.

"Go Back To Gaza, You Traitor!"

That's what MK Miri Regev to MK Haneen Zoabi said in the Knesset today:

The Knesset witnessed a rare eruption of violence on Wednesday when MK Haneen Zoabi (Balad) was cursed and shoved after relating her experience as a passenger on the Mavi Marmara.

Knesset members from coalition and opposition parties alike sought to shout down the freshman MK, but the furor reached a climax when Anastasia Michaeli (Israel Beiteinu) charged the podium in an attempt to physically block Zoabi from continuing her speech.

It took a battery of ushers to remove MK Eli Aflalo (Kadima), who was called to order three times but remained standing in an aisle yelling and gesticulating until he was forcibly removed.

During the pandemonium, Arab and Jewish MKs scuffled in the aisles, and ushers were summoned to separate them.

“Go back to Gaza, you traitor!” MK Miri Regev (Likud) yelled in Arabic at Zoabi during the heated debate on the Free Gaza flotilla.

Zoabi was released from police custody early Tuesday morning.

At the podium, Zoabi said she was “astonished by the incitement” and “despised the words” she had heard during the Knesset debate on the Monday morning incident.

The line from the title is horrible, but even worse is the attempt by other MKs to forcibly prevent her from speaking. Is Israel a democracy, or isn't it? You can't eat your cake and have it too.

Edit: I do have to admit that the asshat who yelled "check if she has a knife!" comes in a close second. And the move to try to expel members of the Knesset who "were found to have committed incitement against the State of Israel" comes in pretty high too. That would be nothing more than a license to expel critics of Government policy at will, and render the Knesset into an Iraqi- or Iranian-style rubber-stamp Parliament. The people of Israel, no matter their ethnicity and religion, deserve better than that.

Canadian Activist: They "gunned down civilians from helicopters"

Here's another eyewitness:

Neish watched in horror as Israeli soldiers gunned down civilians from helicopters as the raid began, and he saw the bloody bodies of at least nine people killed on the Mavi Marmara. He flatly rejects allegations that people on the ship were armed or that they attacked the soldiers. A videotape produced by the IDF purports to show activists hitting the soldiers with sticks and stones, but its legitimacy is in question.

There seems to be somewhat of a running theme here.

Want Some Prewritten Anti-Flotilla Tweets and Talking Points?

Head on down to FlotillaFacts.com for all your bullshitting needs. Here's a list of prewritten tweets!

You can also use these points in media talkbacks on facebook and on your blogs.

FACT: Israel transfers 15K TONS supply of human aid EVERY WEEK 2 GAZA http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

BLOCKADE AIM: Nsure weapons not transferred 2 HAMAS- using to attack INNOCENT http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

FACT: terrorists use AID DELIVERIES 2 smuggle ingredients 4 BOMBS in SUGAR SACKShttp://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla RT

QUOTE: “They are going to have to FORCEFULLY STOP US” (organizers) http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

FACT: flotilla REFUSED 2 supply aid 4 captive in isolation, GILAD SHALIT http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

FACT: 5 boats boarded, protestors complied/ safely let 2 shore http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc#freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza RT

FACT: funding from Islamist organization IHH/ links 2 FUNDAMENTALIST JIHADI groups http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla

FACT: protestors carried out PRE-PLANNED VIOLENCE: threw soldier off top deck http://tinyurl.com/2dxhrhc #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

FLOTILLA: TURKEY has BLOOD on its hands, NOT Israel http://tinyurl.com/255ksq2#freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

FACT: HAMAS responsible 4 suffering of Palestinians/Israelis: RACIST CHARTER http://tinyurl.com/2e8xlbw #freedomflotilla #flotilla #gaza

(I especially like the one that namedropped Shalit.)

I'd been wondering why the #flotilla hashtag had been flooded with this sort of nonsense. Now I know.

And, now, so do you!

British Survivor: "The Israeli military were firing on us...we had no arms".

This is almost getting old. Guardian:

"At around 4.10am I woke up, went up to the deck so I could see outside and I saw small dinghies bristling with guns and Israeli military speeding towards the ship," she said.

"Helicopters then appeared and gas and sound bombs were used ... We then had the first passenger fatally injured. He was brought to the back of the deck below. He was shot in the head.

"I saw him. He was in a very bad way and he subsequently died. There were bullets flying all over the place. We asked for the Israelis to stop the attacks. We asked this in English: 'We are not resisting, please help the injured.' Instead of helping the injured the saloon remained surrounded by soldiers targeting individuals with laser sights.

"The captain announced live ammunition was being used, to stop resisting and to go downstairs. At 5.15am we started broadcasting over the Tannoy for help to evacuate the critically injured and for emergency medical assistance. We asked the Israelis to stop the attacks in English."

She said she could "see the red of the laser sights sweeping over people's heads".

"The Israeli military were firing on us," she said. "We had no arms. We made two attempts to get the message across in the written form. We wrote a sign in Hebrew saying 'SOS! Need medical assistance. People are dying. Urgent.'"

After 7am, after the commandos had taken control of the boat, she said they handcuffed everyone using cable ties, confiscated their phones and told them to sit in lines on the deck in the sun for several hours, before being taken into the cabin after some complained of dehydration.

"It was terrifying," she said. "If you talked they pointed a gun at you."

This time, however, the Guardian has a video interview. I highly recommend you go watch it. It's very, very different when you hear somebody describe these acts, instead of just seeing them as text on a screen.