Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, July 04, 2011

Flotilla Follies keep on going. Comedy gold!

From AFP:

Thirty pro-Palestinian activists on a Canadian boat bound for Gaza that was stopped out of a Greek port Monday for breaking a ban, defied authorities by claiming they had all captained the ship.

Greek coastguards halted the Canadian vessel Tahrir about 10 minutes after it left port on the island of Crete Monday afternoon with some 40 people on board, organisers said.

"We have been boarded by about 15 armed special forces," David Heap of the Canadian Boat to Gaza organization said by phone from the vessel.

"I'm being blocked by a man with a machine gun," he said over the noise of shouting from passengers he said were being pushed around. "We are not using force back," he added.

The Tahrir, which was carrying activists from Canada, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey, was forced to turn back to Aghios Nikolaos port in Crete, as Heap and others shouted, "We have to go to Gaza. Let us pass!"

It had sailed without a captain in the hope of avoiding a severe legal repercussions.

Passenger Joseph Dube, a former Belgium senator with an expired captain's licence, had sailed the ship and agreed to take full legal responsibility, according to the Tahrir's spokesperson Huwaida Arraf.

When authorities boarded the boat and demanded to speak to the captain, some 30 passengers "claimed they were the captain," she said.

"Everyone took part in manning the boat in one way or another -- they all had a go at sailing it. The idea is that it will be difficult to arrest 30 people," she said.

It is not yet clear what will happen to the passengers on the Tahrir.

"We left as a volunteer crew. It was legal for us to do so under international law, they had no right to stop us," Heap said, adding: "Our destination is still Gaza."

Earlier on Monday, French activists had been joined by their American counterparts to stage a "symbolic departure," on the Louise Michel boat in defiance of the Greek ban.

"And we're off!" shouted the passengers, cheering and waving as the captain of the Louise Michele unfurled the sails and wildly beeped the boat's horn, chanting "One, two, three four, Occupation No More!"

Activists from the impounded Audacity had begun a hunger-strike in front of the US embassy on Sunday to protest against the arrest of their captain, who was allegedly being held in "shocking conditions".

They were quickly moved on by police.

French Captain Alain Connan said he had decided not to set sail because he risked being slapped with a long prison sentence.

Head of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) Moustafa Barghouti said the demonstration was an "exciting moment" and that people in Gaza had "already called to say how grateful they are for such a devoted show of solidarity".

Standing out on deck wrapped in a Palestinian flag, he said the protest was helping "expose not only Israel's blockade and occupation but also the complicity of the European and American governments".

Fatah-oriented Palestinian Arab media are pretty much ignoring the entire flotilla story. Hamas prime minister Haniyeh saluted the would-be seafarers.

The US Boat to Gaza website adds:

Two boats from France – a cargo ship and a smaller passenger boat – are in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. (They did not set sail from Greece.) We are not sure what they are planning on doing.

The Irish boat was sabotaged beyond repair last week and the Greek boat was also sabotaged but we do not have an update on their status.

Free Gaza called for a protest today in front of the Greek embassy in London.

I couldn't find any footage of this massive London protest - for some reason none was uploaded to the Free Gaza site - so we will have to make due with footage of the Dublin protest, where a huge crowd of eight people or so got to listen to other people shouting unintelligible slogans with bullhorns:

Montreal managed to scrounge about a dozen lethargic protesters in support of the floptilla:

The flotidiot's tweets are also hilarious, as they compare the Greeks stopping them from sailing to Nazis "following orders." Their smug sense of self-righteousness - where they are now "fasting" for their flotilla - is classic. You can get a taste of their holier-than-thou attitudes in this report from Euronews:

Of course, Israel is the source for all evil, and now the Greeks are guilty by proxy.

And here are the poor, starving children that they are trying to help so badly:

Grapel still in custody

Last week Yediot Aharonot published a rumor that Ilan Grapel would be released in by the weekend.

Obviously, that didn't happen.

Palestine Today says that Egypt rejected a US plea to release Grapel, saying it is a matter for the Egyptian judiciary.

"Freedom Flotilla" - look closer

Doesn't "freedom" sound wonderful?

Unfortunately, sometimes people use that word but they mean something completely different - or even the opposite. In those cases, you have to look closer.

Click to enlarge.

Boat people (Hitchens)

From Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

The tale of the Gaza "flotilla" seems set to become a regular summer feature, bobbing along happily on the inside pages with an occasional update....

However, given the luxury of time, might it not be possible to ask the "activists" on board just a few questions? (Activist is a good neutral word, isn't it, with largely positive connotations?) Most of the speculation so far has been to do with methods and intentions, allowing for many avowals about peaceful tactics and so forth, but this is soft-centered coverage. I would like to know a little more about the political ambitions and implications of the enterprise.

Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world—by my count—to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbors, and the sunshine beats down, doesn't any journalist want to know whether the "activists" have discussed this element in their partners' world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?

Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.

The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a "warrant for genocide" forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test. I wonder if any reporter on the scene will now take me up on this.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t D)

Hello Rafah, hello Gaza (video)

Don't know who made this, but it is pretty good.

And since this gives me a reason to post it again, here was my version of that song from a couple of years ago:

(h/t Omri)

Did Abbas retract his Holocaust denial?

In an interview with Dutch media, PA president Mahmoud Abbas was asked about his views of the Holocaust:

Is it true that you deny the extent of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed?

"No, I do not deny the Holocaust. I know that the Holocaust took place during WWII. I have studied and written a book about. I believe that many Jews were murdered and that other peoples of other nationalities were murdered . So I agree, I admit there were pogroms, that genocide was committed during the war against the Jews by the Nazi regime. "

How many Jews were killed according to you?

"I've heard from the Israelis that there were six million. I can accept that."

So are you yourself convinced of that number?

"I accept what they say. If they say six million, six million I say. It is up to them to decide, because they know better than e."

In Abbas' doctoral thesis, he wrote, "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed." In the book he wrote based on the thesis, he wrote, "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand...Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews . . . The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million."

He also claimed that the Jews who were killed were victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot.

So how can we reconcile Abbas from 1983 and Abbas today? Simple - he is a liar.

When Israeli media asked him about his thesis and book, Abbas told Maariv, "When I wrote `The Other Side,' we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks."

Which means that he is willing to lie about his beliefs if the lies are politically expedient.

So which is more likely - that he lied about his beliefs in a doctoral thesis and subsequent book that took hundreds of hours to write, or that he is lying now because he does not want to appear to be a Holocaust denier to the Europeans and Americans?

(h/t jzaik)

First person video of Syrian sniper shooting cameraman

From Ha'aretz:

Syrian opposition released footage Sunday that it says was filmed in the restive city of Homs, in which a civilian cameraman is fired upon by troops dispatched by President Bashar Assad.

In the video, the photographer documents the security forces firing indiscriminately at citizens and homes in the Karm a-Shami neighborhood. As the photographer narrates what is happening around him, the camera focuses on a uniformed man hiding near a house below.

After a few seconds the soldier is seen pointing his gun at the photographer and firing, apparently hitting him as the camera drops. Media outlets outside of Syria have yet to verify the events documented.

No idea if the cameraman survived.

Three million hits

On Sunday, EoZ registered its 3,000,000th hit since the blog started.

So that's why I've been hearing so many fireworks outside!

Other shoe to drop from Special Tribunal for Lebanon?

From Ya Libnan:

The day the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) team delivered the indictment to Lebanon , several reports from Beirut indicated that the delegation will head to Syria to deliver the Syrian portion of the indictment in the 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former PM Rafik Hariri .
An STL delegation met June 30 with Lebanon’s state prosecutor Said Mirza and handed him a copy of the Lebanon portion of the indictment and the arrest warrants. Two of the suspects Mustafa Badreddine and Salim Ayyash are reportedly senior members of the Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah while the other two Hassan Aneissy, also known as Hassan Issa, and Assad Sabra played a supporting role in the execution of the assassination.

According to a report by Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot handing the indictment to Damascus was postponed due to the Syrian unrest.

According to the paper at least two prominent members of President Bashar Assad’s family will be on the list, his younger brother Maher (Assad ) who has been commanding the crackdown against the protesters and his brother-in-law Assef Shawkat ( married to Assad’s sister Bushra) , former head of Military Intelligence and current deputy chief-of-staff of the armed forces.”

Der Spiegel magazine which was the first to leak details ( May2009) about Hezbollah’s involvement in Hariri murder has reportedly leaked that “new indictments in the STL will include Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian suspects.”

Things might get very interesting if the STL hands down indictments for Assad's family. And the existence of Palestinian Arab complicity is intriguing as well.

Meanwhile, if anyone had the slightest idea that Hezbollah worked for Lebanese interests instead of its Iranian masters, this reaction from Iran should show otherwise:

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani ( right) rejected the indictments against Hezbollah members in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005.

“We know that the United States was opposed to the establishment of a government led by Najib Mikati, but they failed due to the vigilance of Lebanon’s leaders. Now they created the tribunal, which they use as a tool to express their dissatisfaction with the new government,” Larijani said during an official visit to Azerbaijan.

“The Americans feel they have been slapped in the face and they are seeking to make up a story” by indicting Hezbollah members, Larijani added.

According to observers Larijani’s reaction was expected because if Hezbollah did in fact execute the murder , it could not have done so without the knowledge of the top Iranian leadership. When Hariri was assassinated Larijani was the security adviser to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s ultimate authority. Larijani also is a former member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, the group that created Hezbollah in 1982.

PA facing financial crisis. But insists it is ready for statehood!

From Bloomberg:

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said his government has only enough money to pay half of salaries this month and appealed to “donors and our Arab brothers” to fulfill their pledges for funding.

“Today is a day of crisis,” Fayyad said at a press conference today in the West Bank city of Ramallah. He said the Palestinian Authority had a deficit of $585 million and had reached the limit of its bank borrowing.

Fayyad said the financial crisis “shouldn’t mean anything for the readiness for a Palestinian state.” Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said he plans to ask the United Nations to recognize a Palestinian state in September.

The World Bank said in an April report that the Palestinian Authority had increased bank borrowing to fund development projects for which designated aid hadn’t been received and that arrears were accumulating at an unsustainable rate. At the end of 2010 total domestic debt was about $840 million, “which may be close to the PA’s borrowing limits,” the report said.

Donor countries have paid only $330 million of the $971 million pledged this year, Fayyad said. Roughly one-quarter of the authority’s $3.7 billion budget comes from foreign aid.

Oman, Algeria and the United Arab Emirates are the only Arab countries that have so far paid funds that they pledged for this year, Fayyad said, adding that the U.S. and European Union have been making regular contributions.

It's been nearly a year since Fayyad declared that the PA would be "financially independent" by the end of 2013. I'm sure this is all going according to plan.

The World Bank report from earlier this year warned about this crisis, but the report buried this information on page 12 in its overly rosy view of the future of the PA and how ready it was for statehood.

Notice also how it is always the Arabs who don't pay their commitments to the PA. But don't be to hard on them - they are very good at shipping burial shrouds to Gaza.

(h/t NormanF)

Newest Free Gaza publicity stunt

As the flotilla gets shakier by the day, the Free Gaza/ISM and sister movements are planning a new stunt: having activists fly to Israel and protest at Ben Gurion Airport.

Here's a video of Paul Larudee, from Free Gaza, describing the plan:

I particularly like what he says around the 4 minute mark.

While he wants the trip to be taken by the usual D-list celebrities and token self-hating Jews, he particularly wants Palestinian Arabs who can trace their families to within the Green Line, and who now live in the West, to participate in this "return" - but he warns that only people who really don't want to return should join, because Israel is likely to ban them from future trips.

Apparently, the action is planned for this coming Friday.

While a couple of prominent activists say they will go, I'm certain that the number will be much smaller than the hundreds they are pretending will go. And almost certainly the number of Palestinian Arabs who now have citizenship in Western countries that go will be minuscule.

Last year, Free Gaza announced an initiative of flying to Gaza with a private plane. That intended stunt went exactly nowhere. Chances are, so will this one, and a few dozen people will have wasted hundred of dollars apiece on - nothing.

(h/t Israel Matzav, Daled Amos and others)