Public prosecutors in Germany are looking into a war crimes complaint filed against Israel by two members of parliament with the far-left Left Party and a human rights activist who were on board the Mavi Marmara when Israeli troops stormed it 11 days ago.
Eleven days ago, the Israeli military stormed the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara, part of a flotilla carrying pro-Palestinian activists toward the Gaza Strip in an attempt to break the Israeli blockade. Now, it has become a case for German prosecutors.
Human rights activist Norman Paech and two German parliamentarians from the far-left Left Party, Annette Groth and Inge Höger, have filed criminal complaints for “numerous potential offences, including war crimes against individuals and command responsibility … as well as false imprisonment.”
At 5:10 a.m. on May 31, the complaint reads, Höger, Groth and Paech heard from the captain of the Mavi Marmara via the ship’s loudspeaker that the Israeli soldiers who had boarded the ship as part of the commando operation were taking over control of the ship. An hour later, Israeli soldiers ordered the Germans on deck, where their backpacks and other belongings were searched. Their hands were temporarily bound.
It wasn’t until 9:10 p.m. that parliamentarian Annette Groth was given the possibility of contacting the German Embassy. At 2 a.m. on June 1, the Germans were brought to the airport in a prisoner transport vehicle for their flight back home.
According to international criminal law expert Florian Jessberger of Berlin’s Humboldt University, “there is cause to believe that false imprisonment was perpetrated as understood by German law.” He says that German criminal law would have jurisdiction “irrespective of the fact that the act was perpetrated on the high seas.”
This is great news; coming hard on the heels of Barak’s avoidance of France, Livni’s ditto of Britain, and that Israeli general’s (whatisname?) to even get off the plane in London, begins to show that their crimes are coming back to haunt them.
When the whole Israeli edifice comes crashing down, under its own momentum, I hope these people in particular have no refuge anywhere; just as they denied Gazans a refuge anywhere during their turkey shoot.
Well, despite Angela Merkel’s Zionist leanings, this time she seems powerless to protect her friends in Israel from what they will obviously call a slap in the face, added to the insult of trying to extradite a Mossad agent from Poland under a European Interpol warrant to face charges of getting a German passport by deceit in order to take part in an assassination in Dubai.
It would be nice to hope that the prosecutor will have to go into all the relevant facts of the case, making it a truly independent exposure of the crimes on board the Mavi Marmara that day but somehow I doubt the German foreign ministry will allow the case to gather the full traction it deserves.
I’m sure this will be interpreted in the Israeli and American media as those Germans being “anti-Semites” again. But one can expect nothing less.
A deafening silence in the U S of A.
The reasoning being that we adhere to the propagated myths of: “If we Jews are anything, we are a people of history … Our history provides the strength to know that we can be right and the whole world wrong.”
“We ( Jews ) were right, and the whole world was wrong. The Crusades…. the Talmud burnings in England and France…. The Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. ….. The ghettos ….. — and we alone were right, and the whole world was wrong.”
“Today, once again, we alone are right and the whole world is wrong. The Arabs, the Russians, the Africans….. even the Vatican”.
America the symbol of freedom, decency and leadership is slipping away.