Today, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak, praising the Shayetet 13 commandos who slaughtered at least nine humanitarian activists on board the Mavi Marmara, said:
“…we live in the Middle East, in a place where there is no mercy for the weak…”
A year ago President Obama declared in Cairo:
Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and it does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end.
But if the violence is being committed by Israelis then it is all too evident that this particular world leader lacks the courage and moral conviction to speak out.
When the slaves of Zionism are called on to break out of their chains, instead, their own fear of political and financial retribution guarantees that they will maintain their silence.
Obama is not only incapable of condemning Israeli violence; he cannot even acknowledge its existence!
When unarmed and non-violent Americans are the victims — whether killed, maimed or abused by Israeli soldiers — the government of the nation that proudly describes itself as the most powerful nation on earth has nothing to say in defense of its own citizens.
If it wasn’t being used to justify murder, this headline in the Washington Post would be laughably absurd:
Israel says Free Gaza Movement poses threat to Jewish state
Once viewed only as a political nuisance by Israel’s government, the group behind the Gaza aid flotilla has grown since its inception four years ago into a broad international movement that now includes Islamist organizations that Israeli intelligence agencies say pose a security threat to the Jewish state.
The Free Gaza Movement’s evolution is among Israel’s chief reasons for conducting Monday morning’s raid on a ship carrying medicine, construction materials, school paper and parts for Gaza’s defunct water treatment plant. The movement once drew its support almost entirely from activists and donors in Australia, Britain and the United States. But the ship that Israeli forces stormed Monday morning was operated by a Turkish charity that Israeli intelligence agencies and others contend has connections to radical Islamist groups.
Radical Islamist groups — the hobgoblins of the Israeli psyche have also enfeebled the judgement of most Americans. Raise the specter of such a threat and the rational mind freezes.
This is the psychology of cowardice, where fear becomes omnipresent.
Those thus enslaved, cloak their own weakness with fables about the demons they hope to destroy. But their deceit is transparent. This is heroism merely self-declared, visible to no one else.
Arrogance and cowardice are the two faces of the fear of fear. Israel’s might is the mask behind which it conceals its own lack of courage — its terror of looking weak.
Hours after Israeli commandos were out slaying sea monsters, an Israeli soldier in the West Bank faced the threat of an unarmed American 21-year old.
Emily Henochowicz was hit in the face with a tear gas canister fired directly at her by an Israeli soldier during a demonstration at the Qalandiya checkpoint. She is a talented young artist who will now only be able to follow her passion with one eye — the other was removed in surgery yesterday.
Does the soldier who shot her believe Israel is now safer?
When a state blinds or even kills individuals whose “crime” is their willingness to stand up in defense of justice, what is it that national security is securing?
As Robert Fisk duly noted yesterday:
[I]t is a fact that it is ordinary people, activists, call them what you will, who now take decisions to change events. Our politicians are too spineless, too cowardly, to take decisions to save lives. Why is this? Why didn’t we hear courageous words from [Britain’s prime minister and deputy prime minister] Messrs Cameron and Clegg yesterday [after the flotilla massacre]?
For it is a fact, is it not, that had Europeans (and yes, the Turks are Europeans, are they not?) been gunned down by any other Middle Eastern army (which the Israeli army is, is it not?) there would have been waves of outrage.
And what does this say about Israel? Isn’t Turkey a close ally of Israel? Is this what the Turks can expect? Now Israel’s only ally in the Muslim world is saying this is a massacre – and Israel doesn’t seem to care.
But then Israel didn’t care when London and Canberra expelled Israeli diplomats after British and Australian passports were forged and then provided to the assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. It didn’t care when it announced new Jewish settlements on occupied land in East Jerusalem while Joe Biden, the Vice-President of its erstwhile ally, the United States, was in town. Why should Israel care now?
How did we get to this point? Maybe because we all grew used to seeing the Israelis kill Arabs, maybe the Israelis grew used to killing Arabs. Now they kill Turks. Or Europeans. Something has changed in the Middle East these past 24 hours – and the Israelis (given their extraordinarily stupid political response to the slaughter) don’t seem to have grasped what has happened. The world is tired of these outrages. Only the politicians are silent.
I ran across this article, on the actual illegality of the blockade itself:
http://opiniojuris.org/2010/06/02/why-is-israels-blockade-of-gaza-legal/
Moss
The time has arrived to either kill or emasculate the mad dog that Israel prided itself on being with the blind support of the US.
Americans aught to finally accept that the whole world [aside from its only democratic ally in the ME] not only has lost respect for the US but in a sense its the US that has become an emasculate world power.
The real heroes in all this are the humanitarian activists referred to as “pro-Palestinian” by the mainstream media. All the released and deported activists deserve heroes welcome by their own countries. The struggle continues as more ships the Rachel Corrie for one, are on the way and more flotillas being planned. FREE GAZA FREE PALESTINE .
The First Intifada showed that Israel most fears PEACEFUL DEMONSTRATIONS. On the other hand, it welcomes violence. Why? Because it can cope with violence backed by the US force it controls should its massive arsenal fail to deter or destroy. The Israeli obsession is in the psychotic notion that since the Holocaust was the death of millions of Jews helplessly killed– no matter how morally and intellectually strong, “like lambs going to the slaughter”– it’s only solution for survival is to walk the history of NAZISM backwards copying it in detail as ZIONAZIS. Hence, there is a predatory taste for massacre of the helpless whenever confronted with the desperation of the weak, as was the case with the Germans. This has been reinforced when the Palestinians switch to peaceful protest has led to global recognition of a Palestinian state at cost to Greater Israel expansion. Hence, Israel supported HAMAS hoping that it would declare Jihad on Israel so it could claim self-defense as it massacred the Palestinians. For Sharon, the suicide-shahids were a welcome blessing, though at cost to innocent Israeli lives. His walk to the alAqsa Mosque, provoking Intifada II, was deliberate provocation to bring back violent outrage so he could proceed to exterminate, walking back the history of the Holocaust.
With the arrival of Obama in power Israel got spooked and feared that having duped Bush into war on Iraq and Iran would lead to an American blowback. So it proceeded with extermination of Gaza Palestinians to provoke a violent reaction and to reestablish its Zionazi credentials that had so faltered in Lebanon in 2006. This has led to humanitarian reactions from abroad that made Israel’s current leaders apoplectic with fear and spooked all Israel. And so, we have the Zionazis in power again, walking history backward with the victim becoming perpetrator as an act of panic, not of arrogance. That explains why they look so stupid lying and laughing at people’s rage and seek to present the current massacre as a “PR problem” rather than a crime. It is fear of being discovered as of the same Jews that died in the Holocaust by its vengeful victims and at the same time fearing that Israeli walking back of history too long will end its endless gifts from the people of USA on which, to this day, it survives as that Holocaust empathy that Israel has held to as a security blanket since its birth fades away in the face of its Zionazi behavior. Perhaps at this point, the Arabs neighbors and Palestinians would do well to quell the Israeli psychosis with secret reassurance of a future in an integrated Middle East.
Wow, you really have no shame about lying to attack Israel and Israelis do you?
“faced the threat of an unarmed American 21-year old”. You left out “and a large mob of Palestinians who greatly outnumbered the Israeli troops”.
If you’ve got a gun and teargas, and a mob of people attack you, you can shoot them with the gun, fire the teargas, or let them beat and kick you to death. Talking about an unarmed mob is like talking about an unarmed rampaging elephant. Neither has a gun, but that won’t stop them from killing you.
Oh, and as Robert Fisk (whose entire career is based on bashing Israel) either knows or should know. Turkey hasn’t been a real ally, or even a friend to Israel since an Islamist government was elected there three years ago. Foreign policy has momentum, and they buy weapons from Israel. Turkey is still accepting a shipment of unmanned drone planes from Israel despite the “outrage” of some Turkish thugs being killed in self defense by Israeli soldiers.
It takes time to break long established ties, but the Turks have been wanting to do that since the Islamists took over.
IIII agree with the Israelis, the Free Gaza Movement does threaten Israel. The actions of these righteous people and the reaction of the zionists expose Israel is a pariah state, and its imminent self-destruction is an inevitable consequence of the evildoing of its leaders and their thugs.
I am gratified to see the support for non-violence increasing with every brutal action of the Israeli state.
The big thing lacking is a huge upswing of support for truth and non-violence in the USA. What about a Free America Minds campaign that looks to penetrate the blockade against truth perpetrated by the US media empires?
Poor bob! what melodrama! They were protesting, with NO weapons. You obviously in your conceit think only of Israel. Fisk writes huge amounts including “The Great War for Civlilzation” and your tiny bit of stolen land does not take up much of it.
Instead of this sniping back and forth, perhaps you should read this piece from the Miami Herald on the opening of the Egyptian crossing. It reads like the liberation of Auschwitz. Incredible ….:
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/06/03/1662410/amid-gaza-health-crisis-patients.html