Author: Helena

IDF press office (partially) retracts Al-Qaeda slander

Max Blumenthal has a great post describing how he and a colleague called out the IDF’s press office on its claim that some of the flotilla participants were Al-Qaeda members.
Under questioning from Max and Israeli freelancer Lia Tarachansky, the IDF’s press office quietly changed the title of a piece on its website from “Attackers of the IDF soldiers found to be Al Qaeda mercenaries” to “”Attackers of the IDF soldiers found without identification papers”.
Max writes that after seeing the original claim on the IDF website:

    Tarachansky and I called the IDF press office to ask for more conclusive evidence. Tarachansky reached the IDF’s Israel desk, interviewing a spokesperson in Hebrew; I spoke with the North America desk, using English. We both received the same reply from Army spokespeople: “We don’t have any evidence. The press release was based on information from the [Israeli] National Security Council.” (The Israeli National Security Council is Netanyahu’s kitchen cabinet of advisors).
    Today, the Israeli Army’s press office changed the headline of its press release… The more Israel’s claims about the flotilla’s terrorist links are challenged, the more they fall apart.

The title of the IDF webpage in question— that is, the title that appears at the very top of your browser window– still contains the “Al-Qaeda” slander, however. It, too, needs to be changed.
The page also has photos of bullet-proof vests and night-vision goggles that, the site alleges, were found on the Mavi Marmara, “suggesting passengers were prepared for a gunfight.” I’m not sure they suggest that. They could have been equipment the flotilla people were taking in for members of the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza, who have frequently come under attack by Israeli forces while in the course of performing their duties (a clear infraction of the laws of war.) The vests do, after all, have standard red crescent badges sewn prominently on them.
There is also, however, some doubt over the authenticity and dating of those photos.
Bottom line: Don’t take anything the IDF or the Israeli government says about what happened Monday at face value. They had evidently had a long time to prepare what is called “information operations” (i.e. disinformation operations) around the raid. In another field of information ops, it seems fairly obvious that it was either the Israeli government or some of their fan-base around the world that launched a successful DOS attack against the web-site of the Turkish humanitarian organization IHH, early Monday.
(The IHH: That group that the hasbaristas claim is “connected to international terror”– but that has never been formally linked to any terrorist organization by any other government.)

C’ville peace vigil has Gaza theme– Today, 5 p.m.

The Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice has decided to add the concern about Israel’s murderous actions on the high seas to today’s version of its weekly downtown peace vigil.
The notice is here.
Everyone in Central Virginia who’s able to make it is invited to join us, 5:00-6:00 p.m., outside the federal building, which is at the corner of Ridge/Macintyre and W. Main Streets. Bring signs.
The fact that U.S. citizen Furkan Dogan was among those murdered during the Israeli raid on the high seas Monday should add urgency to our demand that Pres. Obama and the U.S. congress should hold Israel fully accountable for this murderous act of state-sponsored piracy.

Flotilla: American citizen among fatalities

Reuters and others are now reporting that a U.S. citizen, 19-year-old Furkan Dogan, was among those murdered by Israel during its piratical assault on the Mavi Marmara on Monday.
No wonder the Israeli authorities have been trying to keep the identities of the dead hidden for as long as they can.
Turkey’s state-run Anatolia News Agency says that Dogan “was hit by four bullets in the head and one in the chest.”
What will Pres. Obama do to assure American citizens that his administration will seek full justice for this act of murder, committed in international waters?
Update: Paul Woodward has a photo of the young man at his post on War in Context, here.

Flotilla: Great piece from M.J. Rosenberg

M.J. writes:

    The first thing you need to know about the Gaza flotilla disaster is that the intention of the activists on board the ships was to break the Israeli blockade. Delivering the embargoed goods was incidental.
    In other words, the activists were like the civil rights demonstrators who sat down at segregated lunch counters throughout the South and refused to leave until they were served. Their goal was not really to get breakfast. It was to end segregation.
    That fact is so obvious that it is hard to believe that the “pro-Israel” lobby is using it as an indictment.
    Of course the goal of the flotilla was to break the blockade. Of course Martin Luther King provoked the civil authorities of the South to break segregation. Of course the Solidarity movement used workers’ rights as a pretext to break Soviet-imposed Communism.
    The bottom line is that the men and women of the flotilla had every right to attempt to destroy an illegal blockade that Israel had no legal standing to impose and which was designed to inflict collective punishment on the people of Gaza…

Go read the whole thing.

How to end the siege of Gaza, addendum

In my earlier post on this topic, I wrote this:

    Gaza needs to be open for normal commercial and human activity– not just for the trucking-in of international aid.

What I was writing about there was, of course, only the immediate, or very short-term goal. I wanted to stress that “lifting the blockade” should not consist solely of allowing more aid shipments in. Gaza’s 1.5 million, amazingly well educated and capable people need to have the normal economic activities and possibilities of any other of the world’s peoples, as they and their national leaders continue to work on getting the Palestinian-Israeli conflict finally resolved.
Indeed, the basic premise under the Fourth Geneva Convention is that, during the presumably short time that a territory comes under foreign military occupation– pending the speedy conclusion of a final peace agreement between the two warring parties– the occupying power is obligated to (a) interfere as little as possible in the ongoing civilian life and governance of the territory’s residents, and (b) to facilitate their access to those inputs necessary for continued economic wellbeing.
In the case of Gaza, the West Bank, and Golan, of course, the foreign military occupations of those territories have not been short. They have lasted almost 43 years! And conclusion of a final peace between Israel and Palestine still seems far away. Hence the need to pay attention to the continuing economic and development needs of those territories’ civilian populations. However, no-one should think for a minute that addressing those issues is on its own “enough”. The basic issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and the end of foreign military occupation also need– very urgently!– to be addressed.
In the case of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, 75-80 percent of them are refugees from homes and farms within Israel: Their claims regarding those homes, both for restoration of their property rights over them and restoration of their right to return to them, need to be addressed. Gaza’s people also all have a deep and longstanding attachment to Jerusalem and other places inside the occupied West Bank, for religious reasons and because of the normal family and business ties that Gazans have with West Bankers (including the Palestinians of East Jerusalem.)
All those issues need to be satisfactorily addressed in the context of a final peace agreement. This peace agreement could be one that results in a two-state outcome, though that seems increasingly unlikely at this point. Or it could be one involving the establishment of a single, unitary, and binational state in which all Palestinians and all Israelis would enjoy equal citizenship and equal rights. But under one model of resolution or the other, the final peace has to be secured– and soon! Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of the world have all waited for this final settlement for far too long.
The need for that occupation-ending final peace is urgent. It cannot be postponed another 43 years! But in the meantime, the siege of Gaza has to be lifted.

Flotilla: Crisis growing inside NATO?

The very well-informed Craig Murray has a great piece about this on his blog today. (HT: Mondoweiss.)
Murray’s bottom line:

    There are already deep misgivings, especially amongst the military, over the Afghan mission. There is no sign of a diminution in Afghan resistance attacks and no evidence of a clear gameplan. The military are not stupid and they can see that the Karzai government is deeply corrupt and the Afghan “national” army comprised almost exclusively of tribal enemies of the Pashtuns.
    You might be surprised by just how high in Nato scepticism runs at the line that in some way occupying Afghanistan helps protect the west, as opposed to stoking dangerous Islamic anger worldwide.
    So this is what is causing frost and stress inside NATO. The organisation is tied up in a massive, expensive and ill-defined mission in Afghanistan that many whisper is counter-productive in terms of the alliance aim of mutual defence. Every European military is facing financial problems as a public deficit financing crisis sweeps the continent. The only glue holding the Afghan mission together is loyalty to and support for the United States.
    But what kind of mutual support organisation is NATO when members must make decades long commitments, at huge expense and some loss of life, to support the United States, but cannot make even a gesture to support Turkey when Turkey is attacked by a non-member?
    Even the Eastern Europeans have not been backing the US line on the Israeli attack. The atmosphere in NATO on the issue has been very much the US against the rest, with the US attitude inside NATO described to me by a senior NATO officer as “amazingly arrogant – they don’t seem to think it matters what anybody else thinks”.