Amazing video, apparently smuggled out of you-know-where, captures the mood of the “Spirit of Humanity” as it grinds from Cyprus toward Gaza and is intercepted by several Israeli ships nearly two weeks ago. Note the warnings in English that the Israelis might open fire. Note the Spirit’s captain’s statement that the Israeli navy wouldn’t have stood on ceremony with ordinary Palestinians. Note Cynthia McKinney and Huwaida Arraf, cool under pressure.
And note the repetition of the order, Go back to Larnaca– in Cyprus. Reminds me of the important place Larnaca had in Exodus And really brings the blockade home. Reminds me that Egypt’s blockade of one port of entry to Israel, the straits of Tiran, brought on a devastating war in 1967. Gazans suffer complete blockade.
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The arguments against demolishing Israel have long since been thoroughly laid to rest. Israel must be smashed to pieces. Any survivors of the Jewish state need to be thrown into cages for life so that they can no longer harm innocent people.
Wow, the Israelis should have just taken the word of the unknown people on the boat that they were just bringing humanitarian supplies. I mean, if someone says they are bringing humanitarian supplies, they couldn't possibly be lying about it and trying to smuggle weapons. Especially since humanitarian supplies could have been brought to Israel then sent in from Israel to Gaza without smuggling. The only reason they did this was for propaganda purposes. If they had actually just wanted to bring humanitarian supplies, they could have done so without trying to break the blockade.
The whole silly boat ride was a failure. They didn't get the publicity they wanted. No one got hurt and they were sent on their failing way.
Are you going to do the smashing, tough guy?
The vessel had been cleared by customs in Cyprus when it left port as having only humanitarian supplies. But I'm sure those dastardly terrorists such as Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Magure and former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney could have linked up along the way with a small ship carrying guns, bombs, and rockets that militant groups in Gaza already possess, all while being under the watchful eye of the Israeli Navy in international waters, right? The only reason they did this was for propaganda purposes. If they had actually just wanted to bring humanitarian supplies, they could have done so without trying to break the blockade. And where would they have brought these supplies in? The Rafah crossing in Egypt, where the current Viva Palestina convoy is being refused entry into Gaza by the Egyptian authorities? Perhaps the Erez crossing in Israel, because I'm sure the Israelis would 1) let these activists into the country and 2) let them into Gaza with a host of items that are currently on a list basic necessities that can't be delivered? A quick visit to the website of B'Tselem, Amnesty International, or Human Rights Watch will show you that Israel has been increasing restrictions on humanitarian goods entering Gaza since Hamas won the war against Fatah in June of 2007. That's what's meant by "the blockade".
"The whole silly boat ride was a failure." As have most humanitarian efforts to help Gaza. Israel has made sure that the people in Gaza continue to starve and suffer as they inflict collective punishment on 1.5 million people a la Nazi style, and thedhimmi is proud of it.
"I mean, if someone says they are bringing humanitarian supplies, they couldn't possibly be lying about it and trying to smuggle weapons." This is of course, irrelevant. Apart from the fact that the seizure took place in international waters, Israel had ample time to inspect the cargo and found nothing. The could have released the hostages and returned the cargo, but chose to act in their typical thuggish fashion.
Oh great. The cartoon anti-semite, as counterpoint to the cartoon anti-Islamist.
It will happen again, and again. The obstacles to free entry to the port still have the SAME path to resolution, which is for Hamas to willingly join the PA permanently (with no threat of agitation, civil war, or policy preconditions). Then, the PA will have to negotiate with Israel. Even the path of unilateral declaration of a state, or UN initiated state declaration REQUIRE Hamas to unify with the PA. If they can do that, then there is a path to normalization of Gaza ports. If they can't, there isn't.
As far as I know Egypt neither seized nor blocked the access of any ship to the Gulf of Aqaba during the lead up to the 1967 war. When Egypt requested the redeployment of UN troops so that Egypt could move its forces through Gaza toward Yemen, the UN removed its forces entirely although Egypt never asked for such a thing. Thus the UN restored the status quo before the 1956 war. See Egypt Informs U.S. of Blockade of Straits of Tiran. Unlike the piracy which the Israeli government committed against the Spirit of Humanity and which should have brought a demand for release by the USA, the blockade of the Straits of Tiran violated no international law and should be restored with the aid of the USA in accord with several separate international treaties. Abdullah Schleifer documents the sequence of events preceding the 1967 war in careful detail in The Fall of Jerusalem. Schleifer used to be a CBS producer in the 1960s and later founded the journalism school at AUC. I discuss his book briefly in Anti-War: 1960s versus 2000s.
Instead, over time the USA will go down, as it has been going down ever since Truman single-handedly recognized the Jewish state behind the back of the US State Department and the US Delegation To The UN so that he could remain president. He needed Zionist money to fund his whistle stops and for the Jewish block vote in five key states. At the time he made his decision Truman was totally ignorant regarding two key assumptions of Zionism: Gentiles will always hate the Jews and all non-Jews in the way of Greater Israel are collateral damage. Here's how it (i.e., Zionist paranoia running US foreign policy ) all started straight from the mouth of a key US intelligence officer, as documented in the Truman Library Archive (and since then the tail has grown taller every year, the dog, smaller): http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2...
How often has the US recognized a state without borders? And on a unilateral basis?
Right, Richard, and the Iranians should have continued to support the Shah.
Then their stuck until 2016 or so at least.
I'm Jewish. All Jews of character want Israel–a disgrace to the jewish people–destroyed. p.s. only very silly children without a case still throw around terms like "anti-Semite." No one listens to you any more.
Bullshit. I'm prepared to believe that Adam and Phil are Jews, just very naive ones. They think if Israel surrendered to the Arabs and let them take over, everything would be hugs and puppies. You have made it very clear that want the Jews exterminated.
Oh, well, if it had been cleared by the extensive clearing procedure of "looking at the written manifest and checking a box on a form". Then it must not have been smuggling weapons. I mean, there is no way that customs in Cyprus could have missed weapons, what with their x-ray eyes. Seriously though, do you know anything about international shipping? They don't open every crate and search the whole ship, that would be too expensive. They might open a crate or two on the top but mainly it's just paperwork. Also, how were the Israelis supposed to know that a ship with a falsified destination that wasn't in Israel had cleared the awsome security hurdle that is Cyprus Customs? They could have brought them in to Israel. Where they would have been sent along to the Palestinians. Which in fact is what is happening to the cargo now.
The smugglers weren't hostages. The Israelis weren't saying "do this or we will harm these people under our control". The Palestinians take hostages, the Israelis don't. The Israelis released the smugglers and sent the cargo on to the Palestinians once it had been inspected. Of course, that doesn't make as good PR as the original story. Israel's problem is that the truth is often grubby, gray, and boring. The Palestinians don't have that problem. Their propaganda spreads because people will repeat a good story, whether it is true or not.
Wow, you really have no shame about lying. The Egyptians ordered the U.N. out of the way in violation of the treaty that ended the Suez War. They massed on the border of Israel, as did several othe Arab armies and declared their intent to exterminate the Israelis. They gleefully shouted their intent to destroy Israel to the whole world, then pretended Israel started it when the Arab's proposed victims didn't wait for the Arabs to land a blow before they crippled their ability to carry out their stated plans. When four guys say they are going to kill you and start raising their guns toward you, you don't have to wait for them to shoot before you shoot them in self defense. The blockade of Tiran was an act of war. It wasn't a war crime, but international law recognized blockading the access from territorial waters of a country to the high seas as an act of war.
Fair enough, and if you say you're Jewish, I accept that. My point was that you and dimmi might be provocateurs :) I'd agree with your sentiment about Israel being a disgrace to Jewish people, and try to differentiate between Jews and Zionists, while not forgetting that for MOST Jews, support for Israel's existence is a litmus test. Israel delendum est!
The historical source of your quote, the statement that "Carthage must be destroyed" was in the context of a war in which "The city was ploughed over and surviving inhabitants sold into slavery." -Wikipedia. So you think Israel should be ploughed over and the Jews sold into slavery. Nice.
That would be the fairest resolution of the conflict.
Those who support israel have no right to complain about anti-Semitism. They are the cause of anti-Semitism and Jews of conscience need to repudiate these louts, (if only out of self-interest and self-preservation).
Sure, Nazi Thom. That's why your leader Menachem Begin (whom Albert Einstein correctly labelled a "Nazi" and "a Fascist" in a letter to the New York Times), says that israel KNEW Egypt wasn't going to attack and stressed that it was an act of aggression on ISRAEL'S part. "We must be honest" Begin said. "WE attacked THEM." THORS is absolutely correct about the Strait of Tiran incident. You're a nazi and a shitty liar, thom. Give up.
Sounds like a sore loser to me.
Well that would be poetic justice considering how many Palestinian villages were ploughed over and the inhabitants forced into refugee camps but if you want to connect a rhetorical statement with the eventual outcome then I could come up with lots of statements from Herzl and Ben Gurion that telegraphed what would happen to the Palestinian people. Do I personally think Israel should be ploughed over and Jews sold into slavery? No, but the only solution now is that all the inhabitants receive equal rights in one state. Will Israel as it is constituted today then be 'destroyed'? Yes, that'll be good.
That doesn't sound like Einstein. He was pretty temperate in his writing. Got a cite, or are you just pulling more fake quotes out of your ass. As for Begin, another fake quote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Menachem_Begin 'I did a search in the New York times site and didn't found this quote "The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him"' Joachim, or Thors or whatever alias he is hiding behind thinks that it wasn't an act of war blockading a port. In that case, what are you complaining about in Gaza?
You never read Einstein's letter to the Times, signed by 30 other prominent Jews? You know zero, Thom. http://www.ifamericansknew.org/download/einstein....
oh…and by the way, Einstein also repudiated Judaism: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/984283.html
oh sure, Nazi Thom. That's why even Alan Dershowitz acknowledges this precise quote of begin in the endnotes of his book "Preemption." The quote is not a fake. YOU'RE a fake.
Yitzhak Rabin, who served as the Chief of the General Staff for Israel during the war stated: "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions he sent into Sinai on May 14 would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it." Menachem Begin stated that "The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches did not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him." [64] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six-Day_War Both quotes are in dozens if not hundreds of scholarly works. Dispute it all you want. You just make yourself look more ridiculous.
Actually, what you could come up with are lots of fake quotes from Herezl and Ben Gurion. Making up and spreading fake Ben Gurion quotes is a cottage industry for anti-Semites.
That cite said he repudiated religion in general. He was an agnostic or atheist. So are a lot of scientists. So by your characterization, he also repudiated Islam, Christianity, etc.
That's not a letter to the NYT, that is an alleged quote from a letter to the NYT. Given the tendency of anti-Semites to make up fake quotes and cite to real sources that never said them, an alleged quote is worthless. Post a cite to the original letter, not what someone says is a copy of hte letter. Who knows where they got it from.
You obviously haven't dealt with scholarly works. The amount of research that goes into checking the accuracy of a quote is almost none. Theoretically, any quote should cite the chain of sources all the way back to the original. In practice, almost all scholarly works just lift their quotes, citation and all, from some earlier source citing to a supposed original, which in turn lifted the quote from an earlier source citing to the supposed original and so on. These things propagate. "Joe said that Jim said that Fred said that Mary said, that Ellen said that Ted said that Helen said that Bob said that Larry said that the Jews are bad". What gets reported all the way along the line is "Larry said that Jews are bad". Nobody bothers to check with Larry and they leave no way to find out that Bob made it up and Larry never said that. So in that chain, you have eight "scholarly works" all saying Larry said something he never said.
The problem is that even if you wanted to find out who made it up you couldn't, since only the "original" source is cited, and they never bother to check the original. They just assume that if more than one source cites it, it must be in the original. Which is a false assumption since all the sources citing it could be traced back to Bob. Same thing happens with rape statistics, the amount that women are paid versus the amount men are paid "for the same work", the amount that piracy costs the movie or recording industry, etc. In this case, hundreds of "scholarly works" are not hundreds of independent verifications, they are just one lie echoed over and over. I call it "lie laundering". Like money laundering. Taking a lie and running it through an echo chamber of lazy scholarship to make it seem well established.
Even well meaning people can spread the lie. An author I know translated "goyim" as "cattle" in one of his books. It actually means "nations". There is a pretty funny quote if you translate it as "cattle". "And cattle shall not lift up sword against cattle and neither shall mankind know war anymore". When I e-mailed him about it, he said a Jewish friend of his told him that it meant that. I figure the Jewish friend got it from someone who got it from an anti-Semitic source.
Sure, Thom The entire edifice of historical scholarship is all an elaborate ruse to make Israelis look like pigs. Do you have even a LITTLE idea of how laughable you are?
You know that before you even read them? Cool. But then, there seems to be a better class of debate and historical truth from Israeli scholars than North American apologists (not that I have any way of knowing what you are)
I know that because people on this web site have been coming up with fake quotes from Ben Gurion over and over. Fake ben Gurion quotes are too common and too widely spread through the echo chamber to trust anything but the original sources. As I have said elsewhere, people don't check the original sources, they just lift the quote, supposed source and all from someone else quoting it, and print it as though they had gone to the original source.
No, the entire edifice of historical scholarship is a system of lazy, thinly veiled copying and pasting. Very very few papers go to the original sources. That is what makes it so easy for propaganda and false quotes and statistics to spread. We have seen it in action on this very website. Someone will say "the <insert respectable source newspapers here> says that Israel committed this or that action." Then you check it and what the article says is that "Hamas says that Israel committed this or that action". In realistic terms, a newspaper that quotes a claim by Hamas does not make that claim any more reliable than the original source. Reliability decays every time something is quoted. If a 99% reliable source quotes a 50% reliable source the reliability of the information is 49.5%. As a matter of fact, the problem has gotten better in some ways since the advent of computers and worse in others. When someone was transcribing by hand, they could easily miss a "not". Such as Ben Gurion's statement that "We do not want and do not need to expel Arabs and take their places." which is often misquoted as "we must expel…"
Both the hearsay rules (produce the original source, or a reason why the original source and every link in the chain to the witness on the stand is reliable) and the best evidence rule (produce the original document, not what someone wrote about or said was in the original document) in courts are based on this principle. Even if the person you are talking to isn't lying or mistaken, their source could have been.
I: Origins of the ‘Transfer Idea’ Morris concludes that the idea of transfer was not, in 1947-1949, a new one. He writes: Many if not most of Zionism's mainstream leaders expressed at least passing support for the idea of transfer during the movement's first decades. True, as the subject was sensitive they did not often or usually state this in public[74]. Morris also concludes that Zionisms aim was "to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population". According to Morris only after Arab resistance emerged did this become a rationale for transfer.[75] Other authors, including Palestinian writers and Israeli New Historians, have also described this attitude as a prevalent notion in Zionist thinking and as a major factor in the exodus.
II: Israeli historian and former diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami wrote: The debate about whether or not the mass exodus of Palestinians was the result of a Zionist design or the inevitable concomitant of war should not ignore the ideological constructs that motivated the Zionist enterprise. The philosophy of transfer was not a marginal, esoteric article in the mindset and thinking of the main leaders of the Yishuv. These ideological constructs provided a legitimate environment for commanders in the field actively to encourage the eviction of the local population even when no precise orders to that effect were issued by the political leaders.[76]
III: The Peel Commission's plan and the Yishuv's reaction The idea of population transfer was briefly placed on the Mandate's political agenda in 1937 by the Peel Commission. The commission recommended that Britain should withdraw from Palestine and that the land be partitioned between Jews and Arabs. It called for a "transfer of land and an exchange of population", including the removal of 250,000 Palestinian Arabs from what would become the Jewish state[77], along the lines of the mutual population exchange between the Turkish and Greek populations after the Greco-Turkish War of 1922. According to the plan 'in the last resort' the transfer of Arabs from the Jewish part would be compulsory.[78] The transfer would be voluntary in as far as Arab leaders were required to agree with it, but after that it would be almost inevitable that it would have to be forced upon the population.[79] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_1948_P...
IV: The "Concept of Transfer in Zionism" According to Nur Masalha the concept of 'transfer' was deeply rooted in mainstream Zionism. The debate on the 'idea of transfer' in political Zionism became popular in the later 1980s when the State of Israel declassified documents pertaining to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War period and the so-called New Historians began publishing articles and books based on those documents. Proponents of this theory say that the driving force of the 1948 Palestinian exodus was the Zionist leaders' belief that a Jewish state could not survive with a strong Arab population and that a population transfer would be most beneficial.
Theodor Herzl supported the transfer idea. Land in Palestine was to be gently expropriated from the Palestinian Arabs and they were to be worked across the border "unbemerkt" (surreptitiously), e.g. by refusing them employment.[103] Herzl's draft of a charter for a Jewish-Ottoman Land Company (JOLC) gave the JOLC the right to obtain land in Palestine by giving its owners comparable land elsewhere in the Ottoman empire. According to Walid Khalidi this indicates Herzl's "bland assumption of the transfer of the Palestinian to make way for the immigrant colonist."[104] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_and_Palestin...