Articles of Hija del Zion para Israel - Daughter of Zion for Israel
Israel’s vivid act of piracy may yet turn the tide of global opinion | Linda Grant 07:06:34 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby Linda Grant
Like the Exodus in 1947, the Gaza aid flotilla has now etched itself on the mind – whatever the eventual consequences In the summer of 1947 a semi-derelict 200-berth Chesapeake Bay steamer carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors, renamed the Exodus, set out from France to run the British blockade of Palestine. The survivors had been rotting in displaced persons camps since the end of the war, waiting to find a country that would take them. The organisers of the expedition, the Zionist movement, were operating a policy of illegal immigration as both a humanitarian rescue operation and as a calculated move to politically gerrymander the country’s Jewish population. They didn’t expect to be able to land, but they knew that the rickety vessel with its pitiful human cargo of refugees would show up the British as cold-hearted colonial masters. The Exodus could equally have been called End of Empire. As the ship approached Haifa, the commander received a radio signal from the Zionist leadership not to risk the lives of the passengers by a confrontation. But the incalcitrant Polish captain refused to turn back. Hemmed in by three British destroyers, the crew and passengers found themselves boarded, and retaliated with whatever weapons came to hand – a consignment of cans of kosher corned beef. The British killed three people, one bludgeoned to death by a rifle butt in the face. A few days later the passengers were transferred to another ship and sailed back to Germany, back to the refugee camps, under withering press headlines: “Return to the death land,” read one. The gripping events in the eastern Mediterranean, shown on the news reels, evoked massive public sympathy, particularly in America where Britain was seen as the old colonial regime. The media coverage was a PR catastrophe for Britain. To the ship’s captain, Ike Aronowitz, when I met him in 2007 shortly before his death, Ernest Bevin’s decision to repel the Exodus was a gift from a God who had “sent us Ernest Bevin to create a Jewish state”. Against the single image of a ship full of Holocaust survivors being beaten by squaddies, the British had to set a complex narrative, too complicated for a public looking for a simple story of victims and oppressors. The British spoke of the needs and wishes of the existing Arab population of Palestine; a new Jewish state implanted in the Middle East against the will of its native inhabitants was not to be the happy ending of a tragic Jewish story. Yet the Exodus was to be instrumental in cementing support later that year for the UN partition vote which divided Mandate Palestine, and the largely erroneous novel and film of the same name in the late 1950s would create a lasting mythology. The image of the boat had greater power than the warnings from the Foreign Office or the pleas of Arab leaders. The events early this week of the boarding of the Gaza aid flotilla should have jogged the memories of Israel’s political leaders and its military. The sight of Israeli politicians, diplomats and army spokespeople trying to assert a more complicated story than that of innocent civilians brutally murdered by an act of piracy has not washed with the public. No amount of showing videos of the peace activists attacking the abseiling Israeli soldiers will answer the question: what were the soldiers doing there in the first place and why would the passengers not defend themselves against their attackers, exactly as the refugees had done in 1947? Israel’s political reasoning, of a Hamas-controlled Gaza strip, of the threat to the Jewish state from Gaza in the south and Hezbollah in the north, backed by the nuclear-ambitious Iran, falls on deaf ears. Legal arguments by maritime experts that Israel was within its right to assault the ship in international waters can’t compete with the authoritative presence on another of the vessels of the internationally bestselling novelist Henning Mankell, who risked his own life to bring aid to the starving millions of Gaza. Palestinian solidarity movements have not, until now, attained the critical mass of the campaign against apartheid South Africa. Perhaps, like the Exodus in 1947, the Gaza aid flotilla will be the tipping point in the long agony of the Palestinian people, when wavering public opinion finally turns decisively against Israel and the whole Zionist project of a national home for the Jews. When public sympathy is outraged by what has been described as a massacre, the fine points of what is to
be the solution to the rival claims of Arabs and Jews for the same piece of territory are not the point. We look back on the ship Exodus and wonder if our parents and grandparents should have thought harder and emoted less. But emotions are what you feel, you cannot help it. Human empathy for the inmates of a vast open air prison undergoing collective punishment will always trounce the warnings of the thinktanks. The image of the Gaza flotilla has etched itself on the mind, whatever the unforeseen consequences of our collective outrage. •
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International aid and development
Linda Grant guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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Holocaust Mahnmal 2
08:02:21 2010-02-26) )כ"כ ככככ כ'ככ"כby
Image taken on 2008-03-24 09:51:37 by 96dpi.
Obama administration condemns Israel 06:06:00 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby Carl in Jerusalem
Obama administration condemns Israel In case you missed it, here’s US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning Israel’s policies in Gaza as part of the worldwide condemnation of Israel’s defending itself against the flotilla of fools. Let’s go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Gateway Pundit).
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That seems to be one of the big meme’s of this past week – that Hamas and Fatah should reconcile. What could go wrong? posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:13 AM Original post source
The Last Crusade: ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOP BUTCHERED BY MAD MUSLIM 05:06:00 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby NoahDavidSimon
PRIEST LATEST VICTIM IN CHRISTIAN KILLINGS By Paul L. Williams, Ph.D. A Roman Catholic bishop has been stabbed to death in southern Turkey. The incident marked the latest in a string of attacks on Christians since the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma, AKP) gained control of the government in 2002. via ibloga.blogspot.com Posted via web from noahdavidsimon’s posterous
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Carbeques in Germany 05:06:36 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby SheikhYermami
Last week in Osterholz-Scharmbeck (Lower Saxony) : Muslim ‘youths’ accused of being gang-members and drug-dealers carbequed 10 expensive vehicles. The youths are welfare recipients and… Original post source
Suicide Activists on the Gaza Flotilla 05:06:00 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby NoahDavidSimon
I’m amazed how many people are giving their opinions on the Flotilla without watching the multiple viewpoints provided by the Flotilla’s own cameras and the IDF. Let the footage speak for itself. Hell…Why not let the Flotilla speak for themselves!
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via youtube.com just watch the footage folks! Posted via web from noahdavidsimon’s posterous
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Stop the Heron delivery
05:06:00 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby Carl in Jerusalem
Stop the Heron delivery
Israel has a contract with Turkey pursuant to which it has been delivering the Heron (pictured), Israel’s most advanced unmanned aerial vehicle. The final four Herons are scheduled to be delivered in June or July. Israel should not go through with those deliveries. The Turks think that they can treat Israel like a pariah country and get away with it. They were behind the flotilla of fools that confronted the IDF off the coast of Israel on Monday, and they are behind two more ships that are on their way here. And yet, the Turks have no expectation that they won’t get the Herons (Hat Tip: Gates of Vienna). “We expect the remaining Herons to be delivered in June or July,” Turkish Defense Minister Vecdi Gönül told reporters in Parliament. In January, Turkish officials said Israel would send four Herons to Turkey in March. The remaining six Herons are set to arrive in Turkey by the end of 2010, according to Turkish officials. Turkey awarded the aircraft-building contract in 2005, ordering 10 drones from Israeli manufacturers Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, and Elbit. The Heron UAV System is an operational fourth-generation, long-endurance, mediumaltitude system based on leading-edge technology with new fully automatic take-off and landing features and can provide deep-penetration, wide-area and real-time intelligence either by day or at night. The Heron can climb to an altitude of nearly 10,000 meters, has a range of 350 kilometers and can fly continuously for at least 24 hours. It can carry out strategic reconnaissance and surveillance on six targets at once. Why should Israel carry out this contract? Good question. Anti-semitism (and anti-Americanism) in the Turkish media is reaching levels not seen in Europe since World War II Nazi Germany (Hat Tip: Memeorandum). To follow Turkish discourse in recent years has been to follow a national decline into madness. Imagine 80 million or so people sitting at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. They don’t speak an Indo-European language and perhaps hundreds of thousands of them have meaningful access to any outside media. What information most of them get is
filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison and an increasing number of state (i.e., Islamist) influenced outfits. Topics A and B (or B and A, it doesn’t really matter) have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States. For example, while there was much hand-wringing in our own media about “Who lost Turkey?” when U.S. forces were denied entry to Iraq from the north in 2003, no such introspection was evident in Ankara and Istanbul. Instead, Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by U.S. forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews. The newspaper Yeni Safak, Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish. The same paper repeatedly claimed that the U.S. used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside U.S. forces in Iraq and that U.S. forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the U.S. “organ market.” The secular Hurriyet newspaper, meanwhile, accused Israeli soldiers of assassinating Turkish security personnel in Mosul and said the U.S. was starting an occupation of (Muslim) Indonesia under the guise of humanitarian assistance. Then U.S. ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman actually felt the need to organize a conference call to explain to the Turkish media that secret U.S. nuclear testing did not cause the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. One of the craziest theories circulating in Ankara was that the U.S. was colonizing the Middle East because its scientists were aware of an impending asteroid strike on North America. The Mosul and organ harvesting stories were soon brought together in a hit Turkish movie called “Valley of the Wolves,” which I saw in 2006 at a mall in Ankara. My poor Turkish was little barrier to understanding. The body parts of dead Iraqis could be clearly seen being placed into crates marked New York and Tel Aviv. It is no exaggeration to say that such anti-Semitic fare had not been played to mass audiences in Europe since the Third Reich. When I interviewed Prime Minister Erdogan (one of several encounters) in 2006, he was unabashed about the narrative. Erdogan: “I believe the people who made this movie took media reports as their basis . . . for example, Abu Ghraib prison—we have seen this on TV, and now we are watching Guantanamo Bay in the world media, and of course it could be that this movie was prepared under these influences.” Me: “But do you believe that many Turks have such a view of America, that we’re the kind of people who’d go to Iraq and kill people to take their organs?” Erdogan: “These kind of things happen in the world. If it’s not happening in Iraq, then its happening in other countries.” Me: “Which kind of things? Killing people to take their organs?” Erdogan: “I’m not saying they are being killed. . . . There are people in poverty who use this as a means to get money.” I was somewhat taken aback that the prime minister could not bring himself to condemn a fictional blood libel. I should not have been. He and his party have traded on America and Israel hatred ever since. There can be little doubt the Turkish flotilla that challenged the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza was organized with his approval, if not encouragement. Mr. Erodogan’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, is a proponent of a philosophy which calls on Turkey to loosen Western ties to the U.S., NATO and the European Union and seek its own sphere of influence to the east. Turkey’s recent deal to help Iran enrich uranium should come as no surprise. Why should Israel – of all countries – arm this type of regime. For that matter, why should the United States continue to protect it under the NATO treaty?
Since Erdogan and Turkish President Abdullah Gul took power, the excuse for protecting them has always been that the government did not protect the will of the people and if push came to shove the secular Turkish army would refuse to follow Erdogan’s orders. There were even veiled hints of a coup being possible. Really? I see no indications of that. Israel may not be able to push the Erdogan government out of office (although Erdogan aspires to push Netanyahu out of office). But at the very least, it ought not to be arming this hateful regime. To those of you who are Turks (I know that some of you come by here from time to time), ask yourselves how your government would have reacted if the story had been reversed and if there were a flotilla coming to supply the Kurdish rebels. I guarantee your government would have just sunk the ships. Read the whole thing. posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:42 AM Original post source
Dhimmi Dimwits 05:06:07 2010-06-04) )כ"כ כככככ כ'ככ"כby SheikhYermami
United in Stupidity: EU, US pledge to ignore the motives and goals of the jihadists while fighting terrorism The EU and the US have completely bought in to the idea that it somehow… Original post source