The Rachel Corrie has now been illegally boarded by the Israeli military in international waters.
As usual the BBC’s immediate reaction is simply to retail Israeli propaganda. The Rachel Corrie has been boarded “with the full compliance of the crew”, BBC News tells us. That is almost certainly not true, unless you count without violent resistance as “full compliance”.
If that were true, you might wonder why Israel had jammed – again contrary to maritime law – all the Rachel Corrie’s communications with the outside world, and why they are still jammed. The BBC did not mention that.
The organisers have just posted this:
“For the second time in less then a week, Israeli naval commandos stormed an unarmed aid ship, brutally taking its passengers hostage and towing the ship toward Ashdod port in Southern Israel.”
But the BBC is much more concerned to help ensure that the Israeli version has unquestioned domination of the initial news.
No, we don’t have an Armageddon Evangelical. What we have is a non-Armagaddon Roman Catholic whose paternal ancestors in Eastern Europe had to learn to fight and win to defend what was then the Turkish frontier, and they had to be ruthless with their enemies.
They had to do this to stay alive and be left in peace against an enemy determined to fight a religious war. The Armenians and the Pontic Greeks didn’t learn fast enough and they were wiped out. The Assyrians get culled by a pogrom every two generations or so.
I’m not quite a Christian Zionist. What the Christian Zionists believe is that the Jews collectively and directly have from God the sovereign rights to the Land of Israel.
My position is that God gave sovereignty to King David and his legitimate royal descendants. Politics and the formation of states runs their course independently of this.
Now, as for the point about crude death rates, what is the absolute figure for deaths per year since the imposition of the siege.
“My position is that God gave sovereignty to King David and his legitimate royal descendants.”
That seems highly unlikely. Do you have any evidence for this?
OK, Larry. 2 Chronicles 13:5.
What’s useful about it is this. It enables us to conceive of a future in which allegiance to the monarchy, rather than exclusive Jewish ethnicity, serves as the principle of national identity. It makes for a more inclusive nation. It is thought that up to 20 per cent of the population of ancient Israel was non-Israelite.
Mind you, you can always rely on the headbangers of Hamas to screw things up for everyone else.
Very good article by Nick Cohen in today’s Observer.
Yeah, but that’s not really evidence, is it? That would be like citing Genesis for the proposition that two of each animal went voluntarily onto Noah’s boat. It all seems highly unlikely.
But I will read Nick Cohen’s article.
In relation to Michael Petek, I came across a recently-defaced Jewish graveyard in Slovakia. Swastikas all over the stones, stones pushed over, etc. No Jews have lived in that village in central Slovakia since 1942; the last dates on the gravestones are from 1942. It used to be a Jewish village. It was a haunting and terrifying sight.
The Nazi-collaborator Slovakian government was even more assiduous than the German Govt about rounding-up their Jews; in fact, they actually PAID the German govt. to remove ‘their’ Jews.
If we’re talking about Eastern Europe in the context of Israel, we need to talk about Eastern European ant-Semitism.
I have American and British friends whose Jewish grandparents, and all their families who couldn’t get out, were butchered in Prague or in concentration camps. I also have Roman Catholic Slovak people in my family (as well as friends) who are aware of all of this and who are not in denial about it. Of course, there were people in Eastern Europe who helped Jews escape – to Turkey or elsewhere.
One of the central historical reasons there is hell in the Levant right now is that Eastern Europe and Germany (as a culmination of trans-European persecution more generally over a thousand-plus years) murdered six million Jews (as well as millions of Roma and other people too).
The fag-end Ottoman Empire committed the Armenian genocide. This is a fact that needs to be recognised openly by modern-day Turkey.
During WW2, Turkey – albeit that there were anti-Semitic attitudes in parts of the ruling elite – took in many thousands of Jewish refugees from the Balkans. Turkish-British writer, Moris Farhi has written a novel about this; he is Jewish.
So as we know, matters are not black-and-white.
Petek’s comments suggest that he seems to have learned nothing and also suggest that he and those who hold similar beliefs prefer simplistic historical narratives.
The current propagandistic obsession of the right-wing nationalist parties in Eastern Europe with a four hundred year-old historical Ottoman threat (“to quote one of them: “turbans in Bratislava”; what planet are these poeple on?) is laughable but also very serious. It would be like cultivating fear, in present-day Uzbekistan, of the Moghuls in India. The fact that he – wherever he is now – continues to render this as argumentation suggests the transference of guilt on a massive scale.
On the USA, there are many good people in both the South and elsewhere; we tend to get a distorted view here in Europe. Not to take away from an analysis of a certain group of Protestant Evangelicals (and again, I should emphasise many Evangelicals – I have friends who are that, too – are the opposite of this; it’s a specific subset only) who have extremist views on the world. But the sensible people (i.e. those with whom we may agree or disagree in rational terms but who do not believe frantically in enhancing the onset of a Nuclear Winter) tend not to conform to caricature and so don’t get the same press. Nonetheless, the impact over the past three decades of the Evangelicals on right-wing politics of the extremist groupings is far from minimal.
But the main focus of our argumentation in relation to the Middle East needs to be on land, justice, corporate backing for illegal regimes, etc. Not on King David and the psalms. Otherwise, we simply engage in distraction and abstraction, a futile chiromancy.
A dance of death.
Suhayl Saadi, the subtext of the last thing you say – about ‘illegal regimes’ is that the very existence of Israel is itself illegal, much as the state of Northern Cyprus is illegal as a creation of Turkish aggression.
I said before (maybe on a different post) that the existence of Israel is illegal only under Islamic law.
Now, if you want to bring religion into it – and you’ll find plenty video climps on Memri TV doing just that – then be my guest. You’ll get a rejoinder in religious terms, but remember you started it.
No, I did not mean that the state of Israel itself is illegal; clearly, under international law, it is legal; I was referring to the Occupied Territories. There should be corporate disinvestment in Israel with a strategy of complete withdrawl from the Occupied Territories as is reqd by international law and by numerous accords signed by multiple sides.
In the context of geopolitics, I’m not at all interested in Islamic Law, Christian Law, Jewish Law, Hindu Law. I don;t think any of these should have any part in it. That’s my view.
You have avoided responding to my central points concerning eastern Europe, I notice.
the whole world is against israel now, though what zahal did on that flotilla was not really illigal …i hardly can imagne all consiquences of these stories..
No, asis, the whole world is not against Israel, all most people want is some justice for the Palestinians.
Suhayl, I didn’t comment about your remarks on Eastern Europe because I don’t disagree with what you say. Is there anything in particular you want me to engage with?
By the way, the Occupied Territories (besides the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms) don’t belong to any state, so why is their occupation illegal?
Is that Michael Petek? Thank you. The UN – and virtually every country in the world – has called on numerous occasions for Israeli withdrawl from those areas and supports the establishment of a Palestinian state. Even the term, ‘Occupied Territories’ has become a battleground, but this itself is part of the war of disinformation perpetrated by the Israeli state.
The occupation is illegal, but also, the occupation itself, on the ground, ipso facto and de facto, is hugely oppressive. It’s the creation of multiple Bantustans – as both Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu eloquently have pointed-out.
And, as many supporters of Israel have argued, the occupation also will do Israel no favours in the long-term.
I am aware that the long-term agenda is to squeeze and squeeze the enclaves until they become unlivable for Palestinians and thereby to ‘complete’ the process of expulsion. This has become really quite clear.
Michael Petek
If there is a religious claim for the Jews to occupy Palestine, why was St Paul so upset that Judaism had been cancelled, and indeed cursed on the lips of their prophet Jesus, Esa, alaihi salaam, whom they rejected in favour of the international polytheism which had earned them the cash to rebuild the temploe of Solomon?
Whoops! Rome took it down in 73 AD, fulfilling Jesus’, AS, prophecy that not one stone would stand upon another within one generation of the Jews rejecting his message, calling them back to their true religion of Islam. Who are you going to make foot the bill for restoring this ancient conservation building? The Italians for cultural sabotage, or Jesus, peace be upon him, for cursing the Jews and prophecying their removal from Palestine?
Anyway, British policy is to promote nationalism wherever it can, in order to defeat the nationalism they promoted by moral condemnation. To quote the Qur’an, ‘Satan’s plan is weak.’ This is why they supported Saddam’s Arab nationalism, in order to defeat it. This is why they pay Iran to supply Gaza and Lebanon with weapons, to change the Palestinian cause into a Nationalistic struggle, instead of the religious struggle which is the heart of the problem.
There is no solution to the problem of Palestine without recognising that Israel’s claim to the land was cancelled in Jesus’ pbuh lifetime. Then, if the Jews want to live there in peace and harmony with their neighbours, so be it. What is intolerable is Israel trying to convince the Christian world that its violent means justify the ends, because of a right to live in Palestine that was abrogated, and that Christianity is the natural partner to Judaism. Judaism was abrogated. The natural partner to Christianity is Islam. Sorry Suhayl, don’t agree with you about a secular solution on this one.
I know that, anno. We agree to disagree! But let’s not let that get in the way of the struggle to achieve peace and justice for Palestinians.
How do the Israelis always manage to stay so cool when they are being condemned by the whole world? Because they are laughing up their sleeve at you believing, hook, line and sinker, their lie about being the rightful heirs to Palestine. They are laughing at us, but all the Christians think they are laughing with them, and they are on their side.
Plastic Gonks, the lot of them. Fluorescent nylon wool growing out of the cavity where there should be a brain. Why did Zionist Tony Blair abolish fox-hunting? because it was much more fun taking the Christians for a ride and hunting Muslims. Tally-ho! you don’t even have to wait for the right season. Come on you wimps, there’s more carnage to be done.
legal status of israels raid on the high seas:
‘Jose Maria Ruiz Soroa, a Spanish maritime law scholar and co-author of the legal commentary Manual de derecho de la navegacion maritima,said that Israel is not entitled,according to international law, to constrain the freedom of navigation of any ship on the high seas, except in a number of situations that do not apply to the Gaza flotilla case.
He said blockade is not a valid reason, as it is a concept only applicable to war situations. He also said that Israel’s action is a breach of the UN International Maritime Organization Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation (SUA),which was signed by Israel in April 2009; According to the article 6.1 of the SUA, the jurisdiction over the offences that a ship might have committed lays in the State whose flag the ship is flying.
Now we move on to citing specific rules of law found in International Law; Admiralty and Maritime.
Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts Against the Safety of Maritime Navigation ?” Article III
etc
http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/06/so-you-want-to-defend-israel/
Michael Petek.. running a blockade is NOT an act of war. But attacking a ship with a navvy in international waters IS an act of war
Okay, I have to retract something that I said before, the bit about being combatively pleased that Michael Petek is posting here. Reading the above, I realise that MP isn’t really a pseudo-rationalist defending the legality of Israel’s right to defend itself against the weak and the powerless. In fact, he’s a pre-mediaevalist propounding an abhorrent mixture of monarchic and theocratic absolutism. God gave the Land of Israel to the House of David, and is the whole of the law. After that, what room is there for debate, for the exchange of views, for the critical rationalist stance which has as its foundation the mind-state “You might be right and I might be wrong, and together we may be able to get closer to the truth.”
Micky P knows the truth. So bow your heads, unbelievers.
Monty
One of your comments was automatically blocked for too many links.
Anno, the religious claim is that the Land of Israel belongs forever to the House of David, whose head according to the Christian religion is Jesus Christ. That claim is imperishable.
Political claims run their course independently. The claim of the State of Israel is that it came into existence in 1948 in the same way in which other states do. Its mode of earthly government runs its course as a modern democracy and its constitution is in itself non-religious.
What Israel is facing is not merely a Palestinian claim to land, but an Islamic holy war.
There is no propaganda antidote to this kind of onslaught except for Israelis to assert that the God of Israel is the true God and that Mohammed is a false prophet – and to invite anyone who thinks differently to come on over if they think they’re hard enough!
Quod erat demonstrandum
Michael
“There is no propaganda antidote to this kind of onslaught except for Israelis to assert that the God of Israel is the true God and that Mohammed is a false prophet – and to invite anyone who thinks differently to come on over if they think they’re hard enough!”
There are proponents of religiously motivated violence all over. You are just another violent fanatic.
The IDF received a bloody nose in the Lebanon. But what triumphalist Zionists seem not to have grasped is that the Turkish military is in a different league to the IDF or to anything the IDF has ever thought.
Really, it is. The Turkish military is very good indeed. The urkish Navy, for example, could sink the entire Israeli navy before lunch. This whole “Nobody can defeat Israel” bravado could come to a very sticky end. I strongly recommend Zionists to stop the Turkish flag burning.
Craig, thanks for the heads up about the link restrictions! 🙂
I hope it is OK to post again without so many links.
If anyone is interested, the most common photo of the MV Rachel Corrie (as used on for example on Wikipedia and BBC) seems to have been photoshopped by Free Gaza Org.
It is a small point in the light of things but annoying since the photo is used on many high profile news websites.
The photo on Wikipedia comes from Free Gaza Org’s Flickr page.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza/4537506480/sizes/o/in/set-72157623830394876/
It is dated April 17th and if you click on “more properties” you will see it says; Software: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows.
This is strikingly similar to a photo, also dated April 17th, of the ship with the old name of Linda here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/freegaza/4529097080/sizes/o/in/set-72157623830394876/
Note the flags, and particularly the light blue material draped over the stern.
Furthermore, no other photo shows the ship with the above Rachel Corrie signwriting.
Monty – Not commenting on what you’re trying to say, as I don’t get your point, just to say that many people uploading to the web use software like photoshop simply to change the file size of any given photograph. All my photos are files larger than 1MB, after optimizing for the web, they’re reduced to between 20 and 150kB. My online storage has an upper limit and viewers’ page loading time suffers if your photo file size is too large, so I try to keep it as small as possible.
Craig at June 6, 2010 11:03 AM
This is indeed a new dynamic and follows closely the new accord with Iran and Brazil re. Iran’s nuclear energy program.
How serious do you think Turkey is?
How does this sit with its desire to join the EU?
Mae at June 6, 2010 12:01 PM
I had meant to reply to you on the other thread. Suffice to say, thank you for your candid and thought provoking reply. My view is that we are all (not any particular nation or other involuntary group) collectively responsible to see truth and justice wherever in the world.
@Mae – my point is simple – I seek truth and I find it a pity that Free Gaza Org have resorted to uploading a manipulated photo that is now the most popular photo of the MV Rachel Corrie, which itself was very honourably seeking to promote the truth about the terrible conditions in Gaza.
If you examine the two photos in the links you might agree with me that it has been manipulated.
I accept your point that photoshop has many oft benign uses, but combined with the other evidence, the photo seems to me to be manipulated to represent an untruth.
What the idiot Michael doesn’t understand is there is only one God.
And that God is the one who owns people of every religion, and that God isn’t own by anyone including Israel.
I find Christian Zionists to be a very funny bunch.
They side with people who say this about Jesus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvnrBU4vaGY
Over people who accept Jesus as a Prophet.
I think this Buffy Saint-Marie song (sung here by Donovan) is timeless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UC9pc4U40sI
Craig: There are proponents of religiously motivated violence all over.
Yes, and the principle proponents and by far the most violent were the US and the UK under George Bush and Tony Blair, may they both both burn in eternal hell-fire, which is the purpose for which it was made.
Anyone who disagrees with rich, priveleged Craig is a Zionist troll, a racist prat, or a nutter.
Nuff said