It is not surprising that such racist loathing creates a siege mentality in Israel. Worse is the fact that Israelis know it’s not just ‘the black Islamic banners’ with which they have to contend, but also the irrational hatred of much of the rest of the world. The realities of Gaza, Israel and the West Bank – where, with Israel’s assistance, the Palestinian economy is booming – are deemed irrelevant to the conventional narrative. Israel is a cartoon villain, beyond sympathy, Israel has fought so long, and usually so well, in real battles, but it seems to have forgotten how to fight in verbal ones. On the day of the flotilla incident, all the outraged governments were on the airwaves almost before anything had happened. But it took five and a half hours before the Israeli Ambassador in America appeared in public. Quite a lot of articulate people spoke up in Israel’s support – it really The commanders of the first unit were hit by the mob as they landed. One of the soldiers managed to fix another rope, after there were problems with the original one, for 10 more soldiers to land. The commandos cared for the wounded and took over part of the upper deck of the ship. At this stage, six minutes into the operation, another force landed from a second helicopter, led by a major.Tuesday, 8th June 2010
The derangement of the world
8:28am
In the Jerusalem Post, William Shawcross has written a blistering piece about the ‘irrational, obscene hatred’ of Israel now coursing so terrifyingly across both the Islamic and western worlds. ‘Shut up. Go back to Auschwitz’ was the flotilla’s response to the Israelis when they warned it not to enter the area under naval blockade. As Shawcross writes:
...Sunday, 6th June 2010
The alternative universe of the western left
12:55pm
Any rational and fair-minded individual who has been following the unfolding of the Turkish terrorist flotilla saga – the video proof that the Israeli marines only started using live ammunition to prevent themselves from being lynched, kidnapped and murdered; the fact that the same Israeli tactics resulted in six out of the seven boats in the flotilla landing peacefully in Ashdod; the fact that the Mavi Marmara was stacked with al Qaeda-related Islamists who declared they were bound for ‘martyrdom’ before they set out; not to mention the fact that in Gaza, Hamas actually refused to accept the flotilla’s ‘humanitarian aid’ that was the ostensible purpose of the voyage – anyone assimilating all this would doubtless have felt, watching the BBC1 Andrew Marr show this morning, that...Saturday, 5th June 2010
The lethal vacancy on the battleground of the mind
10:20pm
In the wake of the Turkish terrorist flotilla incident, Charles Moore has made the blindingly obvious point -- so obvious that the people who most need to acknowledge it are the last people on earth to do so. It is that those who defend Israel are undercut by Israel’s own utterly lamentable inability to make its case properly to the world. Moore writes:
...Friday, 4th June 2010
So much for the 'humanitarian' fig-leaf
4:23pm
So now we learn from the Israeli navy that an attempt was made to kidnap three of its marines on board the Mavi Marmara by beating them unconscious and dragging them below deck before their fellow commandoes killed nine terrorists and took control of the ship. This account puts the whole flotilla operation in a rather different light to the way it has been presented:
...
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
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