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Lying
about the Gaza flotilla attack
In the face of continuing distortion
in the US media about
the Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound relief flotilla, MJ Rosenberg
sifts fact from fiction about the goals of the flotilla and Israel's
blockade of Gaza
which it attempted to break.
IT'S been one lie after another
in the US media about the Israeli attack
on the Gaza-bound relief flotilla. No matter that the Israeli media
views the whole incident as a debacle for Israel,
in this country the Israel-can-do-no-wrong crowd is on overdrive defending
the operation. As usual, facts don't matter to them.
Except they do.
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. (There is no truth
to the story that Israel
would have delivered the goods on the ships to Gaza if asked; the Israelis never made that
offer and, judging by years of precedent, would have blocked any delivery.)
As for the Israeli argument
that its soldiers were attacked, that is ridiculous. Israeli commandos
were ordered to board a civilian ship in international waters and the
government that sent them claims that the resisting passengers attacked
them without provocation. This is like a carjacker complaining to the
police that the driver bashed him with a crowbar that was under the
seat. Neither carjackers nor hijackers should expect their victims to
acquiesce peacefully.
The situation in Gaza
Here are the facts about life
in Gaza today - facts that can
only be changed by breaking the blockade. These data come from the American
Near East Relief Association (ANERA), which provides relief to Gazans
to the extent permitted by the Israeli (and American) authorities. ANERA
is neither 'pro-Israel' nor 'pro-Palestinian'. It has no political agenda
at all. It merely determines what human needs are and tries to respond
to them.
From ANERA:
Eight out of 10 Gazans depend
on foreign aid to survive.
The World Food Programme says
Gaza requires a minimum of 400 trucks
a day to meet basic nutritional needs - yet an average of just 171 trucks'
worth of supplies enters Gaza
every week.
Clothes that were held in the
port of Ashdod
for over a year were released into Gaza
but arrived covered with mould and mildew, unusable.
95% of Gaza's
water fails World Health Organisation standards, leaving thousands of
newborns at risk of poisoning.
Anaemia for children under
the age of 5 is estimated at 48%.
75 million litres of untreated
sewage are pumped into the Mediterranean Sea
every day - because piping and spare parts are not permitted.
During the 2009 bombing:
More than 120,000 jobs were
lost as Gaza's industrial zone was
destroyed; 15,000 homes and apartments were damaged or destroyed; a
third of all schools were destroyed.
None of these can be rebuilt,
because construction supplies are kept out by the Israeli authorities.
Stopping terrorism?
So what is the blockade about?
It is not about stopping terrorism.
Hamas has repeatedly offered Israel
an indefinite ceasefire in exchange for lifting the blockade. And, on
a half dozen occasions, Israel
accepted the deal but did not live up to its side of it. In fact, the
2009 war began after Israel ignored its commitments under the Gaza ceasefire
agreement, continued the blockade, and then provoked the resumption
of attacks on Sderot through a series of targeted assassinations of
Palestinians (Israel claims that no ceasefire agreement curtails its
right to kill any Palestinian it deems to be a terrorist).
Israel asserts that it will not accept
any long-term ceasefire agreement with Hamas because Hamas does not
recognise its right to exist.
But Israel does not need the permission
of anyone - let alone Hamas - to exist. All it needs from Hamas is an
end to violence and that is precisely what Hamas is offering, in exchange
for lifting the blockade.
This is not to say that Hamas
need never recognise Israel.
It should. But it is ridiculous to insist on recognition as a precondition
for anything. Recognition would be the end result of negotiations, not
a precondition for it.
But that is not what Israel wants. It wants to destroy
Hamas because it is a terrorist organisation. And that makes sense until
one realises that the African National Congress, Sinn Fein, the Israeli
Irgun, the Algerian FLN and a host of other resistance movements were
called terrorist organisations before negotiations brought them to power.
Former Israeli Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir were
both unabashed terrorists prior to their entrance into respectable politics.
And so what? If dealing with terrorists - as Israel
has repeatedly done with Hezbollah - will help achieve a worthy goal,
why not do it? After all, if negotiations fail, one can always walk
away.
Joined at the hip
But Israel will not change its self-defeating
policies until we change ours. And there is no evidence that is happening
(at least, not until after the November elections, for obvious reasons).
For now, our policies are joined
at the hip with Israel's.
We support the blockade of Gaza.
We oppose any efforts at reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. We
even back Israel's opposition to the Arab Peace Initiative,
which offers Israel
full peace and normalisation of relations with every Arab country in
exchange for the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza,
and East Jerusalem.
Enough is enough. The Obama
administration needs to join the rest of the world in demanding an end
to the Gaza blockade as a first big step toward the
resumption of negotiations.
The attack on the flotilla
was one of the most disastrous blunders in Israel's
history. At last, the whole world sees Israel's policy of collective punishment
for what it is - a means to perpetuate the occupation forever. Only
the United States
government has chosen to close its eyes.
The occupation is killing Israel. And we are on the sidelines
letting it happen. Some ally!
MJ Rosenberg is Senior Foreign
Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network, a progressive research
and information centre dedicated to ensuring accuracy, appropriate balance
and accountability in the US media. This article is reproduced from
the Huffington Post website <www.huffingtonpost.com>.
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Shot in the back
Autopsy reports that
most of the nine activists killed by Israelis were shot multiple
times in close range both in the back and the back of the head
raise questions whether these were commando-style executions.
But it was not an issue of concern to the US
media.
Dave Lindorff
YOU want to know why
we need independent journalism, and why those of you who are reading
this article need to support the publication in which it is appearing
and the publication in which it originally appeared? Because if
you rely for your news on the US corporate media, whether ad-supported
or underwriter-supported, you won't learn that Furkan Dogan, the
19-year-old American citizen slain by Israeli commandos in the
raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla 31 May, was shot in the back and
in the back of the head, as well as multiple times in the face.
This is the conclusion
of the autopsy conducted by the Turkish Council of Forensic Medicine,
which also did autopsies on the eight other Turkish citizens killed
in the Israeli raid on the Mavi Marmara ferry and five other smaller
boats in the so-called Freedom Flotilla. Of the other eight dead,
the medical examiners found that five had been shot in the back,
or in the back of the head.
This critically important
information has not appeared in US news reports. Some American
news organisations have left out the autopsy information entirely
from their reports as of 5 June. CNN, in its 4 June report, did
note that five of the nine were shot in the head, and at close
range, but the all-important fact that most of the victims were
shot from behind was left out. ABC had the same information on
3 June, again without mentioning the shots from behind. In its
article on 4 June, the New York Times had yet to even name Dogan,
the American victim, much less mention the bullets that hit him
or how he was shot.
And yet, if you're trying
to establish what happened on that ship, the direction of the
firing, not just the number of bullets, or the distance from which
they were fired, is crucial.
I had some experience
with this as a reporter in Los
Angeles, back in the 1970s. There was a
story that ran in all the local papers, including the Los Angeles
Times, and my paper, the Los Angeles Daily News, about a 14-year-old
kid killed by police while he was burglarising an empty house
in the San Fernando Valley. All
the papers reported the police story that he had been shot and
killed when police entered the house on a call of a burglary,
and he 'turned and appeared to be carrying a gun' (it turned out
to be some camera equipment he was trying to cart off).
On a hunch, I decided
to look more into the story, and as my beat was county government,
I went to visit the coroner's office. There I was shown, at my
request, the drawings and report on the boy's autopsy. What I
discovered was that all the police bullets entered the boy's back.
He was shot while fleeing the police, not while turning to face
them.
If you're a real reporter,
not a stenographer to power, you've got to ask. A reporter from
the UK Guardian did ask. US reporters did not ask. Or if they
did ask, they didn't put the answer in their reports. Or if they
did put the answer in their reports, editors removed the answer.
And so far, no reporter has come forward to protest this news
blackout, even anonymously.
In this current case
of the Israeli commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla, if victims
were shot in the back or in the back of the head, then one is
left really with only two possible conclusions: either the shooters,
who were the Israeli commandos (according to Israel, no Israeli
soldiers were themselves shot, plus all the recovered bullets
were 9 mm, the type of shells in the Israeli weapons, making it
clear who had the guns), fired at people who were fleeing from
them, or alternatively they shot people from the front, and later
executed them with shots to the back of the head, which is maybe
even worse (certainly a war crime).
There aren't many other
possible explanations, and either way we're talking about criminal
behaviour on the high seas in what many are calling an act of
piracy, or else an act of war against a NATO nation.
I suppose if only one
of the nine victims had exhibited a rear head wound, one might
at least theorise a scenario in which he might have spun around
upon being shot in the face, and the commando, firing rapidly,
might have gotten off one unneeded extra round that caught the
victim from the rear. But for that to happen five times requires
a tremendous suspension of disbelief.
So much for the Israeli
government propaganda about its poor and unprepared commandos
being surprised and set upon by vicious 'terrorists' on the boat,
armed with kitchen knives, sticks and metal rods, when they were
anticipating nothing but peaceful resistance. (This absurd story
line was contradicted by Israel's other story line, that it considered
the organiser of the flotilla, the Turkish IHH charity, to be
linked to Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it 'knew' that Palestinian
terrorists had insinuated themselves among the boat's activists
- a claim which, if true, means the commandos would have been,
and surely were, well-armed and prepared for a truly violent reception.)
In any event, what the
autopsies reveal is a massacre, with commandos deliberately murdering
activists on the boats - either directly, or after initially wounding
them.
What they also reveal
is the shameless pro-Israel bias of the US
media, which has simply decided that facts uncomfortable to Israel and its US government backer are not news
that's 'fit to print'.
You can read about the
autopsies in the UK Guardian newspaper, or in Switzerland (SwissInfo)
or in Australia (the Melbourne Age), and you can even read it
in a Reuters report (which is a news service that most American
news organisations subscribe to, but which they actually show
their readers only selectively), but you cannot read it or hear
about it in the mainstream US media, where most Americans unfortunately
still turn for their information.
That is unacceptable.
Dave Lindorff is a
Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is
The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's
Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). He can be reached
at dlindorff@mindspring.com. The above article is reproduced from
the CounterPunch website <www.counterpunch.org>.
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*Third World Resurgence
No. 237, May 2010, pp 38-40
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