By Barry Rubin
A second flotilla of ships is going to the Gaza Strip. Or should I say, trying to go there since it will be stopped if necessary by a legal Israeli blockade. In the first flotilla, the Islamist holy warriors organized by the Turkish government-backed IHH group all gathered on one ship. The other boats, the ships of (political) tools cooperated, no one was injured, and they were towed into port. The ship of jihadists attacked Israeli soldiers, kidnapped and beat up a couple of them, and had the “victory” of getting nine martyrs out of it. Let us never forget that when the Israeli Defense Forces made public a video showing these facts the New York Times blog in a particularly shameful moment dismissed it alleging that the soldiers might have been shooting down unarmed civilians just standing around the deck before the film began. (Thus posing the twenty-first century journalistic question: Who are you going to believe, the facts and your eyes or your predetermined ideological bias?)
This time there’s also a different strategy for the flotilla itself. The would-be terrorists have dispersed themselves among the naive “peace activists” who, whether wittingly or not, are helping a revolutionary Islamist terrorist group intent on committing genocide on Jews, expelling Christians, repressing women, and murdering gay people in their drive to impose a totalitarian state. Thus, there are two possibilities: the “peace activists” will pretend they are civil rights’ demonstrators and be nonviolent or the Islamists will try to provoke violence so as to reap good publicity. According to reliable information, some of the Islamist participants have spoken in conversation of their desire to kill Israeli soldiers. Some are also equipped with sulfuric acid to throw at Israel soldiers. We will see which of these scenarios take place.
A number of the organizing groups are fronts for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood, raising money and political support for these organizations and often controlled by them. In other words, revolutionary Islamists are using Western pacifists and leftists to achieve their own ends. It isn’t clear whether Lenin invented the phrase “useful idiots” but it is useful nonetheless.
Here are some resources on the flotilla, its background, and participants:
J post reporting today that one of the boats docked in Greece has suffered an unfortunate mishap to one of it’s propellor shafts. The sea can be a very dangerous place, all kind of things can go wrong.
The best way to deal with these civilian flotilla provocations as well as their closely related land based border incursions is by using diplomatic means and legal sanctions to prevent them in the first place. This is far preferable to confronting these people on the high seas or at the fences and will have to become the accepted method for dealing with them.
The problem is that these provocations always include the threat of violence and bloodshed from certain radical individuals which as we have seen on the Syrian border can easily escalate to include peaceful and nonviolent accomplices.
Apparently international diplomatic and legal presssure convinced Turkey to stop the IHH from taking part in this upcoming provocation.
Unfortunately it is now too late to prevent the rest of the provocateurs from setting sail, and it will once again be up to a few dozen brave, inexperienced, very young and probably very tense Israeli soldiers and sailors to deal with this flotilla and make the on the spot and very difficult life and death decisions confronting the violent attacks they will face.
For my part, if my Israeli soldiers face the danger of being hurt or possibly killed by these people, then they should use lethal force immediately.
I tell my IDF sons this and it is the philosophy I live by too, that it is better that I kill as many enemy as I must to protect myself because the worst that can happen is that I’ll go to jail for a while and maybe not even that.
The would-be terrorists have dispersed themselves among the naive “peace activists” who, whether wittingly or not, are helping a revolutionary Islamist terrorist group intent on committing genocide on Jews, expelling Christians, repressing women, and murdering gay people in their drive to impose a totalitarian state.
1)I thought the far left has claimed the intellectual high ground, for all time, for all purposes and upon all subjects. The “well read, well informed, well reasoned” illuminati of American policies.
How then could they not know PRECISELY what the implication is, of being in bed with radical Islam?
No, let’s take them at their announced posture….they know exactly what they are doing.
This is a provocative attack on Israel by her sworn enemies. There is no peace sought here, it is an act of war provocation. Let’s not water it down or give any credibility it does not deserve. The sniveling liars and cowards who wish to act as the Trojan Horse’s ass…masquerading as peaceniks and jamming a thumb in the eye of Israel’s compassionate defense systems, beating them with their own sense of democracy and open society…should be met with fair warning.
Harm one hair on one soldier’s head…and the trained sharks will hear the whistle to jump into your boat.
‘Naive “peace activists”‘? You mean like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn?
Or maybe you mean “naive” like the EU, various European governments and George Soros?
No, this is a mix of Islamists, far leftists and hate-filled Europeans who are not naive in the least, but perfectly deliberate and calculated.
Even the New York Review of Books has noticed what is going on:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/jul/14/egypt-victorious-islamists/
Just watched John Downs on the ‘must watch’ Michael Coren show (Canada),
and I’m almost speechless. He defends the Sea Hitler boat to Gaza
with a brain-washed single mindedness that makes me wonder who is
positively the worst lefturd on this planet. Previously I watched Avi Lewis
a true son-of-his-parents definition of hubris, if ever there was one.
So, off topic, how about Rubin or PJM start a ‘Top Ten’ of the worst jew-bashers on the planet? You know, people like: Chomsky, Finkelstein,
Lewis, Yerevani, Nasrullah, etc. There could be a separate list of dead JBs.
That list would soon grow to 100, but that’s OK.
Then ‘they’ would respond.
Those listed would wear their ranking as a badge of honor!
They would also start their own equivalent list: Rubin, Spencer, Pipes…
Why doesn’t the Israeli navy simply mine the sea border, so that if any ships attempt to cross into Israeli territory then they run the risk of tripping the mines. This way, any damage would be a result of their own actions, not an Israeli ‘disproportional response’?
The flotillas against Israel are essentially propaganda tools to discredit Israel. The right way to fight the flotilla (in addition to boarding he ships ) is to turn the tables on the jihadists and expose to the world what these people believe in and what they are fighting for. This can be done by printing thousands of leaflets and making a few huge posters with quotations from the Hamas Charter. For instance: Article 7 : ‘Oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ Article 13: ‘There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad.’ http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/1609.htm These posters can be attached to the ships in full view of any video taken by the media.
At this time I am going away to do my breakfast, when having my breakfast coming yet again to read more news.