Perhaps the heartrending lament that the Turkish aid flotilla Mavi Marmara—headed for Gaza and stopped by the Israeli Navy last week—contained a bevy of innocent Nobel Peace laureates would be more compelling if recent Nobel Peace laureates didn’t include the father of modern terrorism, Yasser Arafat.
Perhaps the fact that nine passengers were accidentally killed in the struggle would carry more emotional punch if the excursion hadn’t been funded by an Islamist, anti-Israeli, Hamas-allied, Turkish front group whose dream is to unaccidentally kill six million Jews.
Perhaps the claim that helpless crew members were unarmed and sought no confrontation with Israeli soldiers would ring truer if the Mavi Marmara hadn’t been stocked with butcher knives and heavy baton-shaped pipes and sticks.
Notwithstanding Pat Buchanan’s idiotic comparison [8] of the ship’s passengers to civil rights protestors, and Israel’s stopping the flotilla to a garden-variety carjacking, Israel is not indiscriminately lobbing cannonballs into Gaza-bound aid ships and sinking them, or raiding them for loot and hostages, Somali pirate-style.
Firing on these “aid” ships that pro-Palestinian groups keep using to try to break Israel’s blockade would actually be justifiable, given that such groups are forever trying to sneak steel, concrete, and other weapons supplies to Gaza for the purpose of constructing more rockets to fire into neighboring Israeli cities.
Instead of reacting as, say, the United States would have if Germany or Japan had tried to break its naval blockade during World War II, the Israeli Navy patiently sends multiple radio warnings to ships entering the blockade zone and gently escorts them to a nearby port, where they inspect the ships, separate any items constituting genuine aid from those that could be used to build weapons, and offer to truck the permitted goods to Gaza at Israel’s cost.
The delivery of confiscated aid to Gaza is invariably turned away.
For example, Israel allowed the Rachel Corrie, a ship named after a dumb American from the hippie Northwest who was crushed to death after she stood in the way of IDF bulldozers clearing the way for Israeli settlements, to dock in the port Ashdod last Saturday, and offered to inspect its cargo after the passengers did not engage in murderous resistance. The Rachel Corrie held only 11 passengers and, for once, was sponsored by a group that renounces violence. Gaza’s refusal to accept the aid confiscated by Israel disproves pro-Hamas activists’ lie that Israel is a ruthless, bloodthirsty military state out to slaughter human rights activists and prevent vital aid from getting to starving Gazans.
The United States supports the blockade, which Israel instituted after years of suicidally tolerating aid ships delivering contraband to Gaza and Hamas’s ongoing offensive in which they have fired thousands of rockets into Israel’s most populous cities.
As with all too many international affairs, it looks as though the United States and Israel will have to go this one alone. Even in the U.S., Israel has its detractors, such as the editorial board at the New York Times, which planted the following anti-Israeli zingers in a pseudo-balanced editorial last weekend: “Turkey is understandably furious about Israel’s disastrous attack on the Turkish-flagged aid ship that tried to run the Gaza blockade… Israel deserves to be criticized for the flotilla disaster… [Israel] has a strong interest in repairing relations with Turkey [but] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu still doesn’t get this.”
Imagine for a second if Staten Island were populated by trigger-happy terrorists who repeatedly stated as their goal the destruction of Manhattan and the tossing of all Manhattanites into the Hudson River. Imagine if Staten Islanders had a history of smuggling in weapons-building materials from ships sent from: Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Long Island, Roosevelt Island, Governors Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, and upstate New York. Imagine if Staten Islanders periodically launched thousands of rockets into the center of Manhattan. Imagine if Mayor Bloomberg shipped thousands of tons of aid to Staten Island every day, to appease the New York Times, but instituted a naval blockade around Staten Island to prevent weapons from being sent there.
Now imagine if pro-Staten Islander phony aid ships repeatedly violated the blockade, filling its passenger lists with homicidal jihadists, deadly weapons, and a few token peace activists, and refused all offers for genuine humanitarian aid to be trucked to Staten Island and distributed at Manhattan’s expense.
I think there would be just a bit more sympathy toward Manhattan’s taking steps to defend itself—even at The Times.
Here’s a suggestion to pro-Hamas groups: how about calling the next phony relief vessel to Gaza the Yasser Arafat? How do you think that would go over on the world stage? After all, Arafat was a humanitarian Nobel Prize laureate!
