As mobs across Europe are incited to demonstrate against Israel for protecting itself against Turkish terrorist aggression, here is a video clip of Gaza-based Yemeni professor Abd al Fatah Nu’man who spells out what that convoy was really all about:
‘This scent is the message of the Islamic message worldwide: Islam is coming, and Gaza is the spearhead that sets the nation in motion...The heroes were selected by Allah to carry out their mission: the mission of awakening the nation...
These are people who wish to be martyred for the sake of Allah; as much as they want to reach Gaza, the other way is more desirable to them.
Martyrdom, in case anyone still doesn’t get it, means in this case killing Jews in the cause of the Islamic jihad. That was the real aim of this flotilla.
So when you read the comments of the British Tory Foreign Secretary William Hague who is moved to
deplore the loss of life
and calls upon Israel to
allow unfettered access for aid to Gaza
which would allow unfettered access for weapons against Israel – and while Hague makes no such call upon Egypt whose border with Gaza, unlike that of Israel which is letting into Gaza thousands of tons of aid per week, remains totally shut -- remember the words of professor Abd al Fatah Nu’man; and as mobs on the streets in London and elsewhere show their solidarity with his murderous agenda, decide whether he is most likely to win the battle for the free world or Hague is most likely to lose it.
Update: Very glad to see that the good folk at Conservative Home have grasped that Hague's earlier statement puts the Conservatives on the wrong side of the battle for civilisation. But since not only does Hague have form on such a 'disproportionate' attitude to Israel but also the Tories are now in coaltion with the Israel-bashing LibDems, who would blame Israel even if jihadis were to sail a flotilla up the Thames and take the entire LibDem leadership hostage, I would not hold my breath for Hague to start upholding truth and justice in the Middle East.
As the international community rushes to condemn Israel for the violence on board one of the ships in the Gaza flotilla, which left a reported 10 people dead and dozens injured, it is now obvious that the real purpose of this ‘armada of hate’ was not merely the further delegitimisation of Israel but something far worse.
Gaza’s markets are full of produce, thousands of tons of supplies are travelling into Gaza every week through the Israeli-controlled border crossings, and there is no starvation or humanitarian crisis. It was always obvious that the flotilla was not the humanitarian exercise it was said to be. Here is footage of the IDF offering to dock the Marmara -- the main flotilla ship -- at Ashdod and transfer its supplies and being told ‘Negative, negative, our destination is Gaza’.
And now we can see that the real purpose of this invasion -- backed by the Turkish Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), a radical Islamic organization outlawed by Israel in 2008 for allegedly serving as a major component in Hamas’s global fund-raising machine -- was to incite a violent uprising in the Middle East and across the Islamic world. As I write, reports are coming in of Arab rioting in Jerusalem.
The notion – uncritically swallowed by the lazy, ignorant and bigoted BBC and other western media – that the flotilla organisers are ‘peace activists’ is simply ludicrous. This research by the Danish Institute for International Studies details the part played by the IHH in Islamist terror in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya. According to the French magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere testifying at the Seattle trial of would-be al Qaeda Millenium bomber Ahmed Ressamin, the IHH had played ‘[a]n important role’ in the al Qaeda Millenium bomb plot targeting Los Angeles airport. It was also involved in weapons trafficking, and played in addition a key role in galvanizing anti-Western sentiment among Turkish Muslims in the lead-up to the 2003 war in Iraq. ‘Peace activists’ these people most certainly are not.
And this flotilla was but the latest jihadi attack, deploying the Islamists’ signature strategy of violence and media manipulation. Here from MEMRI (via Just Journalism) is a clip showing the hysteria against Israel being whipped up on board before the ships set sail, with the chanting of intifada songs about ‘Khaybar’ – the iconic slaughter of Jews by Muslims in the 7th century which is used as a rallying cry to kill the Jews today -- and threats of ‘martyrdom’. This was not merely a propaganda stunt, but a terrorist attack.
This is what the Jerusalem Post reported earlier today about what happened last night:
According to the IDF, the international activists ‘prepared a lynch’ for the soldiers who boarded the ships at about 2 a.m. Monday morning after calling on them to stop, or follow them to the Ashdod Port several hours earlier.
... Upon boarding the ships, the soldiers encountered fierce resistance from the passengers who were armed with knives, bats and metal pipes. The soldiers used non-lethal measures to disperse the crowd. The activists, according to an IDF report, succeeded in stealing two handguns from soldiers and opened fire, leading to an escalation in violence.
Benayahu said soldiers, who had been dispatched to block the flotilla because of fears that it was carrying weaponry and other highly dangerous cargo into the Hamas-controlled Strip, were attacked with knives and bars and sharpened metal implements.
Benayahu said two pistols that had been fired were subsequently found aboard the one ship, the Marmara, on which the violence erupted. And, most dramatically, he said that one IDF soldier had his weapon snatched away by one of the ‘peace activists’ on board, that this weapon was then turned against the IDF soldiers, who came under fire, and that they had no choice but to shoot back in self-defense.
... What seems urgent now is to make publicly available footage that shows exactly what did unfold. In early afternoon, video footage screened on Israel’s Channel 2 appeared to show one of those aboard the Marmara stabbing an IDF soldier. Any such footage should have been made available hours earlier. Critically, if footage showing a soldier’s weapon being snatched and turned on the IDF troops exists, it should be broadcast, and the sooner the better.
Some of this footage is now available on the web but much of it is hard to follow: as ever, the Israelis have been far too slow in making the most telling images and information available in comprehensible form (including in English rather than in Hebrew, for heaven’s sake!). This clip appears to show masked and armed flotilla activists beating Israeli soldiers (although here is the BBC report accompanying that footage, in which the voiceover appears to be claiming, perversely, that the people in masks were Israeli soldiers. That said, the report on Radio Four’s World at One was fair and balanced).
This clip shows an Israeli soldier being stabbed. This IDF clip and this one show attacks on the commandoes including throwing one off the deck, attacking others with a metal pole and a firebomb and an attempted kidnap of another.
It is also becoming clearer as the day wears on that, far from storming the boats in order to attack those on board, the Israelis were hopelessly ill-prepared for the violence they encountered. Israel’s Channel 10 and IDF radio have reported that the Israeli naval commandos were equipped with paint ball rifles to ensure minimum casualties among the flotilla terrorists, with their hand guns to be used only as a last resort. The terrorists tried connecting the steel cables from the overhead helicopters to the boat's antenna, in order to cause the helicopters to crash. Only when the terrorists beat the soldiers with iron rods, stabbed them with knives and tried to lynch them did the soldiers respond. The Israeli commandoes were pushed down stairs, thrown overboard, and shot at.
Here is a report by an Israel army radio reporter on board:
‘The activists had many things ready for an attack on the soldiers,’ Lev-Rom said, ‘including, for instance, a box of 20-30 slingshots with metal balls; these can kill. There were also all sorts of knives and many similar things. These are what they call “cold” weapons, as opposed to live fire. It was quite clear that a lynch had been prepared.’
Lev-Rom said, however, that it appears the army, ‘even though it prepared for many different scenarios, was not ready for this one. The army seems not to have known what type of people were there and what type of weapons they had. It was hard for Israel to conceive that the ship, sponsored by the country of Turkey, would have such weapons. Israel was prepared to deal with anarchists, and instead had to deal with terrorists – that’s the feeling here.’
Here** is an even more vivid account showing how unprepared the Israeli soldiers were:
Navy commandoes slid down to the vessel one by one, yet then the unexpected occurred: The passengers that awaited them on the deck pulled out bats, clubs, and slingshots with glass marbles, assaulting each soldier as he disembarked. The fighters were nabbed one by one and were beaten up badly, yet they attempted to fight back.
However, to their misfortune, they were only equipped with paintball rifles used to disperse minor protests, such as the ones held in Bilin. The paintballs obviously made no impression on the activists, who kept on beating the troops up and even attempted to wrest away their weapons.
One soldier who came to the aid of a comrade was captured by the rioters and sustained severe blows. The commandoes were equipped with handguns but were told they should only use them in the face of life-threatening situations. When they came down from the chopper, they kept on shouting to each other ‘don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ even though they sustained numerous blows.
The Navy commandoes were prepared to mostly encounter political activists seeking to hold a protest, rather than trained street fighters. The soldiers were told they were to verbally convince activists who offer resistance to give up, and only then use paintballs. They were permitted to use their handguns only under extreme circumstances.
The planned rush towards the vessel’s bridge became impossible, even when a second chopper was brought in with another crew of soldiers. ‘Throw stun grenades,’ shouted Flotilla 13’s commander who monitored the operation. The Navy chief was not too far, on board a speedboat belonging to Flotilla 13, along with forces who attempted to climb into the back of the ship.
The forces hurled stun grenades, yet the rioters on the top deck, whose number swelled up to 30 by that time, kept on beating up about 30 commandoes who kept gliding their way one by one from the helicopter. At one point, the attackers nabbed one commando, wrested away his handgun, and threw him down from the top deck to the lower deck, 30 feet below. The soldier sustained a serious head wound and lost his consciousness.
Only after this injury did Flotilla 13 troops ask for permission to use live fire. The commander approved it: You can go ahead and fire. The soldiers pulled out their handguns and started shooting at the rioters’ legs, a move that ultimately neutralized them. Meanwhile, the rioters started to fire back at the commandoes.
It is becoming ever more clear that Islamist terror attacks like this are fiendishly staged theatrical events in which the western media – and beyond them, western governments -- play an absolutely essential role in the drama. If those media and governments refused to swallow the lies and instead called operations like this and the players behind it for what they actually are, such terrorist operations would not happen. The Islamist strategy of war against Israel is carefully calibrated to deploy the most effective weapon in its armoury in the cause of jihadi violence – the western media. Right on cue, western governments accordingly deliver their own script in condemning the victims of terror for defending themselves. And so, courtesy of the west’s fifth columnists, yet another nail is driven into the west’s own coffin.
Let’s see whether this time the western elites show any signs of waking from their lethal trance.
Update: I am told that the Jewish Chronicle website was taken down earlier (now restored) by a massive denial of service, apparently to shut down its balanced coverage of the Ashdod flotilla incident. The JC's teccies, and the server hosts, say this hasn't been caused by just one or two people --- it's clearly now co-ordinated and growing.
**Update 2: The journalist who wrote this account, Ron Ben-Yishai, cannot be accused of being an Israel government stooge: it was Ben-Yishai who in 1982 was first into the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila in Beirut and blew the whistle on the massacre there that had been perpetrated by the Phalangists while Ariel Sharon looked the other way.
The new Education Secretary Michael Gove has been receiving rave reviews for his programme of radical school reform. I have a lot of time for Michael Gove. I believe he is truly passionate about remedying the parlous state of Britain’s collapsed education system, and that he understands better than most that this represents a wholesale cultural demoralisation which simply cannot be repaired by managerial responses that merely rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.
But... I still have not received an answer to the question I posed a while back – how the LibDem policy of maintaining local authority control over schools will mesh with the Gove plan to set schools free from that control. Will Gove swallow the LibDems, or will the LibDems swallow Gove?
We will promote the reform of schools in order to ensure that new providers can enter the state school system in response to parental demand; that all schools have greater freedom over the curriculum; and that all schools are held properly to account [my emphasis].
To whom will all schools be ‘held properly to account’? Somehow I don’t think this means ‘to the parents’. It would seem to point instead towards local authority control – even for the ‘free schools’.
And there’s also this:
We will ensure that all new Academies follow an inclusive admissions policy. We will work with faith groups to enable more faith schools and facilitate inclusive admissions policies in as many of these schools as possible.
The Christian Peoples’Alliance is under no illusion about what this means. In a press release, it warns in alarm:
Plans by the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats to dictate to church schools who they may admit is an unprecedented shift in church and state relations... continuing encroachment by Government into the sphere of school admissions is an unwelcome move, tantamount to nationalisation.
...The meaning of ‘inclusive’ can be drawn from a section of the Lib Dem election manifesto entitled Freeing Schools for Excellence, which said ‘We will ensure that all faith schools develop an inclusive admissions policy and end unfair discrimination on grounds of faith’.
One of the most pernicious features of the Ed Balls regime was his onslaught upon the independence -- and thus the identity and survival -- of faith schools by trying to force them to conform to the ideology of equality through admitting children from other faiths in the name of ‘inclusivity’. One expects the Illiberal Anti-Democrats to espouse such an intolerant doctrine. But the Education Secretary is not only a Conservative, who might be expected to defend the freedom of faith groups to run their own admissions policies, but has made the independence and variety of schools into his signature policy (apart from the little matter of academic selection, but let’s not go into that now).
I do hope my fears are misplaced. But I'm stil waiting for an answer.
With the crisis over the euro threatening promising to wreck the entire EU project, it would appear that death-bed confessions are now in order from those who have helped promulgate this fanatical cause. The Telegraph reports that the EU President, Herman Van Rompuy, has now admitted that the peoples of Europe were misled over the impact of the euro:
The EU's president told a selected audience of civil servants and businessmen that the Greek debt crisis and euro zone bailout had come as a nasty shock to ordinary Europeans. He said the public was not made aware of the full social and economic implications of the currency before it was created.
‘Nobody ever told the proverbial man in the street that sharing a single currency was not just about making peoples’ lives easier when doing business or travelling abroad, but also about being directly affected by economic developments in the neighbouring countries,’ he said on Tuesday evening. ‘Being in the “Euro zone” means, monetarily speaking, being part of one “Euroland”.’
In the first public admission of the scale of the popular backlash, Mr Van Rompuy acknowledged that ‘growing public awareness’ of the euro zone's problems was ‘a major political development.’
‘Today, people are discovering what a “common destiny'” in monetary matters means. They are discovering that the euro affects their pensions, savings, and jobs, their very daily life. It hurts,’ he said.
Indeed it does. As many of us said it would right from the start – not just in reference to the potentially lethal incoherence of the euro, but about the innately self-destructive and anti-democratic nature of the entire EU project of a bureaucratic superstate. The EU elite of which van Rompuy is only one member lied about this project to the proverbial man in the European street from the get-go, denying the sovereignty-busting and anti-democratic nature of the true aim of the EU and riding roughshod over the increasingly vocal opposition of the people to having their powers of self-government removed from them.
Now that elite will fight tooth and nail to rescue the euro and the coercive and ruinous project it embodies (and this is the issue that may tear apart Britain's coaltion government, with the LibDem Vince Cable ruling out the repatriation of powers to Britain to which David Cameron once committed the Conservative party). Let’s hope it fails. For although the collapse of the euro will undoubtedly bring pain, even to Britain -- which (amazingly) retained enough common-sense to hang on to its own currency – the collapse of the EU as a political project and the restoration of economic and political independence to the nations of Europe might just be the beginning of Europe’s salvation from economic sclerosis and cultural demoralisation.
I referred below (in an update) to Cif Watch’s remarkable forensic analysis of Monday’s Guardian front page splash by Chris McGreal, who purported to show that Israel had offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa. Now Cif Watch has published a second devastating analysis, which hammers yet more nails into the coffin of this disreputable piece of anti-journalism. Summarising his findings, the writer concludes of McGreal’s story:
1. The ‘offer of nuclear warheads’ is based on a (so far, undated) draft document in which the words giving rise to this inference of an offer are actually deleted to show that they are wrong. This is ignored.
2. In order to get the inference up and running, not only are the deleted words treated as not deleted, but some additional words are added.
3. This inferred ‘offer’ is then causally linked to a ‘secrecy agreement’ which is misrepresented as constituting a ‘military agreement’, an ‘agreement governing the military alliance’,a ‘broad-ranging agreement governing military ties’ and even the so-called Israel South Africa agreement (of which there is no proof of its existence other than the claims of Dieter Gerhardt, a former KGB spy who spied on Israel).
4. With a skip and a leap, or joining the dots as these conspiracy theorists like to put it, Israel offered nuclear weapons to South Africa pursuant to a military alliance between them.
I’d say this shoddy story was now shot to pieces, along with what remains of McGreal’s reputation.
As the latest absurd flotilla of fools – eight boats carrying no fewer than 700-800 activists -- stages another confrontation with Israel to draw the world’s attention to the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Gaza, Tom Gross writes a timely piece pointing out that Gaza’s shops and markets are full. In a piece of particularly happy serendipity, Gaza’s first Olympic standard swimming pool was inaugurated yesterday. But as Gross writes, the western media dutifully pump out the party line that Gaza is starving:
What they won’t tell you about are the fancy new restaurants and swimming pools of Gaza, or about the wind surfing competitions on Gaza beaches, or the Strip’s crowded shops and markets. Many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza live a middle class (and in some cases an upper class) lifestyle that western journalists refuse to report on because it doesn’t fit with the simplistic story they were sent to write.
...If you pop into the Roots Club in Gaza, according to the Lonely Planet guidebook, you can ‘dine on steak au poivre and chicken cordon bleu’. The restaurant’s website in Arabic gives a window into middle class dining and the lifestyle of Hamas officials in Gaza. And here it is in English, for all the journalists, UN types and NGO staff who regularly frequent this and other nice Gaza restaurants (but don’t tell their readers about them).
And here is a promotional video of the club restaurant. In case anyone doubts the authenticity of this video, I just called the club in Gaza City and had a nice chat with the manager who proudly confirmed business is booming and many Palestinians and international guests are dining there.
But according to Greta Berlin, of the Free Gaza Movement, the flotilla intends to
break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and tell the world that Israel has no right to starve 1.5 million Palestinians.
Surely the world’s first gourmet starvation experience?
Anyone who actually read Chris McGreal’s latest smear against Israel, which the Guardian ran as its front page splash yesterday, would have seen instantly that the detail of the story didn’t even stand up its own malevolent spin. Purporting to claim – on the basis of a book by American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky -- that Israel offered to sell nuclear weapons to apartheid-rule South Africa, it actually provided no backup for this at all. In a risible farrago of suppositions, non-sequiturs, leaps of logic and even the throwaway but self-immolatory line that there was no evidence that Israel’s government would indeed have agreed to such a deal, all that it revealed was that the South African regime had come fishing for such weapons with Israel’s then foreign minister Shimon Peres. The story reversed this to state that Peres had offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa -- for which there was no evidence other than an absurd and incoherent extrapolation of a phrase.
If McGreal had asked the Israel government for its response, it would have heard the emphatic denial issued after the story appeared by both government officials and Peres himself. But it appears that he did not. Remarkably, The Guardian splashed with this sensationalist smear without even putting it to Israel -- whose contemptuous denial was subsequently added to the on-line edition but was absent from the story as it originally appeared in print.
Not much of McGreal’s story is left standing after this magisterial demolition on CiF Watch (and from his own appearances, it doesn’t look like too much is left of Sasha Polakow-Suransky’s reputation either). I particularly enjoyed this bit:
The most pathetic of the examples of “proof” is in the collection of The memos and minutes that confirm Israel’s nuclear stockpile assembled by Chris McGreal. In one such document, minutes from a meeting indicated that “Minister Peres said that the correct payload was available in three sizes” referring apparently to the Jericho missile codenamed “Chalet”. From this McGreal inferred that the “three sizes” referred to conventional, chemical and nuclear rather than the more logical inference of three different weights (the Jericho I has been estimated to carry a payload of 450-650 kg and the Jericho II 750-1000 kg; the size of the payload influencing the distance the missile would travel). In the video ofPolakow-Suransky above, he even has to admit that Peres’s reference to “three sizes” is “a bit ambiguous and there are various different interpretations” (at 1.46). In another document, a Letter from Shimon Peres, 11/11/1974, Peres’s “confirmation” is nothing more than a polite diplomatic letter thanking a Dr. Rhoodie, apparently a South African PR flack, for his assistance in making Peres’ trip to South Africa successful and offering to do the same for him when he next visited Israel.
But hey, what do truth or logic matter when there now seems to be a real chance of bringing Israel down? For the real purpose of this story is not just to provide yet another airing for McGreal’s animus against Israel and his obsessive fantasy that it is a clone of apartheid South Africa. It is that, with Obama manoeuvring to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons, the Israel-bashing freaks of the left are slavering at the prospect that Israel may at last be disarmed and thus destroyed.
Taking their lead from Obama, they believe that Iran should not be stopped from obtaining the nuclear bomb with which it intends to commit genocide against Israel and destroy America, but insteadthat Iran’s principal victim should be stripped of the weapon it will only ever use to prevent its own annihilation.
And in the furtherance of this despicable aim, which lines up the Israel-bashing left behind fanatical terror and against civilisation, the egregious smear is the journalist’s principal weapon of choice.
Update: Read this striking analysis of McGreal's 'evidence'.
Following the risible kangaroo court set up by the General Medical Council Andrew Wakefield, the doctor at the heart of the MMR controversy, has now been struck off the medical register while his colleagues have yet to learn their own fate. This is a tragedy and a travesty. I believe a monstrous injustice has been done here, which has crucified the one doctor who tried to alleviate and prevent the suffering of a particular group of children and which has also betrayed their parents. The full story of how this sinister travesty was accomplished and the full range of people who were complicit in it -- along with what it means for both medicine and public safety -- has yet to be revealed. Over time, I hope this will eventually be achieved.
As of this moment my new book The World Turned Upside Down:The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power is at no 16 on the Amazon non-fiction list and 53 on the Amazon bestseller list overall.
Even given Obama’s ever more terrifying and lethal performance in office, his comments about the jihadi murder of Daniel Pearl, and in front of Daniel’s bereaved family, are simply astounding. This is what Obama said:
‘Obviously, the loss of Daniel Pearl was one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination because it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.’
Daniel Pearl was not murdered because he was a journalist. He was decapitated because he was an American Jew. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed cut off his head in an act of unimaginable barbarism, which was videoed in order to incite other Muslims to similar acts of barbarism and to destroy the will of the west to defend itself. But in signing the Daniel Pearl Press Freedom Act, Obama came up with the remarkable statement that the significance of Daniel Pearl’s murder was merely that
it reminded us of how valuable a free press is.
Any decent and rational person would think that the significance of Daniel Pearl’s murder was actually that the west is up against a psychopathic death cult which has a particular aim of killing Jews and destroying America. But not the American President. In front of the Pearl family, Obama couldn’t even bring himself to say Daniel was murdered. And ‘one of those moments that captured the world’s imagination’??
He seems literally unable to imagine Pearl’s fate, and so, cruising on autopilot, he reaches for the all-purpose bromides of therapeutic sedation: ‘one of those moments’- you know, like Princess Di's wedding, Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction, whatever – ‘that captured the world's imagination.’
... Daniel Pearl was the first, and in his calm, coherent final words, understood why he was there: ‘My name is Daniel Pearl. I am a Jewish American from Encino, California, USA.’ He didn't have a prompter. But he spoke the truth. That’s all President Obama owed him - to do the same.
Is it possible to fathom such moral obtuseness in the US President?
Update: And this is how the free press dealt with Obama's remark.
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a
panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over
God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.
For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here
