Israel making Palestine better than ever

Israel, in its never-ending quest to improve Palestine (showing us all how to truly leave things better than you found them, just like signs at campgrounds tell you), is treating the Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem to an Israeli tourist center:

A Jerusalem planning body on Monday approved a plan to raze 22 Palestinian homes in east Jerusalem to make room for an Israeli tourist center, a decision that could raise tensions in the divided city and deepen the conflict with the Obama administration...

The plan calls for the construction of shops, restaurants, art galleries and a large community center on the site where some say the biblical King David wrote his psalms. The 22 displaced families would be allowed to build homes elsewhere in the neighborhood, though it is not clear who would pay for them...

Barkat says the plan gives a much-needed facelift to Jerusalem's decaying al-Bustan neighborhood, which Israel calls Gan Hamelech, or the King's Garden.

The contested site is a section of a larger neighborhood called Silwan, which is home to some 50,000 Palestinians and 70 Jewish families. Demolitions elsewhere in Silwan have made the neighborhood a hub of tension between Palestinians and Jews.

Israel, generous as ever, is giving Palestinians a direly necessary community center at which they will not be welcome, in a section of the city that is barely occupied by Israeli Jews. That's a lot of spending.

This makes those stupid Palestinians who say they are oppressed or live under apartheid or whatever look dumber than ever.

Gaza flotilla activists were shot in head at close range

Not making a very good case for self-defense on the part of Israeli commandos, even if you discard the fact that the Israelis boarded a cargo ship by force in international waters:

Nine Turkish men on board the Mavi Marmara were shot a total of 30 times and five were killed by gunshot wounds to the head, according to the vice-chairman of the Turkish council of forensic medicine, which carried out the autopsies for the Turkish ministry of justice today.

The results revealed that a 60-year-old man, Ibrahim Bilgen, was shot four times in the temple, chest, hip and back. A 19-year-old, named as Fulkan Dogan, who also has US citizenship, was shot five times from less that 45cm, in the face, in the back of the head, twice in the leg and once in the back. Two other men were shot four times, and five of the victims were shot either in the back of the head or in the back, said Yalcin Buyuk, vice-chairman of the council of forensic medicine.

Hard to shoot someone in the face and the back at the same time. They were either running or coming, and then you caught them again either on the floor, running or falling.

Read on about the Israeli bravery:

The findings emerged as more survivors gave their accounts of the raids. Ismail Patel, the chairman of Leicester-based pro-Palestinian group Friends of al-Aqsa, who returned to Britain today, told how he witnessed some of the fatal shootings and claimed that Israel had operated a "shoot to kill policy".

He calculated that during the bloodiest part of the assault, Israeli commandos shot one person every minute. One man was fatally shot in the back of the head just two feet in front him and another was shot once between the eyes. He added that as well as the fatally wounded, 48 others were suffering from gunshot wounds and six activists remained missing, suggesting the death toll may increase.

The Israelis seemed to have unveiled a new weapon in this assault:

Dr Haluk Ince, the chairman of the council of forensic medicine in Istanbul, said that in only one case was there a single bullet wound, to the forehead from a distant shot, while every other victim suffered multiple wounds. "All [the bullets] were intact. This is important in a forensic context. When a bullet strikes another place it comes into the body deformed. If it directly comes into the body, the bullet is all intact."

He added that all but one of the bullets retrieved from the bodies came from 9mm rounds. Of the other round, he said: "It was the first time we have seen this kind of material used in firearms. It was just a container including many types of pellets usually used in shotguns. It penetrated the head region in the temple and we found it intact in the brain."

They are firing entire shotgun shells now. Wow. Shotgun shells are big.

Israeli pig speaks:

An unnamed Israeli commando, who purportedly led the raid on the Mavi Marmara, today told Israeli news website Ynet News that he shot at a protester who approached him with a knife. "I was in front of a number of people with knives and clubs," he said. "I cocked my weapon when I saw that one was coming towards me with a knife drawn and I fired once. Then another 20 people came at me from all directions and threw me down to the deck below …

"We knew they were peace activists. Though they wanted to break the Gaza blockade, we thought we'd encounter passive resistance, perhaps verbal resistance – we didn't expect this. Everyone wanted to kill us. We encountered terrorists who wanted to kill us and we did everything we could to prevent unnecessary injury."

Everyone is a terrorist these days. It seems very difficult to terrorize the military. Especially when you have pipes and maybe knives and they have helicopters, guns and extensive training. And when they are the ones boarding your ship illegally. Interesting perspective.

Courageous rabbi stands up to 89-year-old woman for not being a Zionist and gets her fired

What a brave man it takes to do this, to ruin an old woman's career.

This is what happens when public figures dare to criticize Israel. They are instantly maligned as anti-Semites, as though there is no legitimate critique of Zionism or the Zionist state's military, economic, foreign and social policies. To Zionists, there is none. They allow now. For them, opposing Zionism in any way, including any of its excesses, is to cast hate and disdain upon every Jewish person. The title of the video is quite sensational, and could be seen as misleading. That's what public relations is all about.

The Zionist lobby in this country has done a fantastic job of securing governmental and, to a lesser extent, public support for its cause.

Things like this though, they do not endear Zionism to anyone. It only pleases those who already believe, further angers those who dissent, and does nothing for the great masses who do not care.

Helen Thomas' comment has nothing to do with Jewish people.

Gaza, Israel, apartheid, sanctions and Tony Blair

For some reason, someone made Tony Blair in charge of brokering Palestinian statehood. Anyway, the conversation he has with Fareed Zakaria is quite interesting, and I love Zakaria's articulation of Israel's policy toward Gaza, which comes along at about 3:55 in:

Israel's latest cowboy adventure

Maybe you know by now about Israel attacking a Gaza-bound humanitarian aid-carrying ship, the Mavi Marmara, in international waters last week and killing nine and injuring dozens of the 700 or so passengers, hailing from a wide array of countries? Well, they did. They invaded it (the only one out of six that they hadn't been able to mechanically disable, a condition they achieved most likely through the use of prop foulers, long ropes/cables designed to wrap around a ship's propeller and seize it) by helicopter, with what seems to be a secretive number of "commandos" rappelling onto the deck at 4am on Monday, May 31st. They were immediately met by a number of people prepared for self-defense, who seemed to use whatever they could find to defend themselves, including pipes, pieces of metal, anything that could be thrown, fists, feet and knives. They tossed at least one overboard, and a few of the Israelis jumped overboard. Watch the Israeli Defense Force-edited video of the people defending their ship against a pirate attack:

There is nothing wrong with how the Israelis were met. They were violently invading a humanitarian aid ship bound for one of the most (deliberately) devastated places in the world right now - Gaza. The Israelis say that these ships were violating their military blockade of Gaza. Technically, that is not true, as they had not approached Gaza, and were in international waters. However, their stated aim was to reach the port in Gaza, yes. They planned to violate their illegal blockade that even the United States does not support. The Israelis say their blockade (including things like coffee, chocolate and cement, as well as nearly all exports) is to punish Hamas and destabilize their rule over Gaza, but these things never work. Look at Iraq. George Bush the First and Bill Clinton's decade-long sanctions against the country, along with their ceaseless bombing campaign, did nothing to touch Saddam Hussein, but did quite a bit to kill 500,000 Iraqi children. All they are succeeding in doing is immiserating the people of Gaza, further radicalizing them, making them hate Israel even more than they already do, making them feel isolated, desperate and hopeless, and making the world view Israel as the heartless wonder that it is. Hamas stands as as strong as it ever has, despite the three-year blockade. Egypt was a part of it as well, but has recently renounced it, as a result of Israel's killings about the ship and typically indignant attitude, and indefinitely reopened its non-industrial border crossing with Gaza.

So back on the ship, Israeli commandos manhandled and beat a ton of people for being on the ship:

"Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat," said Greek activist Dimitris Gielalis, who had been aboard the Sfendoni. He was among six Greeks returned home Tuesday.

"They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used," he said.

He said the boat's captain was beaten for refusing to leave the wheel, and had sustained non-life-threatening injuries, while a cameraman filming the raid was hit with a rifle butt in the eye, he said.

"Of course we weren't prepared for a situation of war.," he added.

The returning Greeks said those still in custody were refusing to sign papers demanded by Israeli authorities.

"During their interrogation, many of them were badly beaten in front of us," said Aris Papadokostopoulos, who was aboard the Free Mediterranean traveling behind the Turkish ship and carrying mainly Greek and Swedish activists.

A fitting retribution for bring wheelchairs and medicine to deeply impoverished people. This is typical for Israel. They love overpowering people and intimidating the helpless. Read on:

Activists returning to Europe said that the commandos had beaten passengers and used electric shocks during the clashes.

Six Greeks and several others, including a Turkish woman and her 1-year-old baby, were released Tuesday.

Turkish activist Nilufer Cetin, who had hidden with her baby in her cabin's bathroom aboard the Mavi Marmara, told reporters she believed there were 11 dead.

”The ship turned into a lake of blood," Cetin told reporters in Istanbul, having returned after Israeli officials warned that jail would be too harsh for her child.

"We were aware of the possible danger in joining the trip," she said. "But there are thousands of babies in Gaza. If we had reached Gaza we would have played with them and taken them food."

She said Israeli vessels harassed the flotilla for two hours starting around 10 p.m. Sunday, and returned at around 4 a.m. Monday, fired warning shots and told the ships to turn back.

When the Mavi Marmara continued on its course the harassment turned into an attack.

"They used smoke bombs followed by gas canisters. They started to descend onto the ship with helicopters," she said, calling the clashes that then erupted "extremely bad and brutal."

"I was one of the first victims to be released because I had a child," she told reporters, "but they confiscated everything, our telephones, laptops are all gone."

Her husband - the ship's engineer - was still being held by Israeli authorities.

Some 400 Turkish activists were on the six-ship flotilla, along with more than 30 Greeks and people of some 20 other nations including Germany, the U.S. and Russia.

Also typical is that Israel cut all communications aboard the ship, and then kept all seven hundred incommunicado while they were detained:

An Al-Jazeera journalist delivering a report before Israel cut communications said Israel fired at the vessel before boarding it. In one web posting, a Turkish television reporter on the boat cried out, "These savages are killing people here, please help" — a broadcast that ended with a voice shouting in Hebrew, "Everybody shut up!"

Al-Jazeera said that eight staff members were detained while covering the story, and asked for the Israeli government to release them immediately...

Of the hundreds of activists who were detained aboard the ships after they were escorted to the Israeli port of Ashdod, 15 were sent to Beer Sheva Prison, according to a spokesman for the Israeli prison authority. Another 25 were slated for deportation and 50 others who refused to identify themselves were being held separately.

Then Israel went on to propagate a bunch of bullshit about how they, the Israeli military, were set up, victims of an ambush. This is amazing. They allege that somehow, through deliberately placing themselves on the deck of a ship, in international waters, armed with guns and authorized to kill, they were the victims in this situation:

Israel's prime minister claimed Sunday that the Turkish activists who battled Israeli naval commandos in a deadly clash last week prepared for the fight ahead of time, before boarding the ship in a different city from the rest of the passengers.

Benjamin Netanyahu's charges highlight Israel's frantic efforts to portray the activists as terrorists and counter a wave of harsh international condemnation that has left the Jewish state isolated and at odds with some of its closest allies...

Netanyahu told his Cabinet that "dozens of thugs" from "an extremist, terrorism-supporting" organization had readied themselves for the arrival of the naval commandos.

"This group boarded separately in a different city, organized separately, equipped itself separately and went on deck under different procedures," he said. "The clear intent of this hostile group was to initiate a violent clash with (Israeli) soldiers..."

On Sunday, the Turkish daily Hurriyet showed new pictures taken by unidentified people of wounded Israeli commandos, including some with bloodied faces. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev said the images seemed to corroborate Israel's version of the events.

"It shows that our boarding party in fact did face deadly violence from the hardcore Islamist activists on the boat ... and that our boarding party was forced to respond," he said. "Had they not, they would have been killed."

Boarding party. Did you get that? BOARDING PARTY? Good one, Mark Regev. When you get tired of lying and killing for a living, you should try writing for Saturday Night Live. They could use someone like you.

The head of the IHH, the Islamic Charity organization that sponsored the Freedom Flotilla, as the six aid ships were called, disagrees with Netanyahu and Regev's assertions:

In Turkey, IHH head Bulent Yildirim said all passengers boarded the ship in the Turkish port of Antalya, and rejected suggestions that those who clashed with the soldiers were trained militants.

"Take a look at who was killed. They had pot bellies. They were old. They were young. Who would believe that they received special training?" he said.

Israel says the IHH is a terrorist organization. Again, even the United States says that they aren't.

Overall, I would say that Israel is taking this well, showing a good amount of contrition for its military escapades:

In a sign of Israeli frustration, some hard-liners produced a music video that parodies the events on the raided ship and has received more than a million hits on YouTube. A group of Israeli men and women portray the activists as Arab and Turkish militants with keffiyehs and mimic their accents. At the end, the mock activists wave clubs and knives in the air.

They sing a song with crude lyrics called "We Conned the World" — set to the tune of "We Are The World."

"We'll make the world abandon reason, we'll make them all believe that the Hamas is Mama Theresa," they sing.

The Israeli government press office relayed a link to the video to foreign correspondents on Friday, then recalled the message and apologized.

Nothing like kicking people who are down. That's Israel's specialty though, and what endears them so closely to many throughout the world.

Further displaying their will to do anything it takes to make themselves the victims in every situation, the Israeli government was forced to admit that it edited the invasion tape to include anti-Semitic rhetoric that wasn't really there:

Israel acknowledged Sunday that it edited recordings of what it said were anti-Semitic and anti-American radio calls by pro-Palestinian activists who tried to run the Gaza blockade and that it could not identify the origin of the broadcasts.

The Israeli military released a 26-second recording Friday night in which a warning call to a ship in the flotilla was met with the reply of "Shut up -- go back to Auschwitz." After another voice reports that the convoy has the permission of Palestinian officials to dock in Gaza, a third voice responds, "We are helping Arabs going against the U.S. Don't forget 9/11, guys."

But after the organizers of the aid convoy accused Israeli officials of manipulating the tapes, the Israel Defense Forces reported it had mistakenly identified one of the six ships in the activists' "Freedom Flotilla" as the source of the broadcasts. And it released a nearly six-minute recording of radio traffic that included those calls and several others, along with bursts of static and calls in other languages on the same channel.

Nice. Nothing like a good lie to drum up support for war. It's a classic technique - Vietnam, Iraq, etc.

I would like to conclude with the fact that Israel has not alleged even once that these ships were carrying weapons, nor anything that Hamas could use as such. Accordingly, despite Israel's best attempts to search the cargo looking for them, all they found were medical supplies and construction materials. Again, this was clearly an entirely just response. What a bunch of fucking monsters.

P.S. The Pixies canceled their first-ever show in Israel because of this. AWESOME. Hooray for people still giving a fuck.

Misery Hangs Over Gaza Despite Pledges of Help

Gaza is fucked. Thanks to the New York Times for this profound insight:

Dozens of families still live in tents amid collapsed buildings and rusting pipes. With construction materials barred, a few are building mud-brick homes. Everything but food and medicine has to be smuggled through desert tunnels from Egypt...

Four months after Israel waged a war here to stop Hamas rocket fire and two years after Hamas took full control of this coastal strip, Gaza is like an island adrift. Squeezed from without by an Israeli and Egyptian boycott and from within by their
Islamist rulers, the 1.5 million people here are cut off from any productivity or hope...
There are tens of thousands of educated and ambitious people here, teachers, engineers, translators, business managers, who have nothing to do but grow frustrated. They cannot practice their professions and they cannot leave. They collect welfare and smoke in cafes. A United Nations survey shows a spike in domestic violence...

Many here are especially worried about the young. At a program aimed at helping those traumatized by the January war, teenagers are offered colored markers to draw anything they like, says Farah Abu Qasem, 20, a student of English translation who volunteers at the program.

“They seem only to choose black and to draw things like tanks,” she said. “And when we ask them to draw something that represents the future, they leave the paper blank.”

No surprises there, and I'm not really sure why this story has been deemed headline worthy. I don't think it would have occurred to me to mention it, were it not for the deep irony in the juxtapostion of headlines.

Consider the New York Times headline, above, with this one from the same day - "Despite No Links to Violence, Founders of Muslim Charity Sentenced to Lengthy Terms for Donations to Needy Palestinians in Occupied Territories." That one is from Democracy Now!, a long-running and well-regarded independent media outlet from New York. Here's a synopsis of what happened:

Five founders of the Holy Land Foundation, once the nation’s largest Muslim charity, have received prison terms of up to sixty-five years on charges of supporting the Palestinian group Hamas. The five were never accused of supporting violence and were convicted for funding charities that aided needy Palestinians. The government’s case relied on Israeli intelligence as well as disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by the FBI over a span of fifteen years.

I think that might be part of the reason that, as a Palestinian man stuck living in Gaza said, “Right after the war, everybody came — journalists, foreign governments and charities promising to help,” said Hashem Dardona, 47, who is unemployed. “Now, nobody comes.” It's hard when they're shut down and locked up. That type of persecution sets a heavy example for others who would wish to do the same things.

Of course, we can never neglect to remember the fact that Israel is a piece of shit terror state run by fanatics with hardons for war: "in an effort to squeeze Hamas, Israel rations aid daily, allowing in about 100 trucks of food and medicine. Military officers in Tel Aviv count the calories to avoid a disaster." Brilliant. The pig fucks count calories of food rations going into Gaza so that not too many Palestinians starve or suffer malnutrition. I'm sure they thank their Israeli masters for that every day. I know I would.

Let's make that very plain: Israeli military commanders decide how much food people in Gaza are allowed to have. They decide when they can have it, and what kinds. Were they in such a mood, they could decide that Gazans get no food. What would happen? People would starve. Israel would face "international diplomatic pressure." The Israeli government would show no remorse or compunction and would surely blame those who died. In short, nothing would change. I wonder where "terrorism" comes from.

In Gaza, you have no control. You are controlled by shitbags of all stripes above you. And they pull those strings tight.