Terrorists attack aid ship in International waters...Follow

Once when I was travelling about in the USA, I rocked up to San Francisco, and checked into a hotel near Union square. they promised the room price included breakfast delivered in the room.

In the morning I awoke to a knock on the door and I let room service in. They delivered a covered tray and a pot of coffee. Coffee was a bit blah, but when I took the lid off the tray, I was somewhat confused to find 6 donuts.

When i queried it, i was told that that was what people around here ate for breakfast.

after that I found a pukka breakfast bar in Haight Ashbury who did fantastic breakfasts. the woman who ran it was Palestinian and my girlfriend who was Israeli ended up working there for a month or so.....


True story

To be fair, they also had handguns.

I know this is a minor point but Egypt is not part of the blockade. They have, at times, closed their border - the Rafah crossing - to Gaza but they are not participating in the sea blockade.

At present, the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza is open.

gbaji. You have an awesome (and willful) lack of understanding as to how 'elite Israeli commandoes' go about their business.

Fair enough. Tho it has to be said that if we all posted here only when it was worth our time, then internet boardz in general would be pretty quiet places :)

This quote is from one of the activists. I love how you follow it with a quote from the guy who performed the autopsies to make it look like they came from the same source. I get someone who's been poorly informed and therefore believes something which is false, but you seem to be complicit in creating false information for others to assume is true. Why?

There is no supporting evidence for this claim. They "assaulted" the ship with paintball guns firing non-lethal ammunition. I'm quite sure they were the same sort of hard plastic balls used in every other sort of paintball gun. Clearly, that wasn't sufficient to disperse the guys who were pulling the ropes to attempt to dislodge the soldiers, and then beating them with pipes and chains and whatever else they had handy once they got on the deck.


How on earth do you fail to place a large helping of blame on the folks doing that? I don't buy the whole "The guys in the uniforms are always wrong" attitude Paul. I think it's childish and leads to exactly this sort of confrontation, usually with the same sort of result.



I see nothing in the official reports which refutes the version of events as I wrote it. The Israelis went to great effort to avoid harming people. The people on the boat escalated this to the point where the only option left for the commandos was to open fire. And yeah. Those guys are trained to take head shots when they can get them. Perhaps that's a good reason *not* to decide to beat on them?


The point is that the deaths would not have happened if the people on that ship hadn't decided to do what they did. And the entire situation would not have happened if the organizers of the flotilla hadn't decided to run it. I'm still waiting for you to acknowledge that this had nothing at all to do with getting needed relief aid to Gaza and everything to do with breaking the blockade itself. Do you think that's a good thing? Are you now going to deny that Hamas in Gaza has been building rockets and firing them into Israel? Are you naive enough to assume that this wont continue if the blockade is lifted?



Look. I get the soft hearted point of all of this. Poor Palestinians. Picked upon by the Israelis. But has anyone considered that maybe if every single time the Israelis let them have some control over a piece of territory they *don't* immediately allow that area to be used as a staging area for attacks against Israel, that maybe just maybe their lot in life would be better? As much as we love to toss around simplistic rhetoric, the sad reality is that the bulk of the Palestinian citizenry would be vastly better off if Israel had simply retained direct military control over all the areas in question. Because it's not really the folks living there who are causing all of this, but the folks who see the people living there as convenient proxies to use to attack Israel. It's much much more complicated than just "Palestinian vs Israeli". Shockingly, in the areas which have been under direct control by Israel, Muslims, Christians, and Jews manage to live together peacefully. It's only the areas which international pressure has been applied to force a "solution" to the Palestinian/Israeli problem that have become freaking hellholes.


Maybe we should just learn our lesson and stop ******** with the people there? Just a thought...

Edited, Jun 7th 2010 5:22pm by gbaji

So they would be better off if they graciously accepted living as captives in the prison camps that they were provided with by the generous chaps over at the IDF headquarters?

Ok. So now we can see where your coming from with all this.

But far far less than if they'd been equipped with submachine guns, right?

Isn't that the point? Paul presented a false impression of the equipment they used. If they'd wanted to just kill the people on the deck, they could have done it easily.

And isn't that really the issue here? What do you think the Israeli motive was here? Does anyone actually think that they went in there trying to kill a bunch of people and went through all of this trouble to do so? Why? Occam's razor and all that. It makes vastly more sense to accept that a flotilla designed specifically to break the blockade would force a confrontation with the Israeli's, force them to board the ship, and then force them to open fire on the people on the ship in order to create an international incident which they could use to pressure the end of the blockade.

There's a pretty clear path between motive and action with that, isn't there? Where's the motive for the Israelis? They want to enforce the blockade. Wouldn't they use the least amount of violence needed to do so? Where's their "win" for forcing a confrontation which would lead to multiple deaths? Who wins here? You're all sitting around declaring the activists on that ship to be victims, aren't you? Are you really so native not to think that's precisely why they did this?


Who's to blame then? The guy who pulls the trigger, or the guy who refuses to stop moving forward, knowing that at some point the other guy will have to shoot? Like I said earlier, I don't have sympathy for "civilians" who choose to deliberately force police or military personnel into taking violent actions. Not one bit. I think by doing so we give those who would use such tactics (almost always at the expense of the naive and idealistic) too much power. It's a cheap "win", and we shouldn't allow it, else we end out holding everyone hostage to whomever can stage the biggest show of innocent victimhood.



So what? Metal pipes aren't non-lethal depending on how they're used either. Everyone wants to make a big deal about how the commandos were armed, but fails to mention that the folks fighting them were armed as well. Just because someone is not wearing a uniform does not mean that they aren't a combatant or a threat. It think it's absurd that in this age of international terrorism, some people *still* don't seem to understand this. Letting people hide behind a lack of uniform and get away with causing violence is stupid and it's the lesson we really ought to have learned by now.


But sadly, we still haven't apparently.

You'll all be happy to know that Iran wants to send ships to break the blockade now. Originally they were saying they'd send the Revolutionary Guard. Then, probably after realizing that the Revolutionary Guard won't do much good from the bottom of the sea, said they were sending several Red Crescent flagged ships.

So that should go swimmingly.

What, like the West Bank? You know, the place which has been been peaceful for years, hasn't fired a single rocket, or done any suicide-bombing? What's their reward from their Israeli occupiers? The slow choking of their economy, a giant wall around them, checkpoints everywhere, and settlements being continuously built on their land. That's some pretty amazing incentive for peace right there...

So yeah, lots of people have considered it, but it clearly isn't not the case.

Also, the rest of your post was just as full of ****, but I'm at work now. Someone can else can take over the simple, if somewhat repetitious, task of highlighting your complete lack of knowledge or objectivity on the issue.

Thats the single most jaw-droppngly hilarious statement that I've heard this week.

/golf clap

True dat.


Ps. Im at work at the moment and we are forced to use IE6 or some such PoS browser. All of a sudden today, evn tho I can read posts, the poster is invisible to me. So I'm having to rely on working out who has posted what by rembering whose signature is whose. Except for Gbaji and varus posts obviously. I can tell those by the content of the post itself.