response

It could almost make you cry.

Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's seemingly limitless concern for the oppressed and downtrodden has been in high gear of late - and he's mobilized his country's diplomats to echo his anguish. But wait, that empathy is reserved solely for the people of Gaza.

Why would Israel, in a deliberate and methodical operation planned over a week in advance -- according to statements by senior Israeli military commanders made in Hebrew-language media days before the attack -- target an unarmed ship on a humanitarian mission flying the flag of Comoros? (Unlike Turkey, Comoros is a party of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction over war crimes committed on vessels of member states.)

Cross posted with the Center on Public Diplomacy

Israel's 2009 war on Gaza has been exhaustively documented: some 1,400 Palestinian deaths (compared to 13 for Israel), a vast, rubble-strewn landscape, international condemnation culminating in the hard-hitting and controversial "Goldstone Report" from the UN, and a blockade, tacitly approved by the U.S. and EU, that led to a humanitarian crisis, and ultimately to the high-seas catastrophe this week on the Free Gaza flotilla.

I just read Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's piece on Huffington Post about Helen Thomas the Jew Hater, and I felt compelled to write something in response.

I just read Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's piece on Huffington Post about Helen Thomas the Jew Hater, and I felt compelled to write something in response.

"I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own advice," says Portia in Merchant of Venice.
She's the cool non-lawyer in lawyer's garb. She delivers the most beautiful tribute to forgiveness - "the quality of mercy is not strained" - and minutes later, shows no mercy whatsoever.
"It is a good divine that follows his own instructions." Again, the hypocrite Portia.

We urge the Obama administration to relate fair-mindedly to Israel over the flotilla crisis, and thus to set the tone for the international response.

A peculiar reference has emerged from Israel's murderous weekend siege of a group of civilian ships in international waters: the lynch mob. The metaphor, though, has not been conjured to describe the actions of the Israeli military, which killed at least nine people after soldiers descended from helicopters onto a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza. Rather, defenders of the raid, and those who argue that this brutality was exceptional in the larger scheme of Israeli policy, have compared the activists on board the boats to a marauding pack of bandits.

crossposted from http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2010/06/israels-aid-to-the-free-gaza-movement-or-how-to-lose-an-information-war.html#comments

Just like most of you, I've been spending the last day just watching videos and reading spin from all sides.

The Obama Administration's equivocation over Israel's outrageous deadly assault on humanitarian ships headed for Gaza ,while not surprising, is nevertheless unacceptable. Once again Israel's bad behavior has dug a deep hole for itself, and we're left debating whether or not to jump in with them. Responsible governments behave responsibly. In its dealings with Gaza over the past 43 years, Israel has been anything but responsible, and we need to clearly distance ourselves from their actions.