Sources report that America’s left-progressives were admitted to hospital early this morning with broken ribs, concussions, black eyes, complex fractures of the humerus, and “the most extensive rectal tearing I have ever seen”, in the words of the attending physician. Reached for comment, the patients claimed in unison “I fell. Really. I’m so clumsy!”

Read the rest of this entry »

To write this book, I am travelling to Europe for a month, and visiting Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Italy, France, and Spain using a one-month Eurail Global pass.  This is not exactly cheap, which is why I’ve set up a page at Indiegogo.com. Anyone who is interested in Reunion – a Travelogue and wants to help make it happen can donate via the project page I’ve set up there. Donors will receive my personal thanks, and, depending on the amount of donation, may also receive free copies of the book or even readings at their locations.

http://www.indiegogo.com/Reunion-A-Travelogue

In December 1996, I found myself standing in the main hall of Munich’s Hauptbahnhof (central train station). I had just returned from spending Christmas with friends in the village of Fieberbrunn, in the middle of Austria’s share of the Alps.

It had been a most instructive visit. Apart from doing some very important formative drinking, I learned that there are still people who decorate their Christmas trees with actual candles, and – as the ache in my left leg constantly reminded me – that “sledding” means different things to different people.

This particular discovery I made one early afternoon, when my friend Paul, with whom I had been staying, announced that there was such lovely snow that we should really take advantage of it and go “sledding”.

Like most people from the Midwestern US, sledding, to me, meant going a few hundred yards up a gently sloping hill, and then speeding down it in a contraption that looks like it might have jet propulsion or, at a minimum, an ejector seat. With this image firmly in mind, I set off with Paul, my other friend Rudi, and one of their friends, wearing some snow gear that Paul had lent me, which consisted of what looked like an oversized snowsuit in prison orange and a pair of his brother’s boots from his year in the army. His brother, as it turned out, had very small feet.

And so we proceeded through the village in the direction of the mountains. In retrospect, this is when I should have begun to suspect that Paul and company might have a rather different image in mind. However, I was too concentrated on the pain in my compressed feet to think much about that.

The hill we ultimately chose was not so much “gently sloping” as brutally inclined. We slogged up for what felt like at least an hour, during which time I had to take five breaks to avoid collapsing, which my companions found quite entertaining.

By the time we had reached an altitude they deemed satisfactory, I was already exhausted. Only now did I notice a few rather important details: First, that we were so high up, and the path was so winding, that I couldn’t see where we’d started. Second, that the path was only about two feet wide. Third, that the sleds looked more like something Norman Rockwell would paint a person sledding in than something that sane people would actually sled in. Lastly, I became aware that the path had a steep rock wall on one side and a thirty-foot drop on the other.

“Let’s race!”, Rudi proposed, nicely rounding out the experience, “Two to a sled!”

All agreed that this was an excellent idea.

Paul and his friend took the one sled, while I found myself clinging for dear life onto a sled I shared with Rudi. As we got underway, Rudi decided to utter the least reassuring words in any language:

“Don’t worry, just trust me.”

In writing The Tacitus Principle, I deliberately refrained from addressing the issue of resistance on board the Mavi Marmara, save to point out the questionable reliability of the videos disseminated by the Israeli military and to discuss – in the abstract – the legal rights of those on board and of the state whose flag the ship was flying. This I did because there was, at the time, no direct testimony from the Mavi Marmara passengers on the subject. As such, I declined to accept an Israeli narrative that I  – amongst many others – have shown to be hopelessly full of holes, internal contradictions, and outright lies.

We now know – and have known for some time – that the passengers on the upper deck of the Mavi Marmara did indeed use the paltry means at their hands to resist an armed onslaught against a ship full of sleeping, defenceless people. Believing – not unreasonably – that the objective of the Israeli attack, which, in its violence, far exceeded any prior response to an attempt to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip, was to kill everyone on board the Marmara, they succeeded in disarming two soldiers and in putting up fierce resistance against those who followed. In the course of the attack, at least nine and as many as twenty of their comrades were murdered.

Some have seen fit to condemn those who decided – having seen one comrade killed before the Marmara was boarded – to echo Malcolm X’ view that “I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defence; I call it intelligence”. Typical of this view is Matthew Taylor’s piece on MondoWeiss, in which he bemoans the lack of “discipline” of those who decided to defend themselves. “Had the soldiers been firing live ammunition?” he asks, quoting Prof. Michael Nagler, “The point is that even if they were – while terribly difficult – the passengers could have resisted nonviolently by refusing to comply with the soldiers’ demands without making any attempt to injure them.”

To this perspective, Taylor adds a complete misrepresentation of the events of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, and the following remark:

On a deeper level, the true power of nonviolence to persuade the oppressor is unleashed with a commitment to pursue acts of courageous love (not just "not being violent"). For example, the Civil Rights Movement activists who sat in at the lunch counters, rode the buses, and registered voters never backed down, and nonviolently resisted the oppressors without demonization or rancor, but with a desire to win over those afflicted with racist views.

This quote handily sums up the problem inherent in the views of Taylor et al. Nonviolent action aims at persuading the oppressor or the onlookers. It is a tactic that seeks to change "hearts and minds" by "melting the hearts" (Gandhi) of those who would seek to tread on us with their boots. To apply a technique for winning hearts and minds to a situation in which the aggressor is already spilling blood and brains is, to say the least, questionable. To sit in front of a computer in the safety of an air-conditioned room and scold others for doing otherwise, however, is nothing short of contemptuous. To demand, further, that people make that decision not only for themselves, but for others who have no input into it, is, in a word, criminal.

Taylor tacitly acknowledges the preposterousness of his remarks when he describes them as “Monday-morning armchair Quarterbacking". But even in this acknowledgement, he manages to miss the point: This wasn't a fucking game. When an Israeli soldier kills you, you die for real.

There is little to add to Max Ajl’s superb rebuttal:

Consider the feasibility of those options on the Mavi Marmara. Could the passengers rely on appealing to the conscience of Israeli commandoes while they were firing bullets at the activists? Taylor thinks so: “the true power of nonviolence to persuade the oppressor is unleashed with a commitment to pursue acts of courageous love.” This seems wooly to me. […] “The point is that even if they were – while terribly difficult – the passengers could have resisted nonviolently by refusing to comply with the soldiers’ demands without making any attempt to injure them,” is ridiculous. When someone is shooting at you and your friends, you must disarm them, and probably use violence to do so. If you can’t disarm them, you must use violence to stop them from shooting, one way or another. The demand a bullet entering your skull makes on you is for you to die, and if there is a way to “refuse to comply” with that demand, Taylor and Nagler should fess up quick. (emphasis added)

The persuasion stage ended the minute the soldiers killed the first passenger (before they even boarded). From that moment on, the few people on the Mavi Marmara who were awake and in a position to act were faced with a stark choice: Do we hope that they will go easy on us, and run the risk that they’ll kill us all given the opportunity, or do we do everything in our power to show them it's not worth trying? In insisting that they choose option A, Taylor and his ilk are demanding that they put their would-be murderers’ lives above their own and those of the hundreds of defenceless people on board.

As I discussed in detail in The Tacitus Principle, there is no question that the passengers of the Mavi Marmara had the legal right to resist the Israeli attack using proportionate force. This, however, does not tell us whether it is the right decision. It is, technically, true that the Seattle demonstrators had the legal right to self-defence against the police officers who bloodied them without legal justification. From a legal standpoint, they would be using proportionate force against an immediate, unlawful danger to their lives and physical integrity and those of others.

However, the real question is tactical in nature: What would the likely consequences have been had the demonstrators used force in self-defence? Most likely, they would have been even further demonised by a press that was happy to reverse the chonology in order to blame them for the violent acts of the police, and the matter would have escalated, leaving demonstrators dead and dying, rather than wounded and unlawfully arrested. Their legal arguments, valid though they would have been, would never have been heard in court.

In these circumstances, the likely consequences of violent self-defence made it an immoral choice quite independently of the legalities.

Moving to the other extreme of the spectrum, let us look at a situation in which those involved were confronted with the near-certainty of death: the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It is important to remember that the goal of the Uprising was not to hold off the Nazis and their Trawniki henchmen; the organisers of the uprising recognised from the start that they would eventually be killed either by bullets and grenades or by gas. There was no use trying to “melt the hearts” of heavily armed killers, whose only mission was to ensure that not a single one of them was left alive. Persuasion was not an option. For them, the only question was whether to give their lives away for free, or to exact the highest possible cost from their murderers. They chose option B, and held the Waffen-SS at bay for weeks. Their fierce, violent resistance, as Max Ajl notes in his piece, is celebrated even today.

When someone asserts, as Taylor and Nagle have done here, that there is something fundamentally wrong with responding to deadly force with non-lethal force, the burden is squarely on them to explain what, exactly, the alternative was. While he does not address the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising case in his piece, it seems clear that Taylor does not draw any bright line between being potentially beaten up and arrested (Seattle) and being, in all probability, killed (Mavi Marmara, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising).

If he would agree that violent resistance in self-defence is appropriate in a case like the Warsaw Ghetto, the burden is on him to explain how he distinguishes the level of deadly force the ŻOB was facing from the degree of deadly force the passengers and crew of the Mavi Marmara were facing. Why, in other words, was a violent response warranted in the Warsaw Ghetto, but not on the Mavi Marmara? There is no fundamental, qualitative difference here. In both cases, people were facing at least probable death at the hands of trained killers. If he accepts violence in the one case, but not in the other, then, his only principled basis is the probability of death. At what level of probability can deadly force be met with force? Does it have to be virtually 100%, as in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising? Or is a greater-than-50% probability sufficient? At what point, in Taylor’s eyes, does the reasonable fear of being killed justify doing something to prevent it?

Let us now suppose that Taylor (et al.) is as quick to condemn a violent response in Warsaw Ghetto as he was to condemn the violent, but non-lethal response to the deadly Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara. In this case, if he wishes to project even a faint modicum of seriousness, Taylor must provide an alternative. What could the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto do? What response would, to Taylor, be appropriately nonviolent, while maximising their chances of surviving?

As happy as he is to lecture, Taylor has no more answers to this question than he does to the question at hand: What should the people on board the Mavi Marmara have done in response to a murderous attack that had already killed one of their fellows? To the extent that he answers this – painfully obvious – question at all, it is with platitudes about “nonviolently [resisting] the oppressors without demonization or rancor, but with a desire to win [them] over”, “refusing to comply" with the demands of soldiers who were firing live ammunition at them, and the frankly bile-curdling admonition to practice “courageous love", and vaguenesses about how “the resisters’ actions are not dictated by the oppressors’ actions.”  

Bullshit.

If someone is trying to kill you, your reaction will almost certainly be dictated by that fact, assuming that you have the normal human instinct of self-preservation. If someone is trying to kill your comrades (especially if they are defenceless), your reaction will just as certainly be dictated by that fact, if you have even the slightest sense of solidarity. Your action will be to do what seems necessary and suitable to preserve your own life and those of your comrades. If you can get the gun out of the would-be murderer’s hand, you do it. If you can get your comrades out of harm’s way, you do it. If you can run and hide, you will run and hide. If there's a reasonable chance that calling for help could save you, you call for help.

The people on board the Mavi Marmara had nowhere to run.

They had nothing but hundreds of miles of sea, blocked on all sides by Israeli warships. They were cornered.

They had no way to call for help. The Israeli military was jamming their communications equipment. They were helpless and alone, and surrounded by people who were shooting to kill.

In the last verse of his song זאָג ניט קיינמאָל, Zog nit keynmol ("Never say..."), which became the anthem of the Jewish partisans, Hirsch Glick writes:

דאָס ליד געשריבן איז מיט בלוט און ניט מיט בלײַ,
ס´איז ניט קיין ליד פֿון אַ פֿויגל אויף דער פֿרייַ.
דאָס האָט אַ פֿאָלק צווישן פֿאַלנדיקע ווענט,
דאָס ליד געזונגען מיט נאַגאַנעס אין די הענט.

Dos Lied geschriebn is mit Blut un nit mit Blei.
S’ is nit keyn Lied fun a Foigl oif der frei;
Dos hot a Folk zvischn falendike Vent,
Dos Lied gezungen mit Naganes in die Hent.

This song was written with blood, not with lead;
It isn’t the song of a bird flying free.
It was people with weapons in their hands
Who sang this song as the walls came crashing in.

Glick’s point is as elementary as it is beautifully expressed. The sentiments of Zog nit keynmol were not written at leisure, in a time of calm contemplation, by a foigl oif der frei (a bird flying free). They were written in a time of extreme and imminent danger, when the only options available ranged from bad to intolerable. Things rarely look the same to a foigl oif der frei like Taylor as they do to people facing the real prospect of death.

Taylor, and the others who would presume to utter platitudes in the face of murder, would do well to keep this in mind.

In criminal law, a defendant who admits having done something that is generally a crime has two basic types of defences (“affirmative defences”) available. The first is what is known as an excuse. It does not deny that the act was wrongful, but offers reasons why the defendant should not be punished in this case. The second is known as justification. It argues that the act was not wrong at all, that it was instead entirely appropriate and acceptable under the circumstances.

There is no need to linger on a defence of excuse. It not only does a disservice to the Marmara resisters and the cause they risked their lives for – it insults the intelligence of anyone reading to suggest that there was anything at all wrong with what they did.

In The Tacitus Principle, I explained that any violent resistance by the passengers of the Mavi Marmara would fall within self-defence, a justification. While this is the legal category their actions fall into, I am not content to argue that the Marmara resisters were blameless. This is obvious. Instead, I would go far as to say that their actions are worthy of praise. Indeed, the way the people on board the Mavi Marmara responded to the Israeli attack should go down in history as an example of how one can resist murderous violence without losing one’s humanity.

If they had merely risked their lives to protect their comrades and to help the besieged people of the Gaza Strip, dayenu. If they had merely taken whatever they could find in order to defend their ship and its sleeping passengers against a midnight onslaught, dayenu.

If they had done only those things, they would be deserving of the highest praise.

However, we know that they did more. From eyewitness testimony, corroborated by the footage that Iara Lee and her camera crew were able to smuggle off of the Mavi Marmara, we know that they not only protected the two disarmed commandos from the cameras of the press; they even used their extremely limited resources to give these people who came to harm them basic medical care.

They did this even as they were sending out a distress call by loudspeaker to the Israeli Navy, announcing their surrender and pleading with the Israelis to provide medical assistance to several people who were bleeding to death. They did this even though the Israelis opted to let their comrades die when they had nothing to lose from saving their lives.

There is no reason to be evasive, or to qualify our defence of the people who tried to protect their ship and comrades from the fourth most deadly army in the world with sticks and stones. There is no need to concede when we are told that they betrayed what some people misguidedly believe to be an absolute principle of nonviolence. The Mavi Marmara resisters did the right thing, and some of them died doing it. In so doing, they forced the suffering of the Gaza Strip, long ignored by articulate opinion, onto the front pages. When the NBC Nightly News calls Gaza a “prison”, when ambassadors are withdrawn from Israel, when country after country announces its intention to send more ships to Gaza, when Turkey commits its navy to protect them, we should remember who we have to thank for it. If the Mavi Marmara had gone quietly and not responded to Israel's live fire, none of this would have happened. This batch of ships would have been ignored just as surely as the previous ones were.

The resisters of the Mavi Marmara do not need us to defend them. They deserve our unwavering praise.

If there is one piece of ancient wisdom that has never lost even a bit of its validity over the centuries, it is Cornelius Tacitus' axiom that, “Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.” Indeed, this appears to be the underlying principle of the US-Israeli PR campaign that has been launched in the wake of the almost universally condemned Israeli commando raid on the unarmed Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which carried aid to the Gaza Strip in an effort to break the siege that has strangled the 1.5 million people there since 2007.

The facts of the attack are fairly uncontroversial. The Gaza Freedom Flotilla consists of several multinational, civilian ships carrying humanitarian aid for the population of the Gaza Strip, which has been under siege in some form or other since 1991, a siege that was tightened to the point of denying basic humanitarian supplies after the elected Hamas government defeated a US-Israeli coup attempt led by Muhammad Dahlan in 2007. The ships were inspected before leaving port, and found to contain only humanitarian aid, much of it medical and reconstruction supplies banned under the US-Israeli embargo.

On 31 May, in international waters, Israeli warships and helicopters surrounded the flotilla, and executed a late-night commando raid on the Turkish ship, Mavi Marmara, killing at least 16 people (a figure that has been revised in subsequent reports without explanation or comment to 9 dead) and wounding at least 30, according to Israeli news reports that were broadcast before Israeli military censors issued a gag order preventing further reporting.

According to a 28 May Maariv article found by Max Blumenthal, this raid was premeditated, having been planned “detail by detail”  as much as a week in advance. Everything aboard the ship, including footage of the Israeli attack shot by journalists travelling with the flotilla, has been confiscated. Only a few of the passengers abducted by the Israeli Navy were initially released; the majority were held incommunicado until 2 June, and denied access to lawyers and the media.

Israel and its apologists have used the head start given them by the military gag order to propound a rather different version. For the purposes of this article, I will rely primarily on the fairly typical sampling that can be found in two press releases of the Israeli PR outfit The Israel Project (courtesy of Doug Henwood):

The first of these press releases – New Ship Headed for Gaza despite Israeli Prohibitions (2 June 2010 – “New Ship…”) – is decorated with a photo of “Anti-Israel activist Rachel Corrie” burning what is supposed to be an American flag. While one might rightly ask why it matters that a young woman who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer during a non-violent attempt to prevent a house demolition seven years ago apparently burned a US flag sometime prior to that, this question is never squarely addressed. The idea, it seems, is to use innuendos about the “illegal flotilla” and unsupported assertions about the “global jihadi ties” of those on board (who even named one of their ships after a known flag burner!) in hopes that the buzzwords used will cause readers to suspend the operation of whatever critical faculties they have.

Having thus set the stage, New Ship… informs us that the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara was, suspiciously enough, “filled with hundreds of Turks”. These flag burner-loving Turks, with their “global jihadi ties”, we learn, carried out a “pre-meditated [sic] attack” on Israeli soldiers who boarded their ship.

Although at least four of the nine activists who died [of natural causes, of course] on the Mavi Marmara May 31 are thought to be Turkish nationals, Israel has not yet released the names and nationalities of those killed in the clash. The Turkish ship was backed by the Insani Yardim Vakfi - “humanitarian relief fund”), or IHH, an Islamist Turkish group. The incident occurred after Israeli Navy personnel attempted to stop the ship from illegally entering Gaza and were attacked by the self-described human rights activists with knives, clubs and other weapons. About 400 of the 700 people participating in the six-vessel flotilla were Turks.

The passengers on the Turkish boat, are “self-described” human rights activists, more than half of whom, the press release once again makes a point of emphasising, were from Turkey (presumably out of fear that the Turks might do to Gaza what they did to Germany – i.e., rebuild it), and backed by the “Islamist Turkish group” İnsanı Yardım Vakfı (Humanitarian Relief Fund or IHH). To support its claim that the IHH is an Islamist group, New Ship... cites to a 1 June Washington Post article, which has only the following to say about the IHH:

Flotilla organizers, from the Turkish nongovernmental organization IHH, or Humanitarian Relief Fund, said they were transporting 6,000 tons of cement, more than 2,000 tons of iron, 100 prefabricated houses, 500 wheelchairs, medical equipment, wood and glass for building, electric generators and food.

Real bad dudes, clearly. It bears repeating that this is the only reference to the IHH in the article, which does not even assert, let alone prove, that the IHH is an “Islamist group”. While this might give a critical reader cause to question the honesty of New Ship... as a whole, the press release was not written for critical readers.

Later on in New Ship..., additional sources are cited for the claim that:

In 2006, a study conducted by the Danish Institute for International Studies showed that the IHH was involved in planning an al-Qaeda attack againstLos [sic] Angeles International Airport in 1999. The IHH reportedly acquired forged documents, enlisted operatives and delivered weapons to al-Qaeda in preparation for the attack, which was ultimately foiled.

The Danish study also cites a French intelligence report which stated that in the mid-1990s the IHH sent a number of operatives into war zones in Muslim countries to get combat experience. The report said that the IHH transferred money and “caches of firearms, knives and pre-fabricated explosives” to Muslim fighters in those countries.

Strangely enough, New Ship… does not link to the Danish study, which is available online, but to a page on the website of the Israeli Intelligence & Terrorism Information Center, headed up by Col. (ret.) Reuven Erlich, which describes itself as "an NGO dedicated to the memory of the fallen of the Israeli intelligence community”. The page, which is replete with assertions and devoid of direct quotes or anything else in the way of substantiation, also does not link to the Danish study, though it does provide an image of the title page and of part of a paragraph from the relevant section (without reproducing the source citations). Those interested can find the report at:

http://www.diis.dk/graphics/Publications/WP2006/DIIS%20WP%202006-7.web.pdf (page 15)

The evidence for the claim that the IHH was “involved in planning an Al-Qaeda attack againstLos Angeles [sic] International Airport in 1999” is that a French magistrate by the name of Bruguière “testified that IHH had played ‘[a]n important role’” in the plot.  

The ”French intelligence report” supporting the remainder of the claim turns out to be a motion filed in a French court: “Requisitoire [sic] Definitifaux [sic] aux Fins de Non-Lieu. De Non-Lieu partiel. De Requalification [sic]. De Renvoi devant le Tribunal Correctionnel, de mantien [sic] sous Controle [sic] Judiciaiare [sic] et de maintien en Detention [sic]” (Final Motion Concerning Dismissal, Partial Dismissal, Reclassification, Remand to the Criminal Court, Continued Judicial Supervision, and Continued Detention). This is, it bears emphasising, the only source cited for these claims in the Danish think tank’s report.

In other words, apart from grossly falsifying a press report, the press release cites the website of a think tank connected to the Israeli intelligence community, which itself cites no sources except for a Danish think tank’s report that bases the claims on an unsupported assertion by a French judge and moving papers filed in court, which the press release helpfully misrepresents as an “intelligence report”. QED.

To further bolster claims that those aboard the aid flotilla were dangerous terrorists, the Israel Project reports that:

a number of flotilla activists discussed the possibility they might die and become “martyrs” in the course of attempting to reachGaza [sic] in their vessels before they had even set out. The organizers held a press conference in the Turkish city of Antalya before the flotilla sailed, tasking all the participants to write their wills before departing. Walid Al-Tabtabai, a Kuwaiti member of parliament, was among those who wrote a will before leaving on the flotilla.

Similarly, in its follow-up press release, European Officials Rushed to Judgment and Condemned Israel’s Attempts to Stop Illegal Flotilla (3 June 2010), the Israel Project claims that Turkish passenger

Benginin told his family just before joining the flotilla: "I am going to be a shahid; I dreamt I will become a shahid – I saw in a dream that I will be killed." And Iritilmis reportedly told a friend before departure, “He was devoted to this activity, and always dreamt about becoming a shahid,”

translating the Turkish expression şehit düşmek (to be killed) as “to become a shahid”, presumably for maximum effect. In other words, then, the damning evidence is that some people on board the flotilla were concerned that they might not survive an encounter with the Israeli Navy.

Perhaps sensing that even its target audience will not immediately grasp the horrors that might ensue if the people of the Gaza Strip were allowed access to concrete, New Ship... helpfully adds that “Hamas [the elected government] has in the past used [concrete] to build bunkers” like those one finds in Sderot, leading, presumably, to an untenable “bunker gap”. Even assuming this is true, one might be forgiven for doubting that there is anything particularly nefarious about building air-raid shelters in an area that has been subjected to extensive aerial bombardment.

In a further effort at creating the impression that the humanitarian nature of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla is pretextual, New Ship... selectively quotes from a 2 June article in the right-wing Jerusalem Post to the effect that:

In the meantime, Iran-backed Hamas on Wednesday (June 2) was preventing Israel from delivering humanitarian aid from the flotilla toGaza [sic]. Israel dispatched eight truckloads of the aid to the Kerem Shalom crossing into Gaza on June 1 after the ships were escorted to the port city of Ashdod. Said a Hamas official, "We refuse to receive the humanitarian aid until all those who were detained aboard the ships are released."

The authors of New Ship…, apologists for “US-backed Israel”, might have mentioned that the unnamed official of democratically-elected Hamas (whose name and title, Minister of Social Welfare Ahmed Al-Kurd, are quoted in the JP article, but suppressed in New Ship…) is further quoted in the very same JP article as saying:

"We also insist that the equipment be delivered in its entirety."

Kurd said that Israel's decision to allow a number of wheelchairs to be delivered to the Gaza Strip was a "deception," claiming that the batteries that operate them had been removed, making them useless.

Clearly, this press release is not meant to be taken seriously.

This all comes to a crescendo with a quote from none other than US-backed Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, who considers the flotilla an “unprecedent attack of hypocrisy”, because "The purpose of the flotilla wasn’t to enter [sic] goods to Gaza – which we allow anyway, on a daily basis – the purpose was to break the naval blockade.” The purpose of the blockade, the indignant Netanyahu proclaimed, is to “stop weapons from entering Gaza”. Amira Hass of the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz helpfully provides examples of the sort of dangerous ordnance the blockade keeps out:

The Defense Ministry is refusing - on security grounds, it says - to reveal why Israel prohibits the import into the Gaza Strip of items such as cilantro, sage, jam, chocolate, french fries, dried fruit, fabrics, notebooks empty flowerpots and toys, while allowing cinnamon, plastic buckets and combs.

One might object that it is hardly hypocritical to launch a flotilla for the purpose of breaking the naval blockade when that has in fact been the stated purpose of the flotilla all along, but it seems reasonable to defer to Netanyahu’s expertise in the field of hypocrisy.

“We are of course sorry for the lost [sic] of lives,” Netanyahu goes on, “but our soldiers were in life danger and were defending themselves from being lynched.”

It is worthwhile at this point to remember what “lynching” actually is. An exhibit currently touring the US, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, provides us with examples:

(1) Bennie Simmons, or Dennis Simmons, accused of the murder of sixteen-year old Susie Church, was taken from prison guards in Anadarko, Oklahoma.  His killers led him to a nearby bridge and hanged him from the limb of a cottonwood tree flourishing by a stream."

The Negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh," reported a local newspaper, "but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob."  As Simmons began to lose consciousness the mob fired at the body, cutting it to pieces. "   The mobsters made no attempt to conceal their identity," remarked the Enfaula Democrat, "but there were no prosecutions."

(2) Tampa had built a flourishing cigar manufacturing industry by providing liberal incentives to manufacturers.  The unionizing of workers and the violence erupting from strikes threatened the town's economy.  Two Italian immigrants were accused of union sympathy and of shooting J. F. Esterling, a bookkeeper for the West Tampa cigar factory.  City fathers were alarmed that an "American" would be subjected to attack.  While the "conspicuous" immigrants, neither one of which was recognized previously as strikers, were being taken to a safer jail in a horse-drawn hack, a mob separated them from a suspiciously modest guard consisting of one deputy sheriff and fireman.  The mob fled in automobiles, a luxury afforded by only the elite in Tampa, which suggested that they were "men with boiled shirts, high collars, diamonds, and kid gloves."

Conspicuously absent from these accounts is any reference to the victims being highly trained, armed special-forces operatives executing a late-night raid. Indeed, it seems that the hallmark of a lynching is that the victim is unarmed, alone, and completely helpless, and usually ends up burnt at the stake or hung from a tree amidst much merrymaking.

Quite apart from the absurdity of using the term “lynch” to describe alleged “attacks” on special forces soldiers raiding a civilian vessel, there is something distinctly sickening about this appropriation of one of the signal atrocities of modern African American history. One wonders how Netanyahu or his many spokespersons and media flacks would react if one of the Mavi Marmara passengers were to refer to the Israeli raid as a “pogrom”.

The Israeli military have since made a major media production of the “weapons" discovered on board the ship as part of the “pre-meditated [sic] attack” on those defenceless commandos.

The “weapons” recovered include “metal rods, slingshots, knives, smoke torches, wrenches, electric saws, gas masks, and molotov [sic] cocktails”. The photographs do not show the “smoke torches” or Molotov cocktails, and what the IDF claims are slingshots are photographed in such a way that it is not actually particularly clear what they are. Gas masks, of course, are not weapons at all. They are breathing apparatus used in environments with contaminated air (and thanks to the Israeli destruction of the main sewage treatment plant, there is plenty of that in Gaza). Flares are standard safety equipment on any ship (for SOS signalling if radio communication is impossible), and are indeed often required in order to obtain a certificate of seaworthiness.

The remainder are children’s toys, kitchen utensils, and run-of-the-mill tools that one will find in any well-equipped home.

When examining these photos, it is important to keep in mind that we are forced to take the IDF's word on them. We have no independent information whatever on this matter. The Israeli military have had unfettered, uncontrolled, unmonitored access to the ships, and have not only a strong interest in finding something to create the perception that their attack was justified but also a track record of lying about these matters.

The same caveats apply to the videos released by the IDF. The first thing worth noting is that none of them is longer than approximately 20 seconds. More importantly, the time stamps have either been obscured or removed altogether, making it impossible to establish a chronology based on them. In one, which the IDF claims was somehow “censored” from the Mavi Marvara’s live satellite feed, we see nothing but what appears to be a fight in a room someplace (how one censors a satellite feed in real time during an armed attack is anyone’s guess). Nothing in the video allows the viewer to determine when or where the footage was shot – we have to take Israel’s word for it.

The other videos are shot in infrared at such a great distance that the people appear to be small dots or vague silhouettes. It is impossible to tell who’s who, let alone what anyone is doing. This is tacitly acknowledged by the fact that the IDF has placed captions by some of the dots, explaining what these particular dots were supposed to be doing. Without them, there would be no way of knowing at all – again, we have to take their word for it. Again, there is not a single identifying detail visible in these videos – we see a large boat and the silhouette of a helicopter, but no markings. These, too, could have been shot anywhere and at any time (or, given the image quality, created as part of a first-year computer graphics course).

Footage of the killings of the activists on board is, of course, conspicuously absent from this heavily edited collection of cinematic vignettes, which might even have been shot during IDF exercises preparing for the raid given the lack of identifying detail and the absence of timestamps from the majority of the footage.

Further doubt is cast on this version by another Jerusalem Post article, dateline 4 June 2010, which relies entirely on unnamed Israeli military sources, including two anonymous members of the Israeli elite unit who claim to have been involved in the raid on the Mavi Marmara. The new version put forth in the article, a significant escalation of prior claims, appears to have been issued in response to the interviews with survivors of the Israeli attack that are now readily available. The article reads like an IDF press release, with no non-IDF sources quoted and no questions whatever raised about the statements reported.

In this version, the attacking Israeli commandos were “attacked” by “mercenaries”, a description the JP uncritically accepts on the basis that it is the terminology used by the IDF.

The article drips with admiration for the “well-built”, “soft-spoken” anonymous IDF soldier, who basis his claim that those on board the Mavi Marmara were “without a doubt terrorists” on the fact that he could see “the murderous rage in their eyes”. This is a particularly impressive diagnostic feat given that the IDF claims that “all the mercenaries wore gas masks”.

An Israeli officer allegedly involved in the raid, identified only as “T.” “fills in the blanks” left by the account of S. (a true disciple of Marcus Aurelius who is “stingy with words”) as follows:

T. said he realized the group they were facing was well-trained and likely ex-military after the commandos threw a number of stun grenades and fired warning shots before rappelling down onto the deck. “They didn’t even flinch,” he said. “Regular people would move.”

If this is true, the IDF is holding out on us. The available footage, far from showing people who “didn’t even flinch”, looks like a free-for-all, with people milling about in all directions. All of the "evidence” that those on board the Mavi Marmara were “mercenaries” or “terrorists” is of basically the same character. Of note, however, is T.’s admission that the attacking commandos were firing (“warning shots”, allegedly) before they even boarded the ship.

Similarly absent from the footage made available is anything to confirm that “The attackers [sic] had already seized two pistols from the commandos, and fired repeatedly at them." The JP also uncritically reports the suspicions of the Israeli military that “the group did have some guns of its own”, but does not see fit to point out that this contradicts prior versions (which claimed, at the most, that guns were “stolen” from the attacking commandos) and is based solely on the result of an investigation by unnamed IDF “forensic experts” that has irreparably tainted the scene (it is not for nothing that suspects are generally not allowed unsupervised access to crime scenes).

S. is reportedly being considered for a "medal of valor” for the “remarkable job” he did.

Meanwhile, post mortems performed in Turkey showed that five of those killed on the Mavi Marmara were shot in the head, one from point-blank range. “One casualty, a 19-year-old dual national Turkish-American citizen named Furkan Dogan, was found to have bullet wounds in his head and multiple bullets in his body, [medical examiner Haluk] Ince said.”

In the eyes of the insufficiently reverent, evidence like might help to explain why S. “does not look like a hero”, in the words of the JP article.

The “Illegal” Flotilla

Before addressing the legal issues, let us return to the undisputed facts:

The Gaza flotilla was in international waters en route to deliver humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, when it was surrounded by the Israeli Navy. The Israeli military then proceeded to carry out an armed attack on at least one of the ships with the equivalent of US Navy SEALS, who boarded the Mavi Marmara by force and proceeded to kill sixteen passengers and injure over thirty. The flotilla was then hijacked and taken to Israeli territory, where the abducted passengers and crews were held incommunicado.

New Ship… repeatedly describes the flotilla as “illegal”, because it "violate[d] Israeli law” to deliver aid to the Gaza Strip. This claim puts Israel and its apologists in a rather awkward position. The official Israeli position, rejected by all international organisations and international law specialists, is that Gaza is not occupied, although Israel retains effective control over Gaza by land, sea, and air, has cut off all direct contact with the outside world, attacks the territory at will, and is exploiting natural gas deposits found in Gaza’s coastal waters. Even more importantly, Gaza is not a separate political entity; it is part of what in international law is referred to in the singular as the “Occupied Palestinian Territory”, which includes the indisputably occupied West Bank. As such, the specific modality of Israeli control does not matter. The Gaza Strip is part of the territory that has been under Israeli occupation since June 1967.

If Gaza is not occupied, however, how does Israeli law apply to Gaza, which is not a part of Israel? This argument ultimately serves only to point up Israel’s duplicity over the (long since resolved) issue of whether it is occupying Gaza (it is).

More importantly, both the Fourth Geneva Convention (art. 64) and the Fourth Hague Convention (art. 43) prohibit an occupying power imposing its laws on the occupied territory, and no state may apply its domestic laws to a foreign ship in international waters.

Another tack that Israel’s apologists have taken is to quote selectively from official naval warfare manuals, such as the San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflict at Sea. As the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) points out on its web page dedicated to this Manual, “[t]he Manual is not a binding document. In view of the extent of uncertainty in the law, the experts decided that it was premature to embark on diplomatic negotiations to draft a treaty on the subject.” In other words, the Manual is what is known in law as a “restatement”, a helpful summary of generally accepted principles and commentary that does not, itself, have force of law.

While less patently ridiculous than the argument that Israeli law has any applicability on the high seas or the Gaza Strip, the naval warfare manuals are what is known in international humanitarian law as jus in bello, i.e., provisions applicable to how warfare is to be conducted. As such, they presume that warfare has already been found to be lawful in a specific case. This bootstrapping argument assumes a matter that must first be proven.

A blockade is, uncontroversially, an act of war. As such, it falls within the general prohibition on the use or threat of military force set forth in Art. 2(3) and (4) of the UN Charter:

3.  All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.

The UN Charter (Art. 51) provides one exception to this general prohibition, which is at the core of modern international law: “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”

Accordingly, acts of war are presumptively illegal. The burden to establish their legitimacy is always on the state asserting a right to use or threaten military force. In order to carry this burden, states must prove that they have exhausted peaceful means (or that no peaceful means are available).

Thus, the first question is: Is Israel under armed attack? The only thing that could potentially be considered an armed attack within the meaning of Art. 51 are the attacks with crude, homemade rockets emanating from Gaza, which have, between 2001 and 2008, altogether claimed fewer lives within Israel (16) than an average month’s traffic fatalities (37 based on 2008 figures).  Thus, for our purposes, Israel can be considered to be under armed attack, ineffectual as it is.

The next question is: Are peaceful means available? This, too, must be answered in the affirmative. One obvious option would be to end the occupation altogether, in compliance with UN Security Council Resolution 242 and decades of General Assembly resolutions near-unanimously (US, Israel, and the odd Pacific atoll opposed) affirming that Palestinians are entitled to full sovereignty over all territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and calling for a “just solution” to the refugee problem, based on the legal principle that refugees are entitled to return to their homes or seek compensation, at their option. In other words, the first peaceful means that should be considered is for Israel to cease defying international law and the consistently expressed demands of virtually the entire world.

Some may object at this point that this might be too much legality for the delicate, unwritten Israeli constitution. Are there any other peaceful options available to Israel – short of living up to all of its legal obligations – to achieve its stated aim of ending the rocket attacks?

Again, the answer is: Yes. Prior to the Israeli “Cast Lead” massacre of Winter 2008-2009, Hamas had agreed to a cease fire with Israel. Despite Israel’s refusal to observe the ceasefire (it kept the siege in place – an act of war), rocket attacks from Gaza all but stopped from 19 June 2008 (when the ceasefire took effect) until 4 Nov 2008, when Israel violated the ceasefire with a deadly attack deep inside the Gaza strip. Nonetheless, the elected Hamas government remained willing to offer Israel a ten-year ceasefire even after Israel had killed 1,400 overwhelmingly unarmed people and laid waste to the Gaza Strip in a month-long massacre.

In other words, far from exhausting peaceful means that have proven successful in the past, Israel has steadfastly refused to consider such means at all. Accordingly, Israel can claim no legal right to impose a blockade of any kind on the Gaza Strip, let alone one that specifically targets foodstuffs, school supplies, and materials desperately needed in order to repair the devastation wrought during Israel’s 2008-2009 rampage.

Because Israel can claim no legal right to impose a blockade on the Palestinians of Gaza, moreover, the US-backed Likud-Israel Beitenu regime in Israel (to use one of the preferred grammatical constructions of the Israel Project press releases) certainly cannot assert a right to enforce such a blockade on third parties. This is particularly true in light of Israel’s duty under Art. 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention to "facilitate [relief actions] by all the means at its disposal" and to "permit the free passage of [relief] consignments and [...] guarantee their protection," a duty, it is worth noting, that would apply even if Israel could lawfully impose a blockade.

Let us return, then, to the undisputed facts. In order to enforce a blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israeli special forces carried out a late-night raid on an unarmed, civilian humanitarian relief convoy in international waters that sought free passage to territory Israel occupies. It is alleged that those on board the Turkish Mavi Marmara resisted this armed attack using whatever materials were available (most of which can be found in any proper kitchen, tool shed, or garage in the world). Approximately sixteen passengers were killed by the Israeli attackers (though current press reports have reduced the figure – without explanation or comment – to nine), and the remainder were taken, by force, to Israeli territory and held there incommunicado.

As we have seen, Israel has no legal justification either for its blockade or for the attack on the Mavi Marmara, let alone for hijacking the convoy on the high seas (which constitutes an act of war against the countries whose flags the ships were flying).

But what of the alleged “lynching” of the armed Israeli special forces soldiers who boarded the Mavi Marmara? Leaving aside the patently offensive and absurd term, this act patently constitutes an armed attack – on a civilian vessel, no less – within the meaning of Art. 51 of the UN Charter. Because of the immediacy of the threat, Turkey (and, indeed, any NATO state under the "collective self-defence" variant in conjunction with Art. 5 of the North Atlantic Charter) would have been entitled to use proportionate force – e.g., by dispatching a warship – to defend the vessel. Barring that, those on board would have been entitled to respond to the Israeli attack using the same weapons that the Israeli troops carried.

In other words, even if we accept as fact the Israeli account of a “lynching” of soldiers who boarded a civilian vessel by force, all this would mean is that those on board the Mavi Marmara used substantially inferior means to ward off (unsuccessfully) an armed, illegal attack on their ship that killed their comrades.

In short, the official US-Israeli line does not hold up to even elementary scrutiny. The central claims either cannot be proven or are directly contradicted by the evidence adduced to “substantiate” them. One could be shocked by the contempt that these propagandists show for their intended audience (the media), if it were not so clearly justified.

They think Obama’s a socialist. They think climate change is a hoax. They think that Obama’s a Muslim, and that all Muslims are out to get us. A lot of them think the Earth was created sometime before last Tuesday by a magic invisible man who forgot to mention dinosaurs in his history of the universe. Some of them still think Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They believe that Obama is a foreign-born Manchurian candidate who wants government “death panels” to decide whether their great aunt gets the operation she needs. They can’t tell the difference between Hitler and the Soviet Union. And they think that all their problems are due to a combination of liberal “socialists”, immigrants, uppity women and minorities, and the Homosexual Agenda. In short, they believe a whole lot of stupid bullshit.

They see their salvation in multimillionaire con artists like Rush Limbaugh and soap opera melodramatist demagogues like Glenn Beck. And every time that the protofascist Sarah Palin says something that makes us long for the eloquence and erudition of George W. Bush, they applaud her even more for enduring the ridicule of the educated classes.

It’s hilarious stuff. Really priceless. But don’t laugh too long, because if the followers of Beck and Palin ever come into any real power, these will be the stormtroopers who burn down mosques and shops suspected of being Muslim-owned, who break the windows of GLBT community institutions and lynch those inside. They'll be the ones looting gynaecologists’ offices and that independent feminist bookstore you get your copy of Bitch from.

Ha, ha. How entertaining – and if it comes to pass, we will only have our own arrogance, laziness, and tactical stupidity to blame.

They are pissed off, and as much as many of us seem to regard anger as scary and uncouth (preferring, apparently, an attitude of detachment that borders on ennui) - they have every reason to be pissed off. Their jobs have disappeared, their wages have stagnated, their benefits have been plundered, their communities have been decimated, and their kids are probably going to be even worse off than they are. And the politicians, the Times, and the Post would have them believe they’re living in unparalleled prosperity.

They believe a lot of crazy, stupid shit. Of course they do – they wisely don’t trust the mainstream of the corporate media – and the only source they know of that even begins to acknowledge that they have a reason to be angry and scared are fundamentalist hustlers and far-right propaganda outlets like FOX News, Vdare, and talk radio. People are only as smart as the information they have access to. And who’s talking to them every day, empathising with their rage, and giving them a framework – loony as it may be – to understand it? Certainly not us. We laugh at their misspelt signs and bizarre theories, and feel so much smarter, whilst we abandon them to the tender mercies of the Beck-Limbaugh-Palin Gang.

A history lesson is in order here. The Nazis didn’t need a majority to come to power; they just had to make an electoral showing strong enough that the mainstream right had to govern with them in order to govern at all. Goebbels’ propaganda – diabolically brilliant though it was – didn’t achieve that result alone. He was aided by a “Social-Democratic” Party that had sold its working-class base down the river, a Communist Party that took its marching orders from Russians who had no understanding of German politics, and a left that ignored the countryside, preferring the safety of the cities, where they could preach to the choir. In this setting, Hitler,–who was bankrolled by rich industrialists and the deposed Hohenzollern nobility - could plagiarise Left issues and offer distorted versions of Left solutions – and win over the working class and the petite bourgeoisie as the only party that had not (yet) sold them out.

Every fascist success is also a Left failure.

What there is of a Left in the United States suffers from chronic amnesia. There is no real continuity between the struggles and organisations of one generation and the next. We start from scratch every time, and occasionally succumb to the illusion that a few good mass demonstrations and direct actions are all that is needed to have an effect on policy. We forget that there needs to be “someone operating the mimeograph machine”, as Noam Chomsky once put it, and that movement building means going to places where we’re currently absent, and talking to people who may not (at least initially) be happy to see us. These are lessons that the far right has learned. They have people going door to door, managing phone trees, and constantly talking to the people they’re looking to win over, strengthening the allegiances of the existing members and mining the prospects for new ones. They make sure that there isn’t a major issue of the day that people don’t hear their version of. Of course, they also have a bankroll fattened by the Scaifes, Coors, Schlaflys, and other sources of concentrated wealth with reactionary sympathies, a budget of which a real popular movement can only dream.

The Greek Left has passed down knowledge and insight from generation to generation - from the struggle against the Nazi occupation, to the struggle against the Allied-backed fascist-monarchist régime, to the struggle against modern state capitalism. Greece has a mass antiauthoritarian Left movement with real popular support (when the cops come after their demonstrators, people in the neighbourhood can be counted on to provide them with shelter).

We, on the other hand, have the Tea Party.

And a choice to make. Either we can continue to amuse ourselves with the latest idiotic sign or sublimely stupid claim, and chuckle to ourselves over the fact that these people have named themselves after the practise of dipping one's scrotum in another man's mouth, or we can start talking to the same people that they get their support from. Some of them are probably unreachable – dyed-in-the-wool, hardcore racists, fascists, and fundamentalists who won’t hear any argument, and who would be saying the same thing even if this society were run for the benefit of the working class and poor majority. Others are just there by default. How many of each there are is anyone’s guess, but if we are actually serious about creating a socially just, participatory society, we will not consider it an academic question.