Thoughts and Facts on the Gaza Flotilla II

Barry Rubin

A second flotilla of ships is going to the Gaza Strip. Or should I say, trying to go there since it will be stopped if necessary by a legal Israeli blockade. In the first flotilla, the Islamist holy warriors organized by the Turkish government-backed IHH group all gathered on one ship. The other boats, the ships of (political) tools cooperated, no one was injured, and they were towed into port. The ship of jihadists attacked Israeli soldiers, kidnapped and beat up a couple of them, and had the "victory" of getting nine martyrs out of it. Let us never forget that when the Israeli Defense Forces made public a video showing these facts the New York Times blog in a particularly shameful moment dismissed it alleging that the soldiers might have been shooting down unarmed civilians just standing around the deck before the film began. (Thus posing the twenty-first century journalistic question: Who are you going to believe, the facts and your eyes or your predetermined ideological bias?)

Now, of course, any actual humanitarian aid could be taken into the Gaza Strip through Egypt, showing that this is a purely political operation designed to end all sanctions on the Gaza Strip so that weapons, money, terrorists, and all necessary equipment can flow in freely. In addition, the goal is to undermine international support for Israel. This time there's also a different strategy for the flotilla itself. The would-be terrorists have dispersed themselves among the naive "peace activists". According to reliable information, some of the Islamist participants have spoken in conversation of their desire to kill Israeli soldiers. Some are also equipped with sulfuric acid to throw at Israel soldiers. We will see which of these scenarios take place.

A number of the organizing groups are fronts for Hamas and Muslim Brotherhood, raising money and political support for these organizations and often controlled by them. In other words, revolutionary Islamists are using Western pacifists and leftists to achieve their own ends. It isn’t clear whether Lenin invented the phrase “useful idiots” but it is useful nonetheless.