Martyrs on holiday - a nice cruise in the Med
Piers Akerman
Daily Telegraph
Friday, June 04, 2010
SPARE me the pathetic preaching of the pro-Palestinian “peace activists” and their Western propagandists. It is now obvious that the goal of a number of those stupid enough to attempt to breach the Israeli blockade was martyrdom not the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
In the previous 24 hours, the wife of Ali Haydar Bengi, one of the nine killed when they confronted Israeli commandos boarding the MV Mavi Marmara, said he “constantly prayed to become a martyr”, according to a report in The Times of London. A friend of Bengi’s, Sabir Ceylan, confirmed this, saying that “before embarking on the journey, he said he desired to become a martyr”.
One of the late Mr Bengi’s shipmates aboard the Turkish-flagged ship was the one-armed Amin Abou Rashed. He was formerly a Palestinian national but is now the happy owner of a Dutch passport.
Mr Rashed is known to be a senior official in the Hamas terrorist organisation.
He is also listed on the official website of the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement for international Islamic domination as one of the organisers of the martyrs’ “Let’s Go to Gaza” cruise.
The so-called Free Gaza Movement, another of the organisers of this ill-fated cruise, has its roots in the International Solidarity Movement. This is yet another radical pro-Palestinian organisation that advocates what is euphemistically known as “direct action” in support of its destructive goals.
In 2003, the late American ISM activist Rachel Corrie - a foe of both Israel and her own homeland - applied a form of direct action when she misguidedly decided to kneel directly in front of an armoured Israeli bulldozer.
The bulldozer was engaged in searches for hidden tunnels at the time. Sadly for Corrie, she placed herself in a position where she could not be seen by the Caterpillar’s operator.
She is remembered today for the futility of her gesture.
Greta Berlin, the group’s 69-year-old co-founder and spokeswoman, agrees with Hamas that Israel has no right to exist.
However, she justifies her view as being part of a larger philosophy that is opposed to all national borders.
While there have been the usual raging anti-Israel demonstrations staged by Islamist sympathisers here and elsewhere, their case has been totally undermined by the videos now circulating.
These show activists aboard the Turkish-flagged Marmara chanting radical Islamic slogans before the clash. The circulation of those videos has done a great deal to take the sting out of this story for open-minded viewers.
We Con the World “Abadone Reason” via Atlas Shrugs
Dr Abd Al-Fatah Shayyeq Naaman, a lecturer in Shariah law at a university in Yemen, also indicated that the Islamist violence was premeditated.
He told an interviewer: “The [Gaza] flotilla commander said: ‘We will not allow the Zionists to get near us and we will use resistance against them. They will resist with their fingernails. They are people who seek martyrdom for Allah, as much as they want to reach Gaza, but the first [martyrdom] is more desirable.” In Western cultures, there is a saying: “Be careful what you wish for.”
But when you belong to an insane Islamist death cult that worships martyrdom and preaches it to kindergarten-aged children, as the Palestinian Authority does through its bizarre television network, wishing for death is seen as a rewarding pursuit.
It was interesting to watch the angst-ridden faces of Western newsreaders conveying urgent updates on the fate of the useful idiots who lent their presence to this terrorist-sponsored cruise of the Mediterranean. It was dramatically apparent that these talking heads had no idea at all that the blockade on the importation of weapons and certain dual-use items into the Gaza Strip is imposed by both Israel and Egypt.
Among this concerned crowd, it doesn’t seem to have sunk in yet that there have been no reports of riots outside Egyptian embassies.
Nor do the public hand-wringers seem to understand that Israel has permitted about 2000 tonnes of humanitarian goods per day to flow into Gaza, along with access to medical care, power, and funds for the army of NGOs and the salaries of those working for the Palestinian Authority.
The flotilla was carrying the equivalent of five days’ supply of goods. In return, more than 1000 rockets, smuggled in through tunnels from Egypt, were launched from the Gaza Strip by Hamas at Israel where the targeted population is commonly given just a 45-second warning to seek shelter. The pro-Palestinian lobby is working overtime to tug at the heartstrings of the guilt-ridden middle classes to suggest that the blockade is creating critical shortages of food in Gaza. But just last week Financial Times reporter Tobias Buck wrote from Rafah that the volumes conveyed through tunnel smuggling are such that: “[The] prices of many smuggled goods have fallen in recent months, thanks to a supply glut that is on striking displays across the [Gaza] Strip.”
The tunnel smuggling, he wrote, had “become so efficient that shops all over Gaza are bursting with goods. Branded products such as Coca-Cola, Nescafe, Snickers [chocolate bars] and Heinz ketchup - long absent as a result of the Israeli blockade - are both cheap and widely available.”
No doubt the merchants were further outraged by the efforts of the “peace” flotilla to further undercut the prices in the souk. Before and during their provocative cruise, the Islamist flotilla organisers were offered the opportunity to offload their cargo in the port of Ashdod and hand it over to the UN for delivery to Gaza.
While this would have ensured the cargo reached its destination safely and expeditiously, it would not have helped those who were seeking martyrdom.
It would also have relieved them of the dozens of knives, Molotov cocktails, detonators, metal pipes, clubs, slingshots and stones, large hammers, wrenches, sharp metal objects, gas masks and bullet proof vests that were later found - hardly the kind of equipment usually associated with charity workers.
Peeling away the layers of disinformation disseminated by the Leftist-media, there seems little dispute that the Israeli and Egyptian blockade has been largely successful. The popularity of the leadership of Hamas has fallen behind that of the Palestinian Authority and Fatah in the West Bank.
It is impossible to see how Hamas can be regarded as anything but a barbaric terrorist organisation while it maintains its core belief that the independent state of Israel must be destroyed.
In Western culture, all loss of life is regrettable.
However, it is clear that the organisers of this week’s voyage to disaster are now intending to attempt to further provoke the Israelis with another futile exercise in blockade-running in the next day or so - and possibly earn more martyrs a speedy pathway to paradise.
While ever there exist cults that prefer death to life, there will be dupes willing to buy one-way tickets to oblivion.
