Let’s All Just Blame Israel…For Everything

Well it’s been a while since my last posting, but that’s because I’ve been off on vacation.  Never fear I’m back now and ready to once again bring some interesting food for thought on contemporary issues.

Today’s  topic of discussion is the recent fallout over the Israeli navy’s bungling of an attempted inspection of a foreign “aid” flotilla that was on its way to the Gaza strip.  An astute reader will note that I placed in quotation marks and the reason is that I hesitate to even call the flotilla’s purpose as that of aid.  As readily available footage shows the story Israel is telling the world is nothing but the truth.  Immediately upon boarding the ships Israeli soldiers are attacked showing the “peaceful” protesters to clearly be anything but.  Plenty of links to the video can be found on You Tube such as this one which demonstrates what the peaceful protesters were actually like.

Now I am well aware of the vagaries of international law on Israel’s right to enforce such a blockade as the one in place on Gaza in the international waters in which the incident took place and have no wish to debate these finer points of international law.  Rather, I would like to focus on the media response and the mass condemnation of the Israelis by media and governments worldwide.  Obviously the optics of this situation is rather grim for Israel.  Regardless of whether or not the soldiers where provoked it’s tough to imagine that Israel could have thought that its actions would play out well on the world stage. 

From a media relations viewpoint the Israeli security forces probably never should have been there in the first place, but from the perspective of security it seems that they navy had little choice but to act.  The flotilla was organized with the specific purpose of running the Israeli blockade and had made no bones about it.   The incident was driven to its ugly conclusion by confrontational internationals whose real motivation for being there seems to be to provoke confrontation. Let’s keep in mind that all but one ship complied with the Israeli navy’s demands to allow them to inspect the ships.

The problem as I see it is just how fast the calls for condemnation of Israel came out.  Before Israel could even begin to defend itself stellar humanitarian nations such as Turkey where already out for blood.  If that isn’t a case of the pot calling the kettle black I don’t know what is… But setting that aside for now it is amazing that people, and media people especially, have done so little investigative legwork of their own on this issue. One look at the videos available shows that condemning Israel’s use of force in this case is simple naivety.  As Steve Janke wrote over on his excellent blog Angry in the Great White North “After watching that video, I have to ask why so few of the violent protesters were hurt and killed.  These are soldiers, not civilian police officers, yet in most cities, coming at a police officer swinging a metal pipe earns you a fatal body shot.  So why would these soldiers have shown more restraint than civilian police officers?”  Couldn’t have said it better myself so I won’t.

Signing off:

Your Fro with the Know.

Tim