Child smuggling food into the Warsaw Ghetto

Child smuggling food into Gaza

We hoped the world would never forget. How tragic that it is Israel that has forgotten most completely.

This extraordinary passage is from the State Department’s Daily Brieifng yesterday:

QUESTION: Mr. Crowley, it is the Israeli’s actions that need to be investigated. So how can Israel, too ?” best investigation ?” why is the United States opposed to UN investigation?

MR. CROWLEY: As we’ve said, we are completely supportive of an impartial investigation that helps us understand what happens ?” what happened on these ships, and more importantly, working collectively, how we can meet our common objectives of increasing the international support for the people of Gaza, and at the same time, supporting Israel with its legitimate security concerns.

We believe that Israel is in the best position to lead this investigation. But as the Secretary said yesterday, this has to be credible. The international community will be watching this very closely as it unfolds. We want to see this done in a way that meets international standards. We’ll be talking to Israel about how best to accomplish this. We’ll be talking to other countries that may want to play a role in this. And as we ?” as the Secretary said, we are open to ways of making this as credible as possible, including international participation. And that is our view.

QUESTION: Why ?” I think his question, though, was essentially why? And can you explain why Israel is in the best position to lead the investigation (inaudible)?

MR. CROWLEY: Israel is a vibrant democracy. It has effective, competent institutions of government, and Israel is fully capable of investigating a matter that involved its forces. And so can Israel conduct a fair, transparent, credible investigation? The answer is yes.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2010/06/142591.htm

At the UN Human Rights Council, the USA was joined by only Italy and the Netherlands in voting against a motion condemning the murderous Israeli attack in international waters. (The UK abstained on the pathetic grounds that we should await the outcome of the independent investigation, in the full knowledge that there will be no independent investigation).

Berlsconi’s support for the US and Israel is no surprise, but the Netherlands deserves remark. It has gone on a remarkable journey in the last decade, from a liberal society to one as poisoned with fascism as their Flemish neighbours.

http://www.economist.com/node/16264970

Today I link to something that I did not enjoy reading, just to illustrate a point. It is a truly poor article by one Niles Gardiner in the Telegraph.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100041748/the-world-demonises-israel-once-again/

I point out merely in passing that the first few hundred overwhelmingly negative comments were deleted by the Telegraph. But the real reason I link is the significance of the strapline:

He appears frequently on American and British television and radio, including Fox News Channel, CNN, BBC, Sky News, and NPR.

I bet he does. He has no international diplomatic experience, no knowledge of international law and very little experience of the hotspots of the world. But he is fully armed with the set of opinions those news outlets want their readers to hear.

Absolutely anybody can write this rubbish. Just string these elements together:

Poor little Israel. Threatened from all sides. Nazi Germany. Islamic terrorism. Hamas. Anti-semitism. Brutal Jihadists. Self defence. The right to return. Only democracy in the Middle East. Self defence. Iranian President threat to wipe off map. 8,000 Hamas rockets. Alliance of liberals, commies and islamists. 9/11. Chopping off hands. Subjugation of women. Taliban. Clash of civilisations. Existential threat. Self defence.

I could churn this stuff out easily and be on Fox, Sky and BBC as often as I like. I could pick up a fat salary like Nick Cohen for a weekly column of this stuff, and pocket the Rupert Murdoch TV fees as an extra. I could sit in a think tank. I would certainly be a great deal more qualified, and a great deal more convincing, than Niles pisspoor Gardiner. I write a lot better too.

But then I am handicapped by morality.

Which reminds me. Having followed the media coverage of the Israeli action very carefully, have you noticed what seems a complete absence on TV of bona fide experts in maritime law?

Normally live news brings in “experts” at the drop of a hat to fill in the 24/7 broadcasting, but despite the fact that professors of international law specialising in the law of the sea are not exactly hard to find, no TV station has asked one about the legality of the Israeli action.

That is because the martime law community is unanimous that the Israeli action is illegal.

Of all the defences of Israel killing unarmed Turkish protestors – the majority of them shot in the back, four in the back of the head execution style – Nick Cohen’s ramble must be the least coherent by a very highly paid hack.

As far as I can make any sense at all of his nine pint muddle, it relies chiefly on his usual contention that anti-semitism and anti-zionism are the same thing, plus the idea that anybody who opposes Israeli brutality, supports Islamic extremism.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/06/israel-gaza-blockade

He manages to get in a side swipe at those of us wise enough to oppose the war in Iraq.

Why is he paid for this nonsense?

The Rachel Corrie has now been illegally boarded by the Israeli military in international waters.

As usual the BBC’s immediate reaction is simply to retail Israeli propaganda. The Rachel Corrie has been boarded “with the full compliance of the crew”, BBC News tells us. That is almost certainly not true, unless you count without violent resistance as “full compliance”.

If that were true, you might wonder why Israel had jammed – again contrary to maritime law – all the Rachel Corrie’s communications with the outside world, and why they are still jammed. The BBC did not mention that.

The organisers have just posted this:

“For the second time in less then a week, Israeli naval commandos stormed an unarmed aid ship, brutally taking its passengers hostage and towing the ship toward Ashdod port in Southern Israel.”

http://www.freegaza.org/

But the BBC is much more concerned to help ensure that the Israeli version has unquestioned domination of the initial news.

Sometimes I come across bloggers who are much better than me. This is one of those times.

This is an absolutely brilliant post from emptywheel. The argument is this. Israel claims its standoff with Hamas is the equivalent to an armed conflict in international law, entitling it to take naval action on the high seas. Equally, the US claims its “War on Terror” is equivalent to a formal armed conflict, justifying its extra judicial killings particularly by aerial drone.

http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2010/06/04/the-us-is-defending-not-just-its-closest-ally-in-israeli-raid-but-also-approach-to-war/

This US argument has just been comprehensively rejected by the United Nations in a comprehensive legal report issued this week.

Read the emptywheel piece, and then consider this from the Washington Post:

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values President Obama released last week.

One advantage of using “secret” forces for such missions is that they rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed “things that the previous administration did not.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/06/03/AR2010060304965.html

Statcounter has been throwing up some very curious statistics in the last few days. A large number of individuals are coming to the site and staying on it for perhaps four or five hours, hopping exclusively between recent articles about the Gaza convoy. Strangely, all the users with that profile use Firefox not IE, and if they come via a search engine usually arrive on the site via a Yahoo search not a google search.

Download file

Now this is from a significant sample – 500 – and the sample changes in real time, but Firefox has been ahead all the time for the last three days. I have never before seen Firefox even come close to overtake IE among readers of this blog in the five years it has been running – which makes sense if you consider IE has a three times larger market share.

http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0&qpaf=-000%09101%09US%0D&qptimeframe=M&qpsp=136&sample=28

I don’t think I have seen yahoo overtake google before in terms of search engine used to find us either.

All of which leads me to think that for two days we have been targeted by a substantial group of people using standard issue software. We have also been under continual spam attack – there were over 10,000 items of apparently random spam removed yesterday.

“The Zionist Federation together with the English Defence League demonstrated opposite the Israeli embassy in support of the Israeli Defence Force action against the Gaza aid flotilla”

http://www.demotix.com/news/346651/zionists-support-flotilla-attack

Whatever its initial aspirations, the State of Israel has become a vicious racist entity. As you can see by its friends.

Commenters may wish to dig around on this one. Just how precise a correlation is there between media supporters of the illegal invasion of Iraq, and media supporters of the illegal attack on the Gaza convoy?

Take both old and new media into account. I think you will find the correlation is approaching 100% – and is a much higher correlation in the media than among politicians.

Now how do you explain this?

Discuss

The Free Gaza movement has just announced that they are sending their ship, the Rachel Corrie, to a port to have a check up in view of apparent Israeli sabotage of some other freedom flotilla ships even ahead of the murderous attacks.

So we are going to make sure the Rachel Corrie is well protected and that Israel is put on notice that anything that happens to her, the passengers and the crew will rest with Israel. As a result of these threats, we’re going to pull Rachel Corrie into a port, add more high-profile people on board, and insist that journalists from around the world also come with us.

http://www.freegaza.org/

I do hope that by well protected they mean physically. Boarding a moving ship from boat or helicopter is not easy, and can be made almost impossible with imaginative deployment of purely defensive measures like razor wire around the rails and razor wire interspersed with sharp metal spikes on open decks.

Interestingly the Free Gaza website is still referring to the Mavi Marmar as Turkish fflagged.

Contrary to virtually all media reports to date, it appears the Mavi Marmara was reflagged from Turkey to the Comoros Islands around 20 May, shortly before heading the peace flotilla.

This is very important. While the Israeli attack remains illegal, it means that the injured party – and the party with legal jurisdiction over the event – is the incapable Comoros Islands rather than the highly capable Turkey. It also greatly reduces the NATO angle, unless other attacked ships were flying the Turkish flag.

But the question must be why on earth was the flag changed just before sailing, and who instigated it?

Flags of convenience are normally adopted for purely commercial reasons to escape regulations of s “serious” flag state like the UK or US, in particular on issues like rates of pay, union recognition, working conditions and hours etc. The Turkish owned merchant fleet uses flags of convenience much less than other advance nations – possibly from national pride, possibly because Turkish regulations are not too onerous anyway.

But it would seem remarkable if the owners of the ship decided for commercial reasons to switch flags just before sailing in the “Peace flotilla”. It is on the face of it a remarkably foolish decision. Did the Turkish governrnent influence it to lessen the political responsibility of Turkey in any incident? Did Israel manage to influence the owners in any way? Is the vessel leased? Who are the owners, and just why did they do this?

None of this masks the illegality of Israel attacking a ship under any foregin flag in international waters. But bluntly, it was a stupid decision in practice by the protestors to set sail in a Comoros flagged ship.

Fortunately the MV Rachel Corrie is Irish registered, and the flag state (Ireland) has already shown it takes its duty seriously by telling the Israeli government it expects the Rachel Corrie to pass unhindered.

And here’s one I made earlier….

http://www.politicaltheatrics.net/2010/06/the-gaza-flotilla-how-israel%E2%80%99s-ministry-of-foreign-affairs-fakes-photos-of-seized-weapons/

Every comments thread on every internet site on the world which has discussed the Israeli naval murders, has been inundated by organised ZIonist commenters stating that the Israeli action was legal under the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.

They ignore those parts of San Remo that specifically state that it is illegal to enforce a general blockade on an entire population. But even apart from that, San Remo simply does not apply.

The manual relates specifically to legal practice in time of war. With whom is Israel at war?

There is no war.

Israeli apologists have gone on to say they are in a state of armed conflict with Gaza.

Really? In that case, why do we continually hear Israeli complaints about rockets fired from Gaza into Israel? If it is the formal Israeli position that it is in a state of armed conflict with Gaza, then Gaza has every right to attack Israel with rockets.

But in fact, plainly to the whole world, the nature and frequency of Israeli complaints about rocket attacks gives evidence that Israel does not in fact believe that a situation of armed conflict exists.

Secondly, if Israel wishes to claim it is in a state of armed conflict with Gaza, then it must treat all of its Gazan prisoners as prisoners of war entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention. If you are in a formal state of armed conflict, you cannot categorise your opponents as terrorists.

But again, it is plain for the world to see from its treatment and description of Gazan prisoners that it does not consider itself to be in a formal position of armed conflict.

Israel is seeking to pick and choose which bits of law applicable to armed conflict it applies, by accepting or not accepting it is in armed conflcit depending on the expediency of the moment.

I have consistently denounced Hamas rocket attacks into Israel. I have categorised them as terrorism. If Israel wishes now to declare it is in armed conflcit with Gaza, I withdraw my opposition and indeed would urge Hamas to step up such attacks to the maximum.

Does Israel really wish to justify its latest action by declaring it is at war with Gaza? That is what the invocation of San Remo amounts to.

Craig Murray is a former British Ambassador. He is also a former Head of the Maritime Section of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He negotiated the UK’s current maritime boundaries with Ireland, Denmark (Faeroes), Belgium and France, and boundaries of the Channel Islands, Turks and Caicos and British Virgin Islands. He was alternate Head of the UK Delegation to the UN Preparatory Commission on the Law of the Sea. He was Head of the FCO Section of the Embargo Surveillance Centre, enforcing sanctions on Iraq, and directly responsible for clearance of Royal Navy boarding operations in the Persian Gulf.

Reviews of Craig Murray’s War on Terror Memoir, “Murder in Samarkand” – published in the US as “Dirty Diplomacy”:

“A fearless book by a fearless man. Craig Murray tells the truth whether the “authorities” like it or not. I salute a man of integrity” – Harold Pinter