Att: Hopelessly Stupid, Willfully Stupid or Free Gaza Supporter

...He said not allowing building materials into the Gaza Strip was causing serious economic damage because it led to the unemployment of thousands and the suspension of building projects

LOTL..
23 October '13..






From this week's ITIC newsletter (October 16 – 22, 2013):

After the Feast of the Sacrifice the Rafah crossing opened to pedestrian traffic but closed again shortly thereafter because of what was described as a computer problem. Ihab al-Ghussin, head of the Hamas administration's information bureau, complained about the frequent difficulties, calling them "feeble excuses," and saying that in his opinion it was deliberate [Egyptian] policy (Alresala.net website, October 20, 2013).

Jamal al-Khudari, head of the popular committee to lift the "siege" on the Gaza Strip, called for all the crossings to be opened and for every kind of commodity to enter the Gaza Strip freely, especially building materials. He said not allowing building materials into the Gaza Strip was causing serious economic damage because it led to the unemployment of thousands and the suspension of building projects (Filastin al-Yawm, October 20, 2013). As noted, following the discovery of Hamas' tunnel, whose construction involved the use of large quantities of concrete imported into the Gaza Strip. Therefore, the Coordinator for Government Activities in the Territories ordered the suspension of the delivery of building materials into the Gaza Strip through the Kerem Shalom crossing until the situation could be reevaluated. (empahsis added)

Free Gaza" Just Doesn't Cut It Anymore. Time For a New Antisemitic Slogan.

Lilac Sigan..
The Other Side of the Equation..
14 October '12..

Guess what? A new flotilla is on its way to Gaza, this time from Sweden. We come in peace, they say. The ship is now sailing with “activists” dressed up as conscious driven freedom fighters, that for some reason don’t see any reason to sail to the thousands being murdered in Syria these days, just a few miles away. So lets stop the costume party for a moment, examine the true facts, and strip these “activists” down to who they really are.

The Gaza border is open. Morsi, the new Egyptian president, has decided to embrace Hamas, the terrorist organization that rules Gaza, and the border between Egypt and Gaza has been open for months. Also, In the past year more than 1.2 million tons of goods have been transferred to Gaza through the secured border with Israel. all that remains closed is Gaza’s access to the sea, so as to prevent massive shipments of rockets to Hamas. Rockets which have continuously been fired on civilian Israeli cities in the past week, by the way.

Oh, have you not heard of these rockets? Sadly, I’m not very surprised. These things don’t get much coverage anymore, because it’s become a bit boring and happens almost every day. The rockets were the official Hamas response to the Israeli unilateral disengagement from Gaza six years ago. In other words: that’s what started happening when Gaza was actually freed.

Meet Free Gaza - tweets for terror and a world without Zionism

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
08 October '12..



The still ongoing controversy about Free Gaza’s propagation of antisemitic material has revealed the for me somewhat surprising fact that apparently quite a few of the group’s supporters seem to believe that Free Gaza is somehow dedicated to promoting peace and coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.

That is plainly not the case.

One of the most recent tweets from Free Gaza is a call to #NormalizeResistance. As I write, this hashtag seems to be primarily used to protest an invitation for Gilad Shalit by FC Barcelona, and the top tweet right now comes from an account set up under the name of Khader Adnan.

We know what Islamic Jihad member Khader Adnan means by “resistance” – and as it happens, Gaza’s rulers understand “resistance” in pretty much the same way.



It is precisely this kind of “resistance” advocated by Islamic Jihad and Hamas that has led to the “blockade” that Free Gaza opposes: Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, more than 8,000 rockets have been fired from there by the “resistance,” terrorizing about one million Israeli civilians who live within the range of these rockets.

So let’s see what Free Gaza has to say about the “resistance”:

Open Zion and +972 - Defending Free Gaza’s antisemitism

Petra Marquadt-Bigman..
The Warped Mirror..
06 October '12..

A few days ago, I noticed on my Twitter timeline some commotion about a tweet that had been posted by a group calling itself “Free Gaza Movement” – and it should go without saying that the group’s goal is NOT to free Gaza from the oppressive and abusive rule of Hamas… Instead, Free Gaza devotes itself single-mindedly to delegitimizing Israeli measures to prevent the smuggling of explosives, rockets and weapons into Gaza, and over the past few years, the group has been organizing “flotillas” to “to break the siege of Gaza.”

As with many so-called “pro-Palestinian” groups, this also means that Free Gaza spreads a lot of horror stories about Israel, Zionism and Jews. But the recent Free Gaza tweet that attracted so much attention was particularly blatant, asserting that “Zionists operated the concentration camps and helped murder millions of innocent Jews.” Anyone skeptical about this claim could click on a link to a video clip featuring a well-known antisemitic conspiracy theorist.

The details of this story and how it developed over the past few days have been documented by Avi Mayer; and by now, there have also been reports in the media about it. Most notably, the influential Walter Russell Mead devoted a long post to this incident, calling on Archbishop Desmond Tutu – who has endorsed Free Gaza – to withdraw his support of the group and to denounce Free Gaza’s propagation of “ugly filth of the lowest kind, gutter anti-Semitism mixed with genocidal rage.”

As I noted in a related post, Free Gaza reacted by offering various evasions and non-apologies. The group’s co-founder Greta Berlin, who was responsible for several of the antisemitic links provided by Free Gaza, claimed in a disingenuous “apology” posted on the Free Gaza website that this material “was shared to a group of people who were discussing the evils of propaganda and racism.”

Despite the fact that Free Gaza has a long record of posting antisemitic material, some people were all too eager to believe this transparently dishonest explanation. Writing on his +972 blog, Larry Derfner complained about “The slandering of Gaza flotilla activist Greta Berlin,” and on Peter Beinart’s Open Zion blog, Emily Hauser declared herself satisfied with Greta Berlin’s assurances that she was not a Holocaust denier and that, even though she hadn’t watched the video she propagated, she posted it as an example of “EXACTLY what I and others are horrified over.”

There is an ancient proverb I remember from school, which we were taught to illustrate the point that claiming innocent intentions doesn’t necessarily absolve a person of the serious consequences of an action: “though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.”

Implementing the US Neutrality Act to Prevent Support for Hamas

IMRA
26 February '11

On the Legal Front Lines: Implementing the US Neutrality Act to Prevent Support for Hamas


Leonard Hammer, PhD
Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center
10 Hata'as St. Ramat Gan, 52512 Israel
Phone: 972-3-7514175 | Fax: 972-3-7514174 info@israellawcenter.org
http://www.israellawcenter.org
http://israellawcenter.org/uploadimages/image/February%202011.pdf

Some organizations, such as the US based Free Gaza Movement, are actively working to generate support for additional flotillas to Gaza. Several new ones are being planned for this Spring. Non Governmental Organizations in the US for example are engaged in gathering people to take part in breaching the Israeli blockade of Gaza, sometimes even in a violent manner, and soliciting funding for these ventures from financial backers. The stated goal of the Free Gaza Movement, even goes so far as to call for hostile action against Israel as a means of breaching the blockade (stating for example that the Israeli authorities around Gaza be completely ignored).

It is worth considering whether such organizations are engaging in potentially illegal activity when leading the charge to create new flotillas. In particular, these organizations can be found to violate the US Neutrality Act.1 The Neutrality Act provides that:

Whoever, within the United States, knowingly begins or sets on foot or provides or prepares a means for or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition or enterprise to be carried on from thence against the territory or dominion of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people with whom the United States is at peace, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Thus, no “military expedition” to engage another state with which the US is at peace is allowed. The disallowed activity broadly includes as well financial backers supporting violent engagement or raising funds to support an expedition. In fact, the Neutrality Act maintains a universal jurisdiction clause, as it applies to all persons, regardless of their nationality, assuming the US has jurisdiction over the individual or group.

Response to Lauren Booth

Yaacov Lozowick
Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
27 August '10

(Doesn't get any better than this. Y.)

Lauren Booth is an anti-Zionist journalist based in London; people who follow such matters seem to think she's even worse than the rest of the pack. I mentioned her a while back, here.

This week she published a chirpy letter to the Israelis, in which, so she claims, she set aside her house chores in order to write us a personal letter. Oddly, she posted it on the website of an ex-Israeli who dislikes us intensely, the last place you'd expect if someone wishes to catch our attention and engage us in conversation; even curiouser, the website doesn't offer the possibility of leaving visible comments. So I'm sending them notice that I've responded, and perhaps they'll forward it to her; I encourage the rest of you to think where else Ms. Booth can be found and to leave her a message. She's made such an effort to reach out, it wouldn't be polite not to reciprocate.

Dear Ms. Booth,

I was touched by your concern for us as described in your "Mom to mom" letter of August 22 2010, in which you tried to inform us about all the bad things happening in our name. I'm a dad, not a mom, but I'll give a stab at reassuring you.

First thing, right up front: nothing's being done "in our name". Whatever it is, it's we who are doing it ourselves. I personally spent three years in the IDF as a young man, and another three over the following twenty-some as a reservist. About the time I was given a pen and retired from service, my first son was serving in the second Intifada, and last year my youngest fought in Gaza with his tank brigade. Ever since high-school I have been well informed about events, as is expected of a voter in a democracy. There's nothing particularly unusual about me, I'm a mainstream fellow with a standard story. For better or worse, what "Israel" does is done by the flesh and blood Israelis, not "in their names". Is this different in your country?

There is no need to carefully broach the matter of looting by IDF troops and nasty graffiti. We've been at war for a very long time, and bad things happen in war; we don't pretend otherwise. Innocent Palestinians have repeatedly died at our hands, which is far worse than looted credit cards, serious though that may be. So we can agree that innocent Palestinians have suffered at Israeli hands. They have. Some still do. Others will, as far into the future as the Palestinian nation refuses to accept the right of the Jewish nation to a homeland in part of the tiny little country they both call home.

(Read full letter)

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The Free Gaza Fraud

Anav Silverman
frontpagemag.com
08 July '10

For much of the world, 69-year-old Greta Berlin, spokesperson and co-founder of the Free Gaza Movement, is a hero. Berlin recently gained international attention for orchestrating the Gaza aid flotilla, calling Israel “a terrorist state” in interviews and articles.

Along with other leading members of her movement, mostly retired and well-to-do California-based women, Berlin has spewed anti-Israel hate rhetoric while simultaneously campaigning for the Palestinian cause.

According to The Guardian, Greta’s colleagues are from the generation who protested in the 1960s as part of the anti-Vietnam movement. The four leading activists, who led communications and legal activities during the flotilla operation, were grey-haired grandmothers and pensioners aged between 65 and 85.

Back in August 2007, two months after Hamas’s bloody military takeover of Gaza where Hamas killed off its political Fatah opponents, Berlin stated on Radio Free Europe (Aug. 13, 2007) that:

The world is busy starving the Palestinians of Gaza into submission, simply because they exercised their human right to vote democratically for the party they wanted in power. I find it obscene that, just because the US, Israel, the EU don’t like the party’s goals, they are suddenly called “terrorists.”

It is ironic that these self-professed humanitarians, with Greta Berlin in the lead, choose to side with and support Hamas, the radical Islamic terrorist organization that seeks to drastically limit the rights of Gazan women and eradicate any form of liberalism in the Gaza Strip.

(Read full article)

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Legal Scholars Weigh in on Gaza Blockade, Flotilla Deaths

Erik Schecter
Carneige Council
28 June '10

Nearly a month after its deadly naval raid on an aid flotilla, Israel refuses to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip.

Still, the government of Benjamin Netanyahu has loosened restrictions on the types of goods that may enter the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave. Likewise, it has set up a commission to examine the events of May 30-31. None of this, however, has squelched criticism of the Gaza blockade and the flotilla incident.

To recap, in late May, the Free Gaza Movement, a pro-Palestinian solidarity group, arranged for six ships loaded with humanitarian aid to breach the Israeli naval blockade. Anticipating arrival of this flotilla, the Israeli navy sailed out to the boats and warned them away from Gaza coastline, offering instead to have the cargo delivered to the territory via Israeli land terminals. However, the flotilla activists rejected the offer.

When the Free Gaza crew made it clear that they intended to run the blockade, Israeli navy commandos boarded the boats at night, in international waters, and subdued the passengers. This occurred, for the most part, without incident. However, on one ship, the MV Mavi Marmara, a large contingent of baton-wielding Turkish Islamist activists clashed with commandos, resulting in the deaths of nine passengers.

This bloody episode provoked a wave of outrage—and not just in the Muslim world. In the United States, conservative pundit Pat Buchanan denounced the Israeli naval action as "piracy," while progressive columnist Glenn Greenwald decried it as a "massacre." Meanwhile, a number of human rights groups reiterated their position that the blockade was a form of "collective punishment" and illegal.

Putting aside overheated rhetoric and pseudo-legal analyses, I asked a group of international law experts about the blockade of the Gaza Strip and the methods employed by Israel to enforce it. These are their answers:

(Read full article)

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Bald-faced lies by IHH

Elder of Ziyon
29 June '10

The IHH, the terrorist-supporting group that was primarily behind the violence on the Mavi Marmara, has released a glossy PDF file filled with lies about what happened on the flotilla. It doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny but the Free Gaza movement is publishing and disseminating it happily, because truth is apparently not a virtue to these virtuous "humanitarians."

I can't do a word-for-word fisking because the IHH did not save the file in such a way that the text can be copied, and optical character recognition is pretty much useless. But here are some lowlights:

"The sole aim of these ships was to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza and break the siege"

Well, that's two aims! And as we know from Free Gaza, humanitarian aid is used a cover for the political goal of delegitimizing Israel. In fact, the Mavi Marmara contained no humanitarian aid whatsoever.

The IHH claims that Israel blocked their communication to the Turksat satellite at 22:30 at the same time that the Israeli boats began to follow them. However, live broadcasts continued up until IDF soldiers boarded the ship, as the initial video of beating and stabbing Israeli soldiers was broadcast in real time.

IHH claims that two Israeli submarines were involved in the operation. This is the first I have heard that claim, and so far no evidence has been found to that effect. I am not sure what a submarine would accomplish, unless IHH is implying that Israel was ready to torpedo the boats.

(Read full post)

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Of course Free Gaza is not a humanitarian group

Elder of Ziyon
27 June '10

Barry Rubin, and some other blogs, have been talking about the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center's finding documents on the flotilla ships that indicate that Free Gaza's aims were not humanitarian, but political, and that they seemed to be instructing their members not to explicitly show that they are de facto supporters of Hamas in order to avoid apparent ties to terror.

The documents are almost certainly legitimate. Documents released by ITIC are, for all intents and purposes, the same as if the IDF sent them out. They work together and ITIC often publishes things before the IDF does, but it does not do so without at least the IDF's tacit approval.

The thing is that we don't need these documents to know Free Gaza's aims. Even though they are registered as a "humanitarian organization," in their own mailings they have made it very clear that they are not - and they say this explicitly on their own web site:

GOALS
There is a time when silence is complicity and inaction is unacceptable. Free Gaza is neither a "protest group" nor an aid agency. Our mission and our work are political. We are a Palestinian and international effort dedicated to the principle of non-violent direct action. We are engaged in active, civil resistance against the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestine, and the violence this occupation uses to sustain itself.

We do bring medicine, supplies, and doctors to besieged Gaza as we can, but this is utterly insufficient. Although humanitarian aid is very much needed, especially now in Gaza, focusing on humanitarian efforts alone is a form of complicity in Israel's malevolent quest to destroy the Palestinian people.

They have said, in an email to their supporters, that they are against humanitarian aid!

(Read full post)

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Documents of the Free Gaza movement seized in the recent flotilla

Inside documents of the Free Gaza movement seized in the recent flotilla expose considerable discrepancies between its strategy and tactics and its public stance. The documents prove, among other things, the attempts to conceal the aid to the Hamas administration since Hamas is designated as a terrorist organization in the US.

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
27 June '10

1. Established in 2006, the Free Gaza movement (hereinafter: Free Gaza) is a pro-Palestinian/pro-Hamas group whose stated purpose is to “break the siege” imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip following the Hamas takeover. Free Gaza is registered in Cyprus as a human rights project and is headquartered in Nicosia. Its website says that Free Gaza has branches in 28 countries, including 11 in Europe, 5 in North America (4 in the US and one in Canada), and a branch in Israel (referred to on the movement's website as “Palestine 1948 territories”). The organizational framework of Free Gaza also includes the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which also took part in the latest flotilla.

2. Free Gaza played an important role in the coalition of organizations which orchestrated the latest flotilla, even though the dominant force was the Turkish IHH. Free Gaza started sending aid flotillas to the Gaza Strip in 2008. Prior to the latest flotilla, Free Gaza was able to send four other aid flotillas to the Gaza Strip:

a. August 2008: two ships departed from Cyprus and arrived at the port of Gaza on August 23 (BBC, August 23, 2008).

b. October 2008: a yacht named Dignity with 26 activists and medical supplies on board arrived in Gaza on October 29 (JTA, October 29, 2008).

c. December 2008: the same yacht, Dignity, with about 3 tons of medical supplies, attempted to penetrate the waters of Gaza but was stopped by the Israeli navy (ynet, December 30, 2008).

d. June 2009: a ship called Spirit of Humanity, which attempted to reach Gaza on June 30, was stopped by the Israeli navy near the Gaza port (Jerusalem Post, June 29, 2009).

(Read full report)

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Flotilla 2: Where is Mariam?

Elder of Ziyon
25 June '10

I believe the Free Gaza movement deliberately tries to add confusion to their next Gaza mission. Either to try to mislead the Israeli authorities, or to hide the fact that they cannot find or afford a bigger ship and/or volunteers to go on these ships.

While searching the web for traces of a ship called Maryam, I encountered this article which sheds some light on the possible plans of the next Flotilla:

The voyage has been encumbered by bureaucratic and political obstacles from the start. UN resolution 1701 bars any attempts to enter Israeli territory directly from Lebanon, so Lebanon’s minister of transportation has only given permission to a French-registered ship, the Julia, to embark for Cyprus. But authorities in Nicosia have barred the ship from entering Cypriot waters, so the vessel – to be renamed the Naji al Ali after a famed Palestinian cartoonist – is expected to leave for Cyprus but change course for the Gaza Strip.

The organisers of the endeavour said they had been authorised to depart Lebanon immediately, but they were unwilling to announce the exact time of the departure, apparently in the hope of confusing the Israeli military about their intentions.
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The exact time of the ship’s departure was not the only secret yesterday. Organisers of a group of women activists led by the wife of a former Lebanese general once held in an Israeli jail, Ali al Hajj, said they would be leaving Lebanon in a ship named the Mariam. This group claims it will have more than 50 women aboard, but it was not immediately clear that the ship even exists.

(Read full post)

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