Miao on the Mavi Marmara

The UN Palmer Committee Report

2011-09-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

A document purporting to be the Palmer Committee report is here. I have not yet had time to read the entire thing, so I'll save my comments until I can do so.

UN Investigation into the Mavi Marmara/Flotilla Fiasco

2011-07-07T06:18:00.000-07:00

Ban Ki Moon established a UN investigation into the Mavi Marmara/flotilla fiasco that both Israel and Turkey agreed to participate in. Ban Ki Moon seems to have done this because he knew that nothing that came out of the UNHRC would be credible. He was right.

The UN investigative committee was led by Geoffrey Palmer, former Prime Minister of New Zealand and an expert in international maritime law. Other panel members were from Colombia, Israel and Turkey.

Their final report has not been made public and it unclear whether it ever will be. I hope that is not the case; it would render the investigation pointless and leave standing as the only offiicial UN document on the fiasco the ridiculous and farcical UNHRC report. Of course Turkey was thrilled with the UNHRC's conclusion that Israel was entirely at fault. But all indications are that Turkey is not too happy with the Palmer panel's final product.

It appears that the Palmer panel draws the following conclusions:

- the Turkel Commission investigation was professional, independent, and unbiased;

- the Turkish investigation was politically influenced, and its work was not independent or unbiased;

- Israel's sea blockade of Gaza is legal and in accordance with international maritime law;

- the IHH acted irresponsibly, and is linked to the Turkish government who did not do enough to stop it;

- Israel does not owe Turkey an apology;

- based on testimony by flotilla passengers, Israel employed excessive force but did so in self-defense.

Israel is not pleased with this last conclusion. I am eager to see the evidence upon which it is based. As I've made clear in previous posts, I do not think that any of the flotilla participants are credible on this subject. They are proven liars whose agenda is the delegitimization of Israel.

Turkel Commission Report on the Mavi Marmara Flotilla

2011-07-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

This post is long overdue since Israel's Turkel Commission issued and made public its report into last year's Mavi Marmara/flotilla fiasco many months ago.

The commission constituted Israel's official investigation; unprecedented for a liberal democracy was the inclusion of foreign observers: Nobel Peace Laureate Lord David Trimble of the UK and Brigadier General (Ret.) Kenneth Watkin, Q.C. of Canada. Watkin is a former Judge Advocate General for the Canadian Armed Forces.

The full text of the report is here. It's a slow download - the report is more than 300 pages.

Within its pages are a detailed analysis of international maritime law concerning sea blockades and their enforcement, with reference to many precedents to put the Gaza blockade into context. I highly recommend this to anyone who is genuinely interested in the legality of Israel's sea blockade of Gaza.

The Turkel Commission found that Israel's sea blockade of Gaza is legal, as is its means of enforcement.

The Commission also found that the IDF acted lawfully in its interdiction of the Mavi Marmara. One of their findings intrigued me, because it confirmed one of the conclusions I drew: the IHH set out to abduct IDF commandos. Testimony of IDF participants who were among the first group of commandos indicates that there were failed attempts to either throw over the side or shove down a ladder hole at least 3 commandos in addition to the 3 abducted. The report is worth the read for the IDF commandos' testimony alone.

Updates to The IHH - Islamist Hostage-takers disguised as Humanitarians

2010-12-20T07:52:00.000-08:00

I've added several new photographs and modified some of my earlier interpretations in this post. See it here.

"The Guerrilla Flotilla"

2010-10-20T20:37:00.000-07:00

A brilliant piece by Trevor Norwitz that sums up the major flaws in the UNHRC Flotilla report, among other things, and does so with a dash of humor. I've added some photographs and inserted comments.

One of the most troubling manifestations of Lawfare today is the increasing abuse of the instruments of international law, specifically to delegitimize and demonize one country (Israel) and to embarrass and weaken another (America).

I thought I would talk today about the latest contribution of the United Nations “Human Rights” Council to this phenomenon, namely its report on what might be called the Guerilla Flotilla (or, if you prefer, the Intifada Armada) which as you probably know was submitted to and accepted by that august body just a few days ago. After that, I’d like to offer a few general thoughts on the topic of Lawfare.

The Flotilla Report is the “Son of Goldstone.” Cut from the same cloth, it is a political manifesto masquerading as a fact-finding report. The main difference (aside from its scope) is that it does not bear the name of a prominent Jew and self-styled “Zionist” and so it is easier to just treat like all the other anti-Israel detritus that has come out of the UN over the years.

It is not surprising that the Flotilla Report looks, feels and smells just like the Goldstone Report given its genesis. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal specifically called for the HRC to commission “another Goldstone Report.” After all, Goldstone excoriated Israel and exonerated Hamas (contrary to how many in the press have chosen to characterize it). Needless to say, Hamas -- along with Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, Iran and all those other champions of human rights around the world -- are simply thrilled with the results of this mission as well. They could not have written it better themselves.

The creation of a document like this, however preposterous it may be, is a perfect example of Lawfare in action: a massive public relations coup (”UN Flotilla” gets you 3 million Google hits in 0.11 seconds) and a precedent that can be used not only against Israel but against the US and other countries when they try to tackle asymmetrical threats in the future.

The most important thing to understand about the Flotilla Report is that it is a political document hinging almost entirely on the commissioners’ subjective determination of proportionality. Its essential finding is that, since the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza was itself disproportional -- that is, it inflicts disproportionate damage on the civilian population of Gaza in relation to the military advantage sought by Israel -- it was illegal per se, so the boarding of the ships was illegal, justifying virtually everything the activists on the ships did to “protect” themselves and their ship and negating the legitimacy of almost anything the Israelis did. [1]

This essential finding from which the Report’s other findings all flow shows up in one conclusory paragraph: “[T]he Mission is satisfied that the blockade was inflicting disproportionate damage upon the civilian population in the Gaza strip and that as such the interception could not be justified and therefore has to be considered illegal.” (53) In the entire 56-page Report there is hardly any discussion or justification for this key finding of disproportionality. And there is no discussion whatsoever on Israel’s reasons for the blockade -- one of the two elements of the proportionality analysis -- beyond the observation (in one of the final paragraphs) that “Israel seeks to justify the blockade on security grounds” (263). [2]

[Odd that, no? No mention of thousands of rockets and mortars being fired from Gaza into southern Israel. Not a word about the longer range Grad rockets fired from Gaza into Ashkelon. PMiao]

It should be noted that the Mission did determine that the primary objective of the flotilla was not in fact humanitarian but political, namely to break the blockade (80), and also acknowledged that Israel had offered to itself deliver all of the humanitarian supplies the ships were carrying. But somehow -- inexplicably -- they still found the blockade disproportional and therefore illegal.

[But rather than conclude that because their primary objective was political the flotillistas did not have the protections granted humanitarians in international law, the Mission contorted itself into concluding that people who are political activists but whose goals are to bring about political changes that will serve humanitarian causes should be granted the same protections as humanitarians. Do they have any clue what a nightmare that would be for, say, police attempting to contain the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators, who often have violent provocateurs in their midst, at G20 meetings? Or is this yet another one of those great UN findings that applies only to Israel? PMiao]

To give you a sense of the mindset of the authors of this masterpiece of fictional jurisprudence, one of the comissioners, British lawyer Da Silva, commented that “even if Bin Laden himself were on the Mavi Maramara, Israel’s blockade would still be illegal.” The Goldstone and Flotilla Reports share many of the same fundamental flaws. I have time to cite just a few:

1. Both missions were born in sin, the illegitimate offspring of politics and prejudice. They were commissioned by the much same cast of characters, including many of the rogue nations who dominate the “Human Rights” Council. In both cases they were authorized by resolutions that expressly prejudged the outcome.

• Goldstone called the resolution creating his tribunal a “very unfair lopsided resolution” but he still produced his report under it even though it was never formally changed.

• HRC Resolution 14/1 which established the Flotilla fact-finding mission is entitled “The Grave Attacks by Israeli Forces against the Humanitarian Boat Convoy” and at the outset “condemns in the strongest terms the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces against the humanitarian flotilla of ships“. (Of course this resolution was adopted after the footage of Israeli soldiers being beaten with iron bars had been all over the news.) The commission, according to the Report, “found it necessary to reinterpret its mandate because of the manner in which the resolution appointing it was couched.” In other words “yes we know we were hired to do a one-sided hatchet job and we took on that assignment willingly, but trust us when we say we had no prejudices”. Well, that is just not good enough. It is equivalent to Goldstone’s admission that Christine Chinkin would have had to be recused for bias if their mission had been a judicial inquiry. [3]

2. Both missions based all of their findings on one-sided evidence. In both cases, the evidence they had was obviously biased, and in Goldstone’s case it was (by the report’s own admission) also tainted by duress. But the same basic formula was used to produce the factual findings in both: the evidence we collected (from the anti-Israel side) said X; Israel provided no evidence to the contrary; therefore we find that the facts are X.

• To quote from the Flotilla Report: “The Mission gave particular weight to the direct evidence received from interviews with eyewitnesses . . . the Mission was obliged to treat with extreme caution the versions [of TV footage] released by the Israeli authorities where those versions did not coincide with the evidence of eyewitnesses . . .” (In other words, as Groucho Marx put it: “Who are you going to believe -- me or your lying eyes?”)

[This decision, although perverse in many ways, is beyond absurd because it rests on the assumption that Israel cannot be trusted because it has a stake in the outcome while assuming that the guerrilla flotillistas have none - which is utterly ludicrous given that their objective was political. The UNHRC report gives them exactly what they wanted. PMiao]

3. Both reports represent an unwarranted rush to judgment, dealing in an expedited cursory manner with matters that should be handled with much greater rigor. The Israeli investigations into the allegations and accusations made by Goldstone have shown the vast majority of them to be false -- and the one or two that have substance are being pursued, as well they should. The Flotilla mission is even more egregious in a sense because it is front-running the Turkel Commission, an ongoing independent investigation including international observers (which is quite unprecedented).

4. Both reports utterly failed (or refused) to investigate critical facts. Goldstone exhibited the most extraordinary willful blindness in refusing to look beyond the evidence presented from the Palestinian side or to investigate Hamas’ behavior (such as locating fighters and weapons in hospitals, schools and other civilian locations). The Flotilla Report doesn’t even mention Hamas except to refer to their electoral victory as the alleged reason Israel wanted to punish the people of Gaza. And it never examines the dubious background, aims or tactics of IHH, evidently the primary instigators of the violence aboard the Mavi Marmara.

[Ironically (or perhaps not), the BBC appears to have done a more thorough investigative job than the UNHRC 'fact-finding' Mission (here and here) PMaio]

5. Both reports betray their bias in their use of language. Here are a just a few gems from the Flotilla Report:

• You may have seen the photograph of an Israeli soldier who had been beaten and stabbed in the stomach with a knife (it was one of those photos doctored by Reuters to remove the knife from the picture); well, in the Report that is described as follows: “One of the soldiers had a superficial wound to the abdomen, caused by a sharp object . . .” (A thumbtack no doubt!)

• There is a very short description of the battle itself -- the vicious one the whole world saw on TV -- just a few paragraphs, but here is how they describe the events when the first Israeli commandos

tried to rappel down the rope and were pummeled by a mob of armed activists: “a fight ensued between passengers and the first soldiers to descend . . .”. A fight ensued . . . like “war broke out” in 1948. Or a scuffle ensued between the office workers in the World Trade Center and the young gentlemen who had commandeered the planes.

• You may have seen the video clip of the IHH leader urging his troops to jihad and martyrdom and to “throw the Jews off the ship”. In the Report it is noted that he “spoke with some bravado about preventing an Israeli takeover of the ship.”

• Of course on the other side there is no such euphemism: the Israeli commandos are found to have summarily executed passengers and tortured those they didn’t kill (by tying their plasticuffs too tightly). The finding is actually that they are guilty of torture in violation of articles 7 and 10, paragraph 1, of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and of the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. And, to add insult to injury, they are guilty of not informing the passengers of the reason for their detention as required by Article 9, paragraph 2 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

[Did the Israelis grin with pleasure as they tightened those plasticuffs, like this 'activist' did when he wrenched this already-injured commando's arm from the shoulder? PMaio]

6. Both reports demonstrate shocking evidentiary double standards, in the assessment of credibility of witnesses and evidence and in the ascertaining of intentions. I go into some detail on this regarding the Goldstone Report in my letter to Judge Goldstone. By way of example in the Flotilla Report, Israel’s evidence of weapons used by activists on the ship is summarily dismissed as unreliable but “the fact that some passengers engaged in last minute efforts to fashion rudimentary weapons shortly prior to the interception confirms the findings of the Mission that no weapons were brought on board the ship“. (101)

[So even though Iara Lee's video - untouched by Israeli hands - shows 'activists' stashing lengths of ship railing and rigging under tarps and along the ship's rail well in advance of the IDF's arrival, and dozens of 'activists' carrying such objects after, this is 'last minute' and the important fact is that they weren't brought on board!!! So guns and knives couldn't have been! And the pepper spray package we see an IHH activist opening with a knife during the raid is an apparition! This is a great example of the tortured logic the panel employed to find no fault whatsoever on the part of the guerrilla flotillistas. PMiao]

7. Both reports include grandiose political pronouncements that are not only irrelevant and inappropriate for a “fact-finding” mission, but betray both a lack of understanding of the complexities (let alone the equities) of the Middle East conflict and a bias against Israel. For example, the Conclusions section of the Flotilla Report offers the pretentious but revealing admonition that “an unfair victory has never been know to bring lasting peace” and ends by referring to “the regrettable reputation which [Israel] has for impunity and intransigence in international affairs“. In similar vein, the Goldstone Report criticizes Israel for “failing to protect its own citizens by refusing to acknowledge the futility of resorting to violent means and military power” (as though its implacable enemies like Hamas have given it any choice).

8. Both reports exhibit a startlingly un-judicial lack of balance between the prejudicial and the probative. The Flotilla Report for example includes lengthy and graphic descriptions of the way in which the deceased activists were (allegedly) summarily executed and of the horrible abuses (allegedly) suffered by the surviving passengers after Israeli commandos took control of the ships which, although obviously derived from one-sided testimony, was simply stated as fact, and seemed to serve little purpose other than to highlight how merciless, bloodthirsty and depraved the Israeli military is.

[I would also point out that the Mission's interpretation of the forensic pathology assumes that the 'activists' who were killed were standing about on the deck doing nothing, rather than engaged in a battle they instigated. For example, the UNHRC Mission makes much of the downward trajectory of a bullet wound to the chest which was fired from 'some distance' - taking this as evidence that shots were fired from the helicopter, if I understand them correctly. The more plausible explanation - that an 'activist' leaning over and beating a commando who was down on the deck was shot by another commando who was standing 'some distance' away - is not even considered. The Mission also made much of the fact that several fatalities occurred on the Level 2 portside deck; they ignore IDF aerial footage that shows two projectiles - one of which is identified by the IDF as a firebomb - being thrown onto the top deck from exactly that area. The Mission also fails to take into account that it took the IDF a full 15 minutes to get the few meters from the ladder descending from the top deck onto the Level 2 portside deck and then foreward to the ship's bridge - which only makes sense if the IDF met great resistance from 'activists' on the Level 2 portside deck. Had the IDF elected to 'shoot their way through', they would have taken the bridge in a matter of minutes and there would have been far more casualties. PMiao]

I could go on and on but I think you get the point. Tragically, both reports reward and encourage the most cynical and despicable of behavior. Both cases represent a missed opportunity to provide moral clarity and deter cynical manipulation of international law and institutions.

Instead they provided a blueprint for violent political groups as to how they can use international law to protect themselves and shift blame to those trying to contain them, a blueprint that can be used against the United States as easily as against Israel.

The entire article can be found here.

Ken O'Keefe Prevaricates on IDF Weapons

2010-10-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

In the interview with Haaretz published on September 24 that I referred to in Coincidence, Ken O'Keefe said that he removed a 9mm handgun from an IDF commando who had "fallen" from the top deck and landed less than a meter from him. Contrary to statements by others, in this interview O'Keefe makes no claim to having thrown the bullets into the sea; he says that he "separate[d] the weapon from the bullets. I gave the bullets to someone and hid the pistol." Once having hidden the gun, he says he returned to the Level 2 deck where soon after another Israeli commando "fell", although he claims that this one was armed with an assault rifle. What became of the alleged assault rifle? "[W]e managed to get the rifle away from him and the Turk who was with me took it". It sounds like Kevin Neish, who has told everyone who will listen that the IDF weapons and/or bullets were thrown into the sea (see A Tale of Three Witnesses), was making it up as he went along, doesn't it?

There are problems with O'Keefe's account. Israel has said that the first team that rappelled onto the Mavi Marmara's top deck carried only paintball guns and 9mm handguns. Okay, so that's a matter of he said-they said on the assault weapon although O'Keefe himself says that he heard only single shots - both live ammunition and paintballs - being fired after the first team of commandos was inserted. But if O'Keefe's reason for keeping the handgun was as evidence against Israel, wouldn't an assault rifle constitute more powerful evidence? Although that assumes that O'Keefe's 'logic' makes any sense at all.

More importantly, photographs released by various passengers who smuggled them out of Israeli custody show that all three of the IDF commandos captured and held hostage wore leg holsters. What is a leg holster for? A handgun. Yet O'Keefe makes no mention at all of a handgun in the case of the second commando he claims to have disarmed. Why is that?

It is highly unlikely that a commando would wear a leg holster for no reason. It is at least theoretically possible that the commando had drawn and lost his handgun on the top deck before being thrown off, although that seems far-fetched - and presents a scenario that doesn't resolve what became of the gun. And if it were the case, why wouldn't O'Keefe mention that the soldier's handgun was already gone when he "fell"? Perhaps O'Keefe wanted the attention on the alleged assault rifle rather than the handgun he makes no mention of? I don't know, but perhaps the mysteriously unmentioned handgun later had an encounter with the bullets he says he removed and gave to "someone".

In the BBC Panorama special, O'Keefe was adamant that no one except the IDF used firearms, saying that he didn't see anyone from the ship fire a gun. Even taking his words at face value, though, they hardly constitute indisputable - or even strong - evidence that the IDF claims that firearms were used against them are false.

O'Keefe didn't see everything that happened, and he cannot account for the alleged assault rifle or the bullets once he had given them to others. The basis for his claim is his trust in those who told him the weapons were not used, as is Neish's mistaken claim that the weapons and bullets were thrown into the sea (excepting the handgun retained purportedly as evidence by O'Keefe). If O'Keefe trusts them so thoroughly, I wonder why he doesn't name them. The Turkish journalist Sefik Dinc also says the guns (presumably all of them) were thrown into the sea, but we know for a fact that this is not true. Dinc does not say when this happened, nor does he tell us whether he saw it happen or if he, like Neish and O'Keefe, is reporting hearsay.

O'Keefe has shown that he is unwilling to talk about everything he knows. He seems to have been clumsily coy about the 'handgun that wasn't' in the case of the second commando - a handgun that certainly existed yet which he fails to mention. This is a glib omission that is similar in many respects to the way he glossed over the questions about whether he'd seen the iron bars that were used to club Israel soldiers when they rappelled onto the ship's top deck being prepared, or whether he was aware of plans to try to capture and hold hostage Israeli soldiers, as we know was Ebrahim Musaji - another non-Turk who helped the IHH "defend" the ship (see "They get held hostage or they get chucked off"). He ignored the questions and talked about something else. Why? O'Keefe's evasiveness has also been apparent in the way he changed the subject on Jane Corbin when she interviewed him for the Panorama special. Rather than answer her question about whether he had thought, before the IDF arrived, about whether active resistance would likely result in violence, he filibustered her with a dissertation on the "occupation".

O'Keefe's evasiveness when he prefers to change the subject is not consistent with his eagerness to take the high moral ground on the issue of using guns against Israeli soldiers, as he did in the BBC Panorama special. He stridently asserts his own moral superiority by proclaiming that while he could have killed Israelis he did not, but will not answer simple questions about what, in some cases at least, are facts that are not widely disputed about IHH plans and preparation for "resistance". Why, in light of this, does he deserve the benefit of the doubt?

O'Keefe seems to have a tendency to pretend things he doesn't want to talk about aren't there... So the question the next interviewer should ask O'Keefe is why he doesn't want to talk about the plan to take Israeli soldiers hostage and the preparation of potentially lethal weapons to use against them, and why he hasn't said anything about the handgun taken from the second Israeli commando he helped disarm.

But perhaps we already have an indirect answer from O'Keefe about the weapons taken from the Israeli soldiers. As with the preparation of iron bars and the plans to take hostages, maybe the answer is in what he doesn't say.

UNHRC Flotilla Panel's Bigotry

2010-09-30T14:27:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of problems with the UNHRC's recently released report of its 'findings'. But in some ways, I think the biggest one might be one of the last statements they make which, to me at least, clearly underscores their prejudices and bigotry:

278. ... It is hopedthat there will be swift action by the Government of Israel. This will go a long way toreversing the regrettable reputation which that country has for impunity and intransigence ininternational affairs. It will also assist those who genuinely sympathise with theirsituation to support them without being stigmatised.

Let's parse these last two sentences. The phrase in the first, "the regrettable reputation" of Israel, clearly implies that her 'reputation' as intransigent in international affairs is deserved, not forged by her enemies and those - like the UNHRC - who are happy to help out her enemies by working feverishly to delegitimize her by stripping away, one by one, every means of defense available to any other state.

The second sentence is even worse, and more damning of the 'investigative' panel in my opinion. It recognizes that those who sympathize with Israel (largely but not limited to Jews) are stigmatized, but clearly implies that the stigma - called bigotry when applied to any other people - is deserved!!! In fact, the panel seems to be promulgating the fiction that rising antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere is caused by Israel's "intransigence", not by the growing numbers of antisemitic Muslims and their lefty lapdogs - including but not limited to the mainstream media and the UN. The panel seems to say that if only Israel would stop defending herself, Jew hatred would vanish. Muslims would stop defacing the synagogue and attacking Jews in Malmo.

Uh huh.

Imagine if someone prominent were to write this sentence: This will go a long way toreversing the regrettable reputation which the Palestinians have for terrorism and for violating bothinternational and local human rights. It will also assist those who genuinely sympathize with the Palestinians to support them without being stigmatized.

But we won't ever see anything like that come out of the United Nations. There is no stigma attached to supporting Palestinian terrorists. Palestinian terrorists, and now their western cheerleaders, are infantalized and so cannot be expected to understand the concept of humanitarianism, or to uphold human rights, let alone be held accountable for their repeated crimes and violations of rights. Palestinian terrorists have gotten smarter in recent decades and have limited their attacks to Israel or, occasionally, to Jews abroad (see UNHRC panel above regarding the "stigma" of support for Israel). And last but not least, if anyone said something like that, the cries of "Islamophobia" and "racism" would ring across the world, while the hypocrisy didn't get noticed at all, just like the IHH's terrorist connections and history of hostage-taking went 'unnoticed' by the UNHRC panel.

This is the insanity with which the UNHRC and the flotillistas are afflicted:

Coincidence

2010-09-29T07:52:00.000-07:00

Mere days before the United Nations Human Rights Council released its unedited report condemning Israel for the occupation of Gaza, the naval blockade on Gaza, and its enforcement of the blockade, Haaretz' weekly magazine published an interview with Mavi Marmara 'activist' Ken O'Keefe. O'Keefe is a former US Marine adorned in gang tattoos who has renounced his American citizenship, now holds Irish citizenship and lives in London. O'Keefe was seen in the BBC Panorama special program changing the subject under Jane Corbin's lame questioning from the wisdom of violently resisting the IDF boarding the Mavi Marmara to the "problem" of "the occupation".

In the interview with Corbin, O'Keefe made it clear that the IHH planned what he called "non-lethal" (not nonviolent) "resistance" to any attempt by Israel to board the ship, and that he was an eager and willing participant. From the Haaretz interview:

Question: Were you present when Bülent [Yildirim] said the flotilla participants would struggle to defend the ship?

Answer: I knew before we set out that the Turks are not like the other Westerners, that there would be no passive resistance in this case. The Turks are a tough people. They are people you don't mess with too much. In the United States or Britain people are asleep, there is no danger of rebellion. The Turks are different. I knew that if the Israelis boarded that ship, it would be a disaster. Not only from the aspect of the people who would be killed, but that it would also be a disaster for the Israelis.

But O'Keefe apparently still can't bring himself to answer certain specific questions about what he knew and/or saw on some subjects:

Question: Did you see them sawing the beams in preparation for the attack?

Answer: I knew we would defend the ship. That was stated publicly a great many times. You have to be an idiot to board that ship and think it will be a ship of passive resistance.

I find his prevarication on that point - already well-established by video evidence and by others' statements, including the IHH volunteer Fatih Kavakdan - fascinating. Why hedge on what is established fact while at the same time appearing to be so forth coming about what became of the firearms taken from captured Israeli commandos and their, according to O'Keefe, not having been used by 'activists'?

But here is the real point. O'Keefe essentially confirms what Kavakdan told the BBC's Corbin - the IHH resistance was going to be violent whatever Israel did to enforce the blockade. This admission further bolsters Israel's claim that her commandos used their firearms in self-defense, as does Sefik Dinc's observation that only after several commandos were severely beaten and thrown off the top deck did the Israelis use live weapons.

I may or may not produce a full critique of the UNHRC report; to do it properly will involve a great deal of time I'm not sure I can find before others, almost certainly better qualified, will. But I will note at this juncture that the 'investigative' panel did not look into the motives, intent or actions of the flotilla participants because they considered them not to be relevant to the issues. Incredible...

O'Keefe was all over Youtube in interviews after the Mavi Marmara incident. This one, though, is by far my favorite:

The IHH - Islamist Hostage-takers disguised as Humanitarians

2010-09-26T15:54:00.000-07:00

Note: edited and some additional photographs added December 20/10.

I was stunned to learn just a couple of days ago that in January this year when the IHH attempted to enter Gaza by overland convoy via Egypt and failed to get the reception - and the free pass - they expected from the Egyptian government, not only did violence erupt, but the fallout involved the IHH taking hostage seven Egyptians - either soldiers or border police, the accounts I've seen vary. Maybe I had my head in the sand last January, or maybe the hostage-taking never got widely reported. These things never seem to when Israel isn't involved. It's also possible that, like Israel with the Mavi Marmara, Egypt wanted to downplay this element of the confrontation for inexplicable reasons. I'll return to this subject below.

But none of those things explains why the media didn't pick up on the parallels between these two cases - the common link between them is the IHH - when the news about Israeli commandos taken hostage broke a couple of days after the Mavi Marmara incident. In both cases, the IHH claimed that the "other side" initiated the violence, too. Imagine that...

This bit of news came to me literally as a footnote when I was reading an English summary of a book recently published (in Turkish) by a Turkish journalist for the popular newspaper Haberturk, who was aboard the Mavi Marmara. [Hat tip to PF] Apologies in advance for the lack of the appropriate accents. In addition to describing events - and largely corroborating the IDF's account, with some notable exceptions - Sepik Dinc included photographs he had taken of the IDF hostages, many of which I had never seen before. He also revealed that at one point 'activists' attempted to throw the hostage commandos overboard.

According to Dinc, Some operatives attempted to throw the soldiers taken to the lower deck into the sea. A soldier hanging in the air during an attempt to throw him into the sea was rescued thanks to the intervention of other people, who prevented that from happening. See the photograph to the right.

His captions for the following series of three photographs read:

As doctors attempted to treat the kidnapped soldiers in the corridors, they also attempted to keep the passengers from further beating them. It was difficult to get kidnapped soldiers out of the hands of the man with the club. He ignored the requests of the volunteers who wanted to protect the soldier, and kept beating him.

The Israeli commando shields his face with his left arm, and perhaps his upper body with his other (photo to left). For unknown reasons the 'activists' had tied a black and white keffiyeh to him before they carried him below decks, and it is still affixed to his right arm in these pictures. My interpretation of the photographic and other evidence is that this commando was the first taken to the ship's lower levels, so perhaps the keffiyeh was a symbol of 'conquest'.

It may or may not be significant that the man who apparently is attacking him with the improvised club wears a similar if not identical keffiyeh (photo to the right). In the closeup photograph below (below left), we can see flecks of blood on the stick. It appears that while people were willing to try verbally to stop the stick-wielder from further assaulting the commando, nobody was willing to intervene physically. Where is Murat Akinan, the man who supposedly was delegated the responsibility for ensuring the Israeli hostages' safety?

Two widely publicized photographs (above right and below) have been seen before; they show an Israeli commando being marched down the stairs to the ship's lower levels from the door to the Level 2 portside deck. Murat Akinan stands behind the commando, grasping his left wrist and apparently also holding the soldier's right wrist or hand behind his head. The photograph above (right) has been the source of disparaging comments about 'sissy' Israeli soldiers because of the contorted expression on the commando's face. Without the blurring I've used to protect his identity, though, it is obvious that his face has been badly bloodied around the mouth and nose.

In the second of the previously released images, Akinan appears to admonish someone outside the frame after he changed his grasp on the captured commando, perhaps permitting him to use his right hand to wipe away some of the blood, now running down his face apparently from his brow. Is there a new injury to the commando's head, perhaps inflicted after the first photograph was taken and prompting Akinan's reaction? This commando reportedly suffered a fractured skull.

The newly released photographs add to the story told in these pictures. Akinan still seems to be more focused on matters on the landing above (right) as they reach the landing between Levels 2 and 3 on the central stairwell. The commando appears to be resisting going further below - his right hand grips the stair rail, perhaps to stop being propelled further down the stairs. An 'activist' violently twists the soldier's left arm from the shoulder, and looks like he's enjoying it given the big grin on his face. If the reports that this commando's arm was broken are true, that must have been excruciating. Or perhaps this is how it came to be broken. Broken arms were common injuries among the members of the first team inserted onto the Mavi Marmara's top deck - incurred when they raised an arm to protect their heads and faces from the blows with iron bars and wooden clubs. But you can really tell from this picture that Murat Akinan's first concern was to get this IDF commando 'to safety', as he claimed in the BBC Panorama special. Not.

Someone has pushed back the lock of hair that was covering one side of the commando's forehead in the two earlier pictures, and now a large, bloody gash is evident. If the commando didn't move his hair himself, I'd wager it was done for the cameras of which there seem to have been plenty. He is also bleeding from the scalp - blood runs down from above his hairline covering his forehead, down to his chin and into his left ear, if that isn't yet another head wound. If you have the opportunity to look at these new images without the faces blurred, you'll see that there's nothing 'sissified' about the expression on this soldier's face. Previously released photographs show a Turkish doctor wiping the blood from his face with Akinan diligently looking on; a video clip confiscated by Israel and used in the BBC's Panorama special shows Akinan trying to keep would-be attackers away from him. In that clip, the commando is able to use only his right arm to shield his head and face from potential additional blows; we never see his left arm near his face. Toward the end of the clip, Akinan appears to be manipulating his left arm (or perhaps both), before and after we momentarily see the soldier's left hand at rest on his leg.

Dinc's book includes only one new photograph of the third commando held hostage, and it adds little to my understanding of his captivity. Two earlier pictures, one of which is to the right, show him before he was stripped of his ammo vest, leg holster and other gear. In images where his face is not blurred, he seems to have a small smear of blood or a bruise under his left eye but his face is otherwise unbloodied. The severity of his abdominal wound is impossible to judge from these first photographs - a very small, faint smudge of blood is visible on his abdomen just above his belt but the position of his legs - and of his captor - obscures much of the area where we later see he has a serious wound. In fact, his captor seems to be kneeling pretty much where the wound is located. Nice.

In the photograph to the leftt, the activist at the top left of the frame wearing a green headband is seen in Iara Lee's Raw Footage in the makeshift clinic in the central stairwell on Level 3 treating a wound to the wrist of another 'activist'. Something has happened to provoke a reaction from the Israeli commando very unlike what we see in the first pictures taken before his gear was stripped from him. He is being held down by a hand pressed just below his neck and a knee on the right side of his torso, and seems to have his arms and hands in a defensive position.

We can now see (right) that this commando has a serious-looking wound to his lower right abdomen, and there is a streak of blood above his belt-line that doesn't seem to have been present in the photographs taken while he still had his gear, although it's difficult to be certain. The largish bloodstain on the right side of his chest was not visible before but his shirt is twisted forward, and that spot may have been on his side. Without doubt, though, there is a bloodstain on his pants, just below his belt and immediately to the left (his right) of his belt buckle that is not present in the picture above.

A close-in of this photograph (left) shows that he now has blood trickling from his nose. He is struggling as his arms are being held by the 'activist' who removed his equipment in the first pictures and someone off-camera may be holding one of his feet. Is it just coincidence that he has more bloodstains (and perhaps larger ones) and that an 'activist' at the right in the frame is holding a knife? Perhaps; perhaps not.

In a subsequent photograph (right) in which the hostage commando's balaclava has been removed, we see more extensive bleeding around the nose - from injuries he did not have in any of the preceding pictures. He is most obviously identifiable as the commando in the previous photographs from the insignia on the epaulets of his uniform, which was unique among the hostage soldiers.

In another picture (left), the 'medic' is either still present or has been recalled to attend to the hostage. I think the latter is more likely for several reasons: the commando's face was not bloodied when we last saw the medic; and the location appears to be different or, at the least, the soldier's orientation relative to the physical setting is significantly changed. The man in the striped sweater on the left in this image was not visible in any of the others; he is seen in Lee's video in the media room, so perhaps he is a journalist. In the unblurred image, the commando appears to be barely conscious; his left eye looks like it is swollen shut. The 'medic's' attention to his upper chest/heart area may be indicative of the perceived severity of his condition.

In the BBC Panorama program, Murat Akinan made a big deal about how the IDF hostages were held in the women's quarters for "their safety", and the BBC's Jane Corbin seemed to have accepted his claim without question. The women's quarters were on the lowest level of the ship, yet one photograph (right) shows this same commando apparently being hauled UP a set of stairs, an action that is certainly not consistent with moving him to the lowest deck. Another (below) shows him being held in an enclosed lounge area which is recognizable from the blue upholstered bench. Various videos show that this room was used by many of the male passengers as sleeping quarters, so it obviously was not closed off to public traffic. This commando was kept there for his safety???? Akinan's story is in shreds.

My interpretation of the photographic and video evidence is that this is the commando we see in Iara Lee's Raw Footage being carried down the central stairs (below) toward the lowest decks several minutes after the helicopter her cameraman filmed had left (and after the captain's alarm had sounded). As I mentioned in an earlier post, he appears very weak as he is taken down the stairs, his only visible movement an attempt to hold onto the rail as they move down from the landing between Level 2 and 3. He wears no leg holster but has a balaclava or something else covering his head and has been put into a life jacket.

This suggests that he was earlier stripped of his gear and held for some time - about 9-18 minutes - depending on whether the helicopter in Lee's video is the second or third - elsewhere on the ship, separately from the two other hostages, before being moved to its least accessible area. In Lee's video, he has been brought in through a door that leads onto the Level 2 deck.

According to Dinc, the IDF commandos were taken to the space below the ship captain's command bridge, an area I know nothing about if he is not talking about the area accessed from the central stairwell. Clearly one of them was held in the lounge during part of his captivity. Elsewhere Dinc says that the Israeli soldiers with injuries were taken to a lower level of the ship (what I call Level 4 - the level above the women's deck); we see two of them in that area in either Dinc's photographs or video. This third commando was clearly injured and yet was not immediately taken to the area Dinc describes. The large picture we can see on the wall in the stairwell behind the 'walking' IDF hostage depicted above is the same one we see on the landing between Levels 2 (bridge level) and 3 in the central stairway in Lee's video.

My tentative conclusion, based on the evidence available, is that the Israeli commando with the bloodied abdomen and later a bloodied face was initially held separately from the other two because he was the team commander and considered to be a higher value hostage, and perhaps because his kidnappers thought that his absence would have a demoralizing effect on the other two. I suspect that he was moved below decks because the arrival of the (second? or third?) helicopter signaled that a credible attempt by the IDF to take the bridge was imminent and the 'activists' did not want to risk losing him in that attempt but preferred to keep him in a less accessible place to use him for 'negotiating' purposes later. The life jacket they put on him when they moved him - to disguise him as an 'activist' - to the main interior quarters indicates that they had no interest at all in 'returning' him to his comrades.

So where does all this take me? If I had had all the information I now have several weeks ago there would only have been one post and one video on IDF hostages. Just one, and it would have made these points:

(1) The IDF commandos held hostage by IHH 'activists' were all subjected to additional physical assaults - beyond those used to capture them - by 'activists' during their captivity, Kevin Neish's self-righteous declarations about how they were 'protected' notwithstanding. Some 'activists' continued to try to do them physical harm or even kill them, while others attempted - although at times only verbally, not by physical intervention - to keep them from further injury or death. Their motives for doing so, however, were not necessarily - or even probably - humanitarian. Dead hostages wouldn't have the same 'value'. The conjoining of humanitarianism and hostage-taking remains an utter perversion of both morals and reason. Those flotilla participants and fans of the flotilla who continue to excuse these actions, or go so far as to applaud the efforts of some 'activists' to prevent further physical injury by others to the commandos taken hostage by means of violent assault, have no understanding of the concepts peaceful, nonviolent, or humanitarian.

(2) The IHH had a prior history of provoking violence and taking state actors hostage in order to 'get their way' - they had done it in Egypt where used the Egyptian hostages to 'win' the release of those of their own who had been arrested. After the fact, they claimed - contrary to all the evidence - that the Egyptians had 'provoked' them. They made me do it, Mommy!

(3) There is no doubt that the IHH intended to use Israeli soldiers being held hostage in the 'negotiations' they seem to have envisioned taking place with Israel over the flotilla's passage to Gaza. I suspect that Yildirim did not anticipate the lengths to which Israel would go to get her soldiers back, but in his mind - and of course the UNHRC's - he, the IHH, and "Free Gaza" would come out the winners either way. Sefik Dinc says that the moment he saw the violence against and capture of Israeli soldiers, he (Dinc) knew that many people were going to die. Smart man.

Dinc's new photographs as well as others I have recently located confirm that all three hostages were assaulted while in captivity; the evidence available before only proved that two were. Murat Akinan's claim that the IDF commandos were held in the women's quarters for their own safety is blatantly contradicted by several of these pictures; one commando is seen being hauled up, not down, stairs, and being held in a public lounge area with several points of access. This commando almost certainly was later moved to the lowest level so make him more difficult for the IDF to rescue, not to 'protect' him.

But with the exception of the second point (2) about the IHH in Egypt earlier this year, none of this is really new. The information about the IHH adds further evidence to support a conclusion I had reached earlier without knowing about it - the centrality of taking Israeli soldiers hostage in the IHH plan.

Here's the question that is really bothering me. A lot. Who knew about the IHH's prior history as hostage-takers in Egypt, less than 5 months before the Mavi Marmara fiasco?

Did "Free Gaza" - or at least its higher ups and organizers - know that the IHH had taken Egyptian policemen or soldiers hostage just months earlier when they joined forces with them for the "Freedom Flotilla"? Did Lubna Masarwa, the coordinator for Free Gaza and the Freedom Flotilla know? Greta Berlin?

Did Israeli intelligence and/or the IDF know? If they didn't, how could they have not known? Surely Israel and Egypt share intelligence related to Gaza? Surely Israel would not skip over sections of a report that involved the IHH out of deference to Israel's (by then already long-faltering) relationship with Turkey? Would they???

If the IDF did know, why in the name of all that is good and worth cherishing and preserving in this world did they agree to a plan that sent commandos armed with paintball guns on their backs and 9mm pistols holstered to their legs, one by one, onto a deck with 15-30 IHH activists armed with improvised weapons and with a history of taking hostages? I hope the plan - flawed as it was - was the result of intelligence failure, and not of political correctness. These soldiers, all of whom volunteered to serve in Shayetet 13 to protect Israel and her citizens, deserved better than their leaders gave them. And better than Giora Eiland gave them in his investigative report, too. Volunteer soldiers know that they are offering their lives in the service of their country. But they should never be expected to be willing to throw their lives away - or unknowingly have leaders who will throw them away for them - in the service of ... what???

Not one of my better videos but here it is:

Of Hostages and Humanitarians

2010-09-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

I put this video together after unexpectedly relocating a youtube video I had stumbled across, long before I had ever given any thought to making videos or doing a blog about the Mavi Marmara 'incident'. Naturally, I couldn't find it again when I wanted to. In fact, this is what I was looking for when I found the clip of Ebrahim Musaji that is highlighted in Mavi Marmara Activist Confirms Intent to Take IDF Hostages.

There is indisputable evidence that taking hostages was part of the IHH's planned response to Israel's enforcement of the naval blockade - and hostages is the operative word here, not 'captives', because hostages are taken in order to be ransomed, traded as chattel. Implicit in the concept of hostages is a threat to the well-being, the lives of those being held and used for such purposes. While the BBC Panorama special (here and here) gives me some hope that the mainstream media have realized that the Mavi Marmara 'activists' story doesn't add up, I was disappointed that the issue of the IDF hostages was glossed over. How in the eyes of the world does taking soldiers hostage not transform the hostage takers into what in other contexts are called unlawful combatants? Or is this acceptable, even laudable, only when the kidnapped soldiers are Israeli?

Murat Akinan - IDF hostage 'caretaker'

Jane Corbin appears to have accepted uncritically Murat Akinan's claim that keeping the captured soldiers on the women's deck (Level 5) was done for their own safety. Akinan was apparently given the responsibility for the hostages' well-being by Bulent Yildirim, head of the IHH. But if the women's deck was a safe haven from bloodthirsty 'activists' because it had no access from the outside, that same feature made it the hardest place on the ship for the IDF to mount a rescue from, as well, from both logistical and cultural perspectives.

Corbin made much of the confiscated video showing Akinan keeping angry 'activists' away from one captured commando, and Neish also makes a big deal of the hostages' 'protected' status. Corbin also seems to accept as a given Akinan's stated reason for the 'activists' anger - that 'activists' had already been killed and seriously injured by the IDF. But the 3 commandos captured were the among the first down the fastropes, and in light of other evidence (see Which Helicopter Is It? and A Tale of Three Witnesses) that two IDF commandos had already been taken to Level 5 before there were any serious injuries among 'activists', I would argue that the source of their anger lies elsewhere.

Akinen (right) on Level 3

Corbin doesn't seem to have considered the possibility that there were non-humanitiarian reasons for the IHH organizers to keep the IDF hostages alive - dead hostages are far less powerful bargaining chips. Given that the IHH clearly intended to try take IDF hostages, the humanitarian rationale makes no sense. Iara Lee's Raw Footage shows Akinan on Level 3 long after the IDF hostages were stashed there; he apparently delegated his responsibility for the hostages' safekeeping. While being detained in Israel, Akinan told the Israelis that he was unable to keep everyone away when he was shown a photograph of one IDF hostage being struck by an 'activist' during his captivity.

Turkish woman responsible for trading IDF hostage

Akinan and an unidentifed young woman were interviewed by Turkish television after their release from Israeli custody. The woman said that one of the hostages had been "given to" her to protect, keep safe and to trade. A couple of questions arise from her statement. Would the fact that the IDF hostages were being held on the women's deck have prevented enraged Turks intent on killing them from going to Level 5 to do so? There were already men down there - Israeli men, Jewish men in addition to the men who took them there - so I'm not persuaded by the 'cultural' argument. Would this young woman have been able to stop even one enraged Turkish man from killing or doing serious bodily harm to an injured soldier? Not unless she had one of their loaded 9mm handguns, I suspect. Finally, the most important question of all, what was she supposed to trade him for and when? And is it just coincidence that this young woman was able to respond in English to an interviewer asking her in English about Israel's claim that 'activists' tried to kidnap soldiers?

Although Akinan said on camera to Corbin that he told other 'activists' the captured IDF commandos should be "taken back", he never says (and she never asks) when. In fact, we have no evidence of any attempt to do so other than the vague allusion by Lubna Masarwa to 'exchanging' them (or perhaps maintaining their continued 'OK' condition) for medical care for injured 'activists'. Corbin never asked whether taking IDF soldiers hostage was planned from the outset or whether they intended to use them in 'negotiations' with the Israeli forces, questions I would think obvious given everything else known about the flotilla - particularly its real objective, which she acknowledges was to break the blockade, not to deliver aid.

I have heard no 'activist' recount how the IDF commandos held hostage on the ship's lowest deck came to be freed. According to the IDF, they had been taken up one level to the Level 4 foreward deck by several 'activists' when they were spotted by soldiers on the top deck who fired rubber bullets at the 'activists'; as a result the 'activists' left the hostages and fled back inside. Two of the commandos were able to jump into the water and swim to a nearby Israeli boat; the third lapsed into unconsciousness on the deck. We simply do not know what the intent of the 'activists' was with respect to the IDF hostages at that point which, according to the IDF, was long after the IDF had taken over the bridge.

I wonder if Neish, who told the CBC the IDF commandos taken hostage were "unharmed" and elsewhere described only bloody noses, dismisses the condition of the one who collapsed unconscious as yet another Israeli lie... or if somewhere inside him there is a well-meaning, if seriously misguided, man who is troubled by that knowledge. Nah, he's the guy we see in Raw Footage photographing one with a bloody abdominal wound and describing the first two as "bleeding and wounded", but telling every one he has spoken to since that they were fine. He, like the others, is unwilling to confront the implications and potential real consequences of the flotillistas' actions.

Corbin clearly failed to connect the dots. Can she really be oblivious to the impact Gilad Shalit's captivity has had on Israelis? I doubt that the IHH was. As the 'freedom flotilla' departed for Gaza, the fourth anniversary of Gilad's captivity - held by Hamas with no contact with the outside world - was approaching and the 'activists' refused a request from Noam Shalit to take a letter to his son. Did it not occur to her or the producers of the BBC program that 'activists' who would refuse such a simple and truly humanitarian gesture might have tried to exploit Israelis' powerful compassion for its hostage soldiers to achieve their objective of breaking the blockade? Talk about provocation...

I suspect that this element of the IHH strategy, unlike the planned violent 'resistance', was not widely known among the passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara. Nonetheless, I have not heard a single one of them speak out against it after the fact. Rather, all the North American and European participants I have heard speak of it have cynically and hypocritically used the IDF hostages' survival as evidence of their own humanitarianism. Why do I suspect that wouldn't change even if they were presented with undeniable evidence that the IHH intended to take IDF hostages... Their sanctimonious rationalizations make me wonder if the concept of humanitarianism has been so degraded... or if in the minds of these 'activists' Israelis are so dehumanized that they are incapable of seeing the fundamental contradiction between their words and the actions they not only excuse but boast about. I suspect the latter, but either way something is very, very wrong with this picture, especially given how widely accepted such distorted and perverse thinking seems to have become.

A Tale of Three Witnesses

2010-09-07T15:54:00.000-07:00

I would really like to have the time to listen carefully to the public statements in languages I understand of everyone aboard the Mavi Marmara; I'm sure there is a tremendous amount of information in them. I have listened to two different interviews with Iara Lee, as well as her introduction to the June 10 press conference at the UN where she screened her Raw Footage for the press. I've listened to several interviews with Kevin Neish, two public presentations he has made, and have read several newspaper articles claiming to quote him. Finally, I've listened Farooq Burney's interview on Al Jazeera (not entirely a softball interview, and he sounded extremely nervous) and listened to a public address he gave in Toronto (here, here, and here). Here is a summary of some of what the three of them have said:

Lee's narrative evolved over time. When she spoke to Democracy Now on June 10 (here and here), she said that she couldn't distinguish rubber bullets from live ammunition, and claimed to have been shocked and horrified when the IDF appeared with fastboats, flash bangs, and helicopters. Yet her own video footage suggests that she wasn't at all surprised at or frightened by the way Israel's initial attempt to board the Mavi Marmara unfolded, and it certainly does not support Burney's claim that people were panicking. Less than three weeks later she was telling The Young Turks, whose interviewer asked some good questions she had trouble answering, that the IDF had immediately fired a mix of rubber bullets and live ammunition at the ship. Not just a strange change in her recollection, but a mix of rubber bullets and live ammunition sounds tactically, well, stupid. Lee also told the TYT interviewer that she had expected the IDF to fire warning shots and use rubber bullets, tear gas, and "so forth" as they had done with earlier boats attempting to break the blockade. She said she expected to go to jail, but in the earlier interview with the sober-faced journalists at Democracy Now, she described how "shocked" she was to find herself being taken to Israel in Israeli custody. What did she expect? Aruba?

Neish's public comments have also changed over time. When he spoke to a group in his home town of Victoria, British Columbia in early June he said "I don't know who fired the first shot, so don't even ask". His complete remarks in Victoria are here, here, here, here, and here. But less than a month later, when he and Farooq Burney were describing their ordeals to Toronto's 'Free Gaza' franchise (Neish's full address is here, here, here and here), he was adamant that the IDF had shot and killed two activists from the first helicopter before setting foot on the ship, saying that he had been told this by people he trusted. I wonder who that might be... Because that allegation is the centerpiece of the IHH's 'explanation' for the reception rappelling IDF commandos got when they reached the top deck. However, Fatih Kavakdan told the BBC's Jane Corbin that the cut metal rods were prepared specifically to use on the IDF when they attempted to board the ship, no conditions attached.

Fatih Kavakdan

In other comments, Neish has made it clear that he has been in contact with 'Turkish authorities' since returning to Canada, and I assume he means the IHH, not the Turkish government (although maybe there no longer is any signficant difference between the two). Toeing the party-line? Neish shows a propensity to believe and regurgitate a lot of strange things, such as the claim that the IDF's paintball guns dispensed pellets that contained something really hard as well as pepper and/or tear gas ("chemical weapons") in addition to paint. As long as they cast Israel in a nasty light.

IDF commandos using paintball guns

I count about ten, not 20

Burney claimed that the IDF commandos in the first fastboats were armed with machine guns, and yet in Lee's video the only weapons we see are paintball guns in the boat attempting to board the Mavi Marmara at the starboard shipside. We can see no weapons at all in the fastboats that kept a greater distance from the ship; that is not to say they had none, but we at no time see weapons of any kind directed at the ship from those boats. Oddly, Burney and Neish both got the approximate number of commandos wrong by exactly the same number. I wouldn't expect them to get it exactly right, not unless they were obsessive like me and had brightened and enlarged a still image from the Raw Footage to count them... But in doubling the actual number in their identical estimates (if that is what they were), they exaggerate the scale of the initial 'assault'.

Neish talks at length about the IDF commandos taken hostage; he claims to have seen all three being brought in and his photographs and Lee's video appear to support him in that. He describes them being stripped of their gear, although he is careful to point out that their weapons were taken from them on the deck before they were brought inside. Even though he did not see any commandos before or in the process of being disarmed, he insists that they carried both pistols and machine guns, that the bullets were removed from them, and that all the bullets from them and all weapons except the pistol Ken O'Keefe hid as 'evidence' were thrown into the sea. He describes having heard this from 'many sources' and considers them to be trustworthy.

Why would you remove bullets from a gun before throwing it and the bullets into the sea? Never mind... silly question.

Lee claims that serious casualties occurred among the 'activists' almost immediately, and uses a clip from her own footage to support her claim. The clip shows the first casualty filmed, but it occurs after the helicopter her cameraman had filmed - and whether it is the second or third helicopter is not knowable with any certainty with the information currently available. But that it is not the first is without doubt.

Burney describes the first two helicopter insertions as 'failures', and says that the IDF didn't start 'shooting people' until after the third. It was not until after the third team's insertion that they solidified control of the top deck and moved to take the bridge on Level 2 below it, according to the IDF timeline. Interestingly, Neish also says that the casualties didn't 'really pile up' until the IDF hostages had been moved downstairs and we see one of them being moved after the insertion of the second or third helicopter.

Iara Lee claims that "within minutes" 'activists' attempted to surrender and to get assistance for their injured but were rebuffed by the IDF who, she alleges, "came to kill". She strongly implies that the 'activists' ceased resisting as soon as the first helicopter arrived, right away broadcasting an announcement telling people to go to their rooms and stay calm; Burney says that this happened about 45 minutes into the event when the IDF had taken control of the bridge, which is consistent with the IDF account. Lee's own video shows it happening nearly 15 minutes after the helicopter her cameraman filmed had departed, although we don't know how much real time had elapsed since the first helicopter's arrival. According to the IDF timeline, the bridge was taken a little more than 30 minutes after the first helicopter had inserted a team.

Lee also claims that at about the same time the 'activists' 'surrendered they began to plead over a loudspeaker with the IDF for help for their seriously wounded. Again, her own video demonstrates that this did not happen until after the IDF had taken the bridge; in fact it occurred about 5 minutes after in video time in her own footage.

But there are a couple of things about that broadcast plea that strike me as very odd: the language in which it was made, and the references it makes to the IDF commandos being held hostage (still, at this point). Lubna Masarwi is the person who makes the plea, which I have transcribed below*. She is an Israeli Arab so I would be surprised if she does not speak Hebrew, but maybe she doesn't. In that case, though, why not have Haneen Zuabi, the Israeli Knesset member aboard who is fluent in Hebrew and Arabic but does not speak English, make the broadcast if the primary concern was getting medical assistance for their wounded? Would it not make more sense to address the IDF in Hebrew than in English? Or was the more important audience the camera, hence the use of English? If that sounds incomprehensible, remember that Haneen Zuabi was filmed arguing with an IDF commando to prevent - yes prevent - them from taking seriously wounded 'activists' to hospitals in Israel. Was it politically untenable for Zuabi to appear to be offering to trade IDF hostages for medical assistance for their own? That's a rhetorical question; the answer is obviously yes. Which suggests to me that a public - i.e., filmed in English - 'trade', even after the bridge had been taken, was more important to the 'activists' than any medical assistance at that point. Actually, isn't the proper word in such circumstances 'ransoming'?

Neish says that the IDF commandos held hostage were kept on the lowest deck where the women's quarters were 'for their own safety', because that level has no access from the exterior. He may be right that it was the safest area for them (other than the top deck with their team, of course) if some 'activists' wanted to kill them while others wanted to keep them alive. But it was also the part of the ship where it would be most difficult for the IDF to mount a successful rescue.

I've come to the conclusion that both the commandos involved in the raid and Giora Eiland are wrong - killing Israeli soldiers was not the foremost aim of the IHH 'activists', although I don't rule out the possibility that there were circumstances in which they would have killed soldiers while trying to take IDF hostages, or have killed the soldiers they took. I am not saying, though, that the IDF were wrong to react to the situation as they did; as it unfolded they could not possibly have fully understood the motives of the 'activists' whose actions were clearly potentially lethal. Three commandos had been thrown off the deck to unknown fates, fates that were still unknown after the IDF had taken control of the bridge.

But I do think that taking IDF commandos hostage was among the IHH's major objectives. In fact, I'm beginning to think that IDF hostages may have been the linchpin in the media extravaganza they carefully crafted. They might have envisioned a 'best case' scenario in which, live on Al Jazeera, they 'negotiated' to trade kidnapped commandos for the right to sail to Gaza, perhaps for the elimination of the blockade. 'Activists' might be seriously injured or killed in the attempt; they certainly would be seriously injured or killed in the aftermath, whether they were successful or not, in the 'worst case', but several had expressed their willingness to pay that 'price' and dead 'humanitarian activists' were a very useful tool in their media campaign to delegitimize Israel. For the IHH it was a 'win-win' situation. Israel, and with the proper spin only Israel, comes out of it looking bad.

The 'activists' can (and do) repeatedly boast about how they showed their 'humanitarian' colors by not killing the IDF hostages, and the fact that they did not does bolster their argument that their intent was not to kill Israeli soldiers. Neish casually dismisses the violence obviously involved in their capture ("I don't know how they did it") but goes on ad nauseum about how they were 'treated well' and 'protected'. I nearly gagged when the audience applauded this sanctimonious, self-serving and willfully blind hypocrisy. I guess it's OK with these 'humanitarians' to beat the crap out of people, throw them off the deck, hold them against their will, and then attempt to trade them as chattel to get something you want.

They showed their true 'humanitarian' colors, all right.

*Transcription of Lubna Masarwa's announcement:

Israeli navy. All the passengers are sitting down. [In Lee's video you can see that this was not the case.] We have no guns here. We are civilians taking care of Israel's people. Don't use violence. We need help for the people.

She resumes after about 20 seconds:

Don't use violence against the civilians. People are (sick?) in here. We have many injured people. Please don't attack. We need Israel's help.

And after another pause of about 15 seconds:

Israeli navy. We need help. Your people are OK. Don't use violence against us. We are civilians.

Mavi Marmara Activists Testify at the UN

2010-09-06T11:48:00.000-07:00

Tongue in cheek, although I heard last week that 'survivors' were testifying before the United Nations Human Rights Council panel 'investigating' the incident. I started to imagine what their testimony might sound like...

Did the UNHRC's panel ask those who had professed a desire for martyrdom to elaborate on what that meant for their understanding of the flotilla's goals, I wonder? Was Kevin Neish asked to explain what he meant by his reading of the mood on the ship as "We're going to Gaza or we're going down?" Did Neish understand this to mean that the mood was a willingness to incur serious injury or even to die for 'the cause'? If so, how did Neish think that such injury or death might come about, given the history of past intercepted flotillas where no harm had come to 'activists'? Did the panel inquire how 'nonviolence' came to include hurling fistfuls of nuts and bolts and using specially prepared 3-foot lengths of chain to "whip at", in Neish's words, IDF soldiers attempting to board? Was Neish asked why he was, apparently, so moved emotionally by the plan to throw nuts and bolts at Israeli soldiers? Did the panel ask any of them why nuts and bolts were collected and placed in piles where they were, why chains were cut, and why the ship's rigging and rails were sawn into club-like lengths if their only intent was to scream and push with the hands, as Iara Lee has claimed? Did they inquire of Ken O'Keefe whether non-lethal, rather than nonviolent, resistance (a phrase he used in the BBC Panorama special) to any IDF effort to board the Mavi Marmara was the plan from the outset?

Did they ask Ebrahim Musaji, aka The Beard, whether the IHH organizers discussed what the plan was for any IDF commandos they did succeed in taking hostage? If their intent was to violate international law by using them as bargaining chips? If they had given any thought to how Israel might respond to such an action on the 'activists' part, given the fates of previous IDF captives and hostages, or whether Israel's anticipated response was actually part of their "plan"? Did the panel ask Burney Farooq and others who have described the outcome a success by what yardstick, given their stated objectives, they considered the flotilla to be a success, and how far they had been willing to go to make it a success in their own terms? I am confident we can very sure that no one has asked- or will ask - those giving testimony how breaking the blockade and rendering Israel incapable of preventing Hamas from importing more arms, including longer range missiles, would help anyone except Hamas.

Will any of these questions be asked by the supposedly more legitimate United Nations investigative panel?

Because understanding the IHH plan is absolutely essential to understanding how events unfolded. There is clear evidence, even in Iara Lee's own video, of violent intent, of preparations for violence, and of the ability to act in a violent manner against IDF armed with paintball guns as their primary 'weapons'.

There is also clear evidence of the intent to kidnap soldiers as part of the overall plan. I have begun to wonder if IDF hostages were not a major element, perhaps the linchpin, in the anti-Israel media extravaganza called the 'Freedom Flotilla' by the IHH and other organizing groups. The IHH might have envisioned a best case scenario in which, live on Al Jazeera, they 'negotiated' to trade kidnapped commandos for unobstructed passage to Gaza. Failing that, they could be certain the attempt to take hostage IDF commandos would result in injury to and perhaps the deaths of some 'activists' - an outcome considered acceptable to some of them - at the hands of the IDF. They accurately predicted the headlines across the world - Peaceful Humanitarian Activists Murdered by Israeli Forces, or some variation on that theme- and most of them have been diligently repeating the obvious fiction ever since.

Mavi Marmara Activist Confirms Intent to Take IDF Hostages

2010-09-06T09:31:00.000-07:00

Ebrahim Musaji, aka The Beard

Ebrahim Musaji, the lad from Bristol featured in They Get Held Hostage or They Get Chucked Off, spoke at an event in Bristol on June 7. He confirmed, indirectly, that the IHH intended violent resistance against any IDF attempt to board the ship. And he confirmed that taking IDF commandos hostage was discussed as part of the overall plan beforehand.

Listen to what he says:

I have to say that I'm simultaneously amused and flabbergasted by the boasting from 'activists' about not killing the IDF commandos who were kidnapped - as if beating the crap out of them, throwing them off the deck to land many meters below, dragging them or forcibly marching them below decks, and stashing them on the lowest deck with no external access and without access to necessary medical treatment somehow affirms their 'nonviolent' 'humanitarian' credentials.

Given the violence necessarily involved in taking IDF commandos captive, I am far less charitable about their motives for not killing them, as well. I will elaborate more on this point in another post.

A Missing Piece

2010-09-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

Two of the three IDF commandos who were thrown off the top deck of the Mavi Marmara were thrown over the port side; IDF footage indicates that both landed on the same part of the Level 2 portside deck that Iara Lee's cameraman was on when the Helicopter Scene and the scene immediately preceding it were filmed.

If anyone has any doubts about my argument that Lee's helicopter is not the first, this seals it. By time the cameraman moves inside, following the first injured 'activist' we see in the entire video, two disarmed IDF commandos had already been hauled into the bowels of the ship, "bleeding and wounded", as Kevin Neish put it. And that simply cannot be if Lee's helicopter is the first. We see the third being brought in at about 0:45:27, virtually seven full minutes in continuous video time after the start of the Helicopter Scene.

Does this fact suggest that the helicopter we see is more likely to be the second than the third? I don't think it does; the interval between the departure of the first helicopter and the arrival of the second was two minutes, according to the IDF timeline. The third commando taken hostage had to have been thrown onto the second deck before the second helicopter arrived; according to the IDF he was thrown off just after the first chopper left. That would be about 9 minutes before we see him being carried down the stairs, if the helicopter in Lee's Raw Footage is the second. And that, of course, assumes that the third commando taken to the lower level of the ship was the third thrown off the upper deck, but there is no basis for this assumption. The insignia on his uniform indicates that he likely was the leader of the first team of commandos. If the 'activists' waited at 9 minutes to bring one of the hostages in, is there any particular reason they might not have waited another 9? That would depend on both their reasons for waiting and the reason to bring him inside when they did, the latter of which undoubtedly was a result of the evolving circumstances on the upper decks of the ship.

IDF commando on lower left grasps at rail

The commando we see being carried down the stairs is not unconscious - you can see him grasp the stair rail at the top of the central landing. But he seems to resist feebly rather than forcefully as witnesses like Neish and photographs suggest the other carried down bodily did. Another walked (or perhaps more accurately was walked) down the stairs. This suggests to me that the commando in Lee's footage might have been very badly injured in the attack and/or the fall. Two of the three went over head first, and one - apparently this one - was stabbed in the abdomen. The IDF also say that one of the three was lapsing into unconsciousness when he was rescued.

Injured IDF commando carried is down stairs

Interestingly, the commando we see has been put into a life jacket, unlike either of the others. Color me skeptical of the humanitarian aims of this group, but I would bet my life that was not done out of concern for his safety but rather to disguise him - to make him look to any of the IDF on the top deck looking down or any Israeli surveillance craft overhead like one of the 'activists' while he was being moved.

It seems reasonable to surmise that the 'activists' elected to keep this commando, who clearly has a bloody wound on his abdomen, somewhere on Level 2 until circumstances led them to think that an IDF move to take control of the bridge, located on Level 2, was imminent. Holding onto their human booty, presumably in their minds a bargaining chip, then required that he be moved to the lowest level of the ship. If they chose not to move him as soon as they 'had' him because of his injuries, the decision to move him later indicates that they were less concerned about his well-being than they were about keeping hold of their third hostage.

If the helicopter in Lee's Raw Footage was the third, the IDF move was indeed shortly to come; according to the IDF it began about 4 minutes after the insertion of the team it carried. We see this soldier being carried down the stairs 3 minutes after completion of the insertion filmed and about a minute after the captain's signal/alarm sounded for unknown reasons.

Which Helicopter Is It?

2010-09-05T08:15:00.000-07:00

I watched Iara Lee's Raw Footage many, many times before I finally realized that the helicopter she shows is not the first. The BBC made the same mistake that I and, I would guess, almost everyone else who has viewed Lee's video has made. And by her count, that's more than a million people. In the IDF footage, commandos had no choice but to rappel down a single rope, one after another and sometimes in rapid succession, because they had dropped only two ropes, one of which was rendered useless when 'activists' tied it to the ship's antenna. Lee's footage shows a descent in which three ropes were dropped from a helicopter, at least two of which were used by descending commandos. In fact there are two instances in which we can see pairs going down simultaneously on different ropes. The two sets of footage clearly depict different events.

Which footage shows the real first insertion of IDF commandos onto the ship? No one except a few loons on Youtube says that the first commandos who rappelled onto the deck were not beaten with sticks and metal rods, and even none of them disputes that several were thrown over the side to a lower deck, and that the first three onto the top deck were taken captive. When shown this footage in a BBC Panorama special Bulent Yildirim, head of the IHH, did not claim or imply that any part of what we see in it is fraudulent when the BBC asked him to comment on the 'passive resistance' depicted. And the thermal imagery showing the attack on the commandos is corroborated by confiscated video and closed-circuit footage from the top deck itself.

If the IDF footage depicts the first helicopter, then Lee's Raw Footage shows either the second or the third. Is there evidence of an earlier helicopter insertion in her video? There is. The scene showing the arrival, repelling, and continued harassment of the first IDF fastboat on the ship's starboard side is one of the longest at just over six minutes. It is followed, starting at about 0:37:50 in the full video, by a scene only 3 seconds long. Shot in the same location (Level 3, starboard side deck), it shows 4 men standing at the rail, one of whom is pointing straight up to the sky; what I am certain is a helicopter is audible. I believe the brevity of this scene - at 3 seconds the shortest in the video - is significant.

When the camera is next turned on (assuming no video has been deleted) at about 0:37:53, the cameraman has moved up to Level 2 and is on the opposite side - the port side - of the ship. We hear no helicopter, but the camera shows a fastboat paralleling the ship at some distance and than pans down to show Level 3 below.

What prompted the cameraman, after only 3 seconds, to turn the camera off and head up a level and over to the other side of the ship? I would bet it was the arrival of the first helicopter. But the camera will be turned off yet again - a third time - before the beginning of what I call the Helicopter Scene in which we see the insertion of 8 IDF commandos onto the top deck before the camera shifts so that the helicopter is no longer in its field.

Elements of the Helicopter Scene itself, which starts at about 0:38:24 in Lee's Raw Footage, are interesting. It opens with a lengthy view of a red-streaked corner where a ladder ascends to a hatch opening onto the top deck, on the port side of the ship. The cameraman is in essentially the same place he was before he last turned the camera off. A voice - the cameraman's, I think, because we hear it often - repeatedly says the red streaks are blood until eventually another man says "I think they're using some kind of paintball-looking stuff."

Through all this, in the background, we can hear the sounds of a melee, a brawl. Where are these sounds coming from? The structural sequence of Lee's Raw Footage implies that the first fastboats have come and been repelled and are now merely 'accompanying' the ship at a distance, nothing else of significance has occurred, and nothing important is happening when the Helicopter Scene starts. But given the camera's location, I think the sounds are coming from the top deck. We are hearing 'activists' on the top deck in a confrontation with IDF commandos who are also up there.

This sheds a very different light on the "this is blood" dialogue at the opening of the scene. When I first saw Lee's Raw Footage, my reaction to this segment was that someone was trying to do a bit of Pallywood propaganda; that part of the footage has indeed been used by Lee on Vimeo and by countless others for just that purpose. But if you are trying to do Pallywood propaganda, why would you ask someone to explain that it is paint and not blood for the camera? And why didn't I think of the absurdity of that sooner?? In light of the evidence that at least one IDF helicopter has already arrived - there are IDF commandos on the top deck as this dialogue is being filmed - it takes on a very different significance.

I initially wondered how and why the IDF would have been shooting paintballs that hit the very top of a ladder under a roof on Level 2 - right where a hatch opens onto the top deck - when their concern had to have been dealing with 'activists' on Level 4 who were spraying them with hoses and throwing things at them as they attempted to board shipside from fastboats. I don't know if it's the correct one, but now the obvious answer is that the paintballs that produced these particular streaks were fired from paintball guns on the top deck. The cameraman may actually have thought it was blood because he knew that the IDF were up there, knew that things were violent because IDF commandos had been thrown down. After the explanation that the streaks are paint, the cameraman jocularly says "Forget I hear or saw the real one?" It's impossible to know with certainty what he was alluding to, but perhaps it had something to do with live weapons he has seen prior to this scene.

Another element of the sound in the first part of the Helicopter Scene, before the arrival of the chopper depicted makes it impossible to hear anything, is what we in fact do not hear. There are a couple of loud sounds, one of which I suspect is a paintball gun, but we clearly do not hear gunshots - and we have examples of gunshots after the helicopter leaves to compare these earlier sounds to. Note that in the Helicopter Scene, the camera is on for two full minutes before the arriving chopper drowns out other sounds, and that the cameraman was in essentially the same place for another 30 seconds prior to the start of the Helicopter Scene. That is an absolute minimum of two and half minutes - but almost certainly longer - when IDF commandos were on the top deck, IDF who knew that three of their team had been thrown off to an unknown fate, and we hear not a single gunshot.

This fact puts the lie to Lee's (and Hanen Zuabi's) slanderous assertion that the IDF came to the Mavi Marmara with the intent to kill. It also makes Bulent Yildirim's allegation that IDF were shooting from the helicopters before they set foot on the ship - a claim that has been repeated by numerous 'activists' who were in no position to know - highly implausible at best. If the IDF were willing to shoot a couple of 'activists' on the top deck before the commandos began to rappel down (just to get the remaining ones really agitated?), why would they stop shooting once they were on they deck and under attack?

Time itself in Lee's video is inconsistent with the idea that the helicopter depicted is the first. According to the IDF, the fastboats began their first attempt to board shipside at 4:28, the first helicopter arrived at 4:30; commandos began to rappel down at 4:32, and the helicopter left at 4:33. The second helicopter arrived at 4:35, and third about 10 minutes later at 4:46. The footage of the latter two insertions is too incomplete for meaningful comparisons with Lee's.

Farooq Burney, a Canadian who boarded the Mavi Marmara in Anatolia with the IHH, describes the arrival of the first helicopter as having occurred as the first fastboats were being repelled. He claims to have been on Level 2 at the time. In Lee's footage, four and a half minutes of video time elapse between the arrivals of the first fastboat and of the helicopter captured on video. How much real time that represents is unknowable - the camera was turned off three times between those events and she inexplicably (or not) chose to erase the digital time stamps before uploading the footage to Youtube. But Burney's description is more consistent with the IDF timeline than is Lee's footage.

If we accept the IDF timeline, the elapsed video time in Lee's footage - 2.5 minutes on film between the first helicopter we hear and the arrival of the helicopter we see - it seems unlikely that her video depicts the second helicopter. We hear no helicopter at all in the 30-second scene shot on Level 2 after hearing the first chopper in the 3 second scene preceding it, and we do not hear a departing helicopter in the opening seconds of the helicopter scene itself, which runs a full two minutes before the chopper recorded in the Raw Footage arrives.

Burney's account is consistent with the IDF timeline in another respect that sheds light on but doesn't resolve the question of which helicopter Lee's footage depicts. According to the IDF account, the second team of commandos to arrive secured the hatches to the deck below, presumably to prevent additional 'activists' from reinforcing those already on the top deck. No attempt to take Level 2 right below, on which the bridge is located, was made until after the arrival of the third team, nearly 15 minutes after the first was inserted. What ensued in the interim was a sort of uneasy standoff for the most part. Burney describes the first and second insertions as failures which, in the context of his broader comments, means that the IDF teams inserted did not overcome the 'activists' on the top deck or take the bridge. My point is that what we see in the prelude of the Helicopter Scene is consistent with what the IDF and, to a certain extent, Burney say was happening after both the first and second helicopters had left but before the arrival of the third.

Lee has claimed that her motive for uploading Raw Footage to Youtube was to allow people to see for themselves what happened; she makes much of the fact that it is 'uncensored' as I have already discussed in Who Called the Shots? It does contain fragments of useful information many of which, ironically, corroborate the IDF account of events; see also It's stupid to shoot Israelis, to try to [ ] soldiers and They get held hostage or they get chucked off.

But Lee's decision to remove the digital time stamps prior to making the video publicly available smacks of yet another attempt to promote a particular narrative, as I argued in Mavi Marmara Propaganda. After the 3 second scene, we have no way to know whether 3 minutes or 13 have elapsed in real time before the Helicopter Scene starts. We never hear another helicopter after this scene, but the camera was turned on and off many more times. The entire elapsed time from first direct encounter with the IDF fastboats to taking control of the ship's bridge in Lee's video is less than 20 minutes; the IDF say it was 36, and Burney describes the entire sequence of events as taking 45 minutes but may have been counting from when the first IDF fastboats and support boats were first spotted about 5 minutes before the shipside attempt to board. Without digital time stamps, there is no way to know what is not recorded on film, or even what the real sequence of events was.

The grand narrative - or Big Lie, if you will - that emerges from the lack of temporal context might be called 'death by helicopter', the narrative that the IHH have consistently promoted of valiant humanitarian aid workers nonviolently fending off the evil IDF with whatever they can find at hand, only to be cut down when the first helicopter arrives on the scene.

In Lee's footage, we do indeed hear live fire after the only helicopter shown leaves, and we see the first injured 'activist' captured on film in the entire video shortly after. But it isn't the first helicopter and it is obvious that the situation had changed significantly after what occurred to the commandos inserted by the first helicopter. Was the first one not filmed? If not, why not? What cameraman out to record the greatest event in 'Free Gaza' history would willingly give a pass on the opportunity to record that and its alleged bloody aftermath? Why is Lee's Raw Footage of such a momentous event, from the perspective of the flotillistas, that occurred over more than 30 minutes barely half that long?

Do we see the second or the third helicopter? Why doesn't Iara Lee want us to know?

Mavi Marmara Propaganda

2010-08-23T09:39:00.000-07:00

Since releasing Israeli Attack on the Mavi Marmara//Raw Footage on June 11, Iara Lee appears to have assumed the role of chief propagandist, at least in North America, for the "Free Gaza" flotillistas. In an interview with The Young Turks on June 29, she showed a brief video she had created at about the time of her press conference at the UN on June 10 for release to major media networks. The only bright spot is that the mainstream media didn't bite; there may be hope for them yet.

The brief video is an unapologetic propaganda piece; Lee says her goal was to show the other side of the story and to demonstrate that the confiscated footage the IDF had released and that the media were broadcasting is "fake". Wow, she doesn't mince words! But she never does say exactly what she claims was "fake" in any of confiscated or other footage released by Israel. Lee shows us families and young people socializing, the breathtaking beauty of a sunset over the Mediterranean Sea, lots of mostly youngish folks working away on laptop computers, and a tiny peek at vigilant "activists" standing at the ship's rail dutifully keeping watch for the IDF when they aren't grabbing a bit of well-deserved shut-eye wherever they could find space to lie down.

We do not hear power saws cutting metal, someone who has to be a British national explaining that the plan is to take hostage or "chuck off" boarding IDF, or an "activist" muttering about the stupidity of shooting Israelis after the IDF have taken control of the ship. We see no one taking cut bits of the ship from under tarpaulins and putting them in handy spots around the ship's rail on lower decks for use against the IDF when they arrive, no IHH organizers shooing the cameraman away from an 'inconvenient' location or activity, and certainly not any captured IDF commandos.

Much of the fluff uses video that is not in the Raw Footage Lee has released; she doesn't tell us whether it comes from previous times and places or whether she has in her possession - or has access to - additional smuggled footage from the Mavi Marmara which has not been released. I suspect the latter because in at least one of these "new" clips, several individuals are recognizable from the Raw Footage.

I've prepared a brief video that summarizes my thoughts about Lee's propaganda piece:

Not surprisingly, she falsifies the order of events during the IDF interdiction, presenting a narrative in which at first defenseless "activists" were subjected to gunfire from a helicopter hovering above the ship; in defiant desperation the "activists", David, could only fire slingshots at the death-delivering IDF Goliath hovering above them. The allusion is so transparent it would be laughable if so many people hadn't been sucked in by it. The uninformed casual viewer of Lee's propaganda piece would never know that the IDF's first attempt to board the Mavi Marmara was at shipside from fastboats, where they were met with such violent resistance from "activists" that they gave up the attempt in less than a minute.

Lee follows the footage of the helicopter "assault" with a very selective fragment from a much longer segment I call The Stairwell Scene, where "activists" armed with various improvised weapons filled the central stairwell that connects the 2nd and lower levels and opens onto the exterior side decks - their objective apparently to prevent the IDF from penetrating further into the ship. Lee chooses a seconds-long clip that shows the "activists" in a more defensive posture and omits the longer parts where "activists" chant "Allahu akbar" and rap their improvised weapons against the wall, where an apparent organizer rallies the group with loud calls invoking Allah, and where one "activist" proudly brandishes for the camera an IDF helmet in one hand, a heavy stick in the other and shouts aggressively. She does show their use of a human shield though, a woman (?) dressed from head to toe, face covered, in black Islamic garb standing alone at the top of the stairwell. Rather than indicating a moment of honesty, though, I think this reflects the adoption by the left of the perverse idea that using human shields is admirable rather than deplorable because of the implied 'bravery' of the action by the shield.

Lee shows clips from what looks like every scene of injured people her "raw footage" captured, and uses different segments of the one instance her cameraman filmed of a stretcher carrying a dead "activist" twice for impact. Predictably, amidst the scenes of the injured Lee inserts a clip - again not from her "raw footage" - showing an elderly Christian priest standing, his hands steepled in prayer, amidst praying Muslims as if this is an ecumenical group seeking deliverance from the evil being rained down upon them. This is followed by video of bearded men cuddling babies, young men and women in casual conversation, and overlain with her emotion-choked words from her introduction of the "Raw Footage" to the UN press corps on June 10:

Was this a lynch mob moved by hatred of Israelis or was it a cross section of humanity moved by the plight of Gaza? Did we lay a trap for the Israeli commandos or did they unnecessarily attack us? Did we take them by surprise or did they take us by surprise? Do you see a premeditated ambush or do you see some passengers using items at hand to protect themselves from an unprovoked assault?

I've come to think that Lee's performance at the UN was worthy of an Oscar nomination. These questions might have been reasonable when she first presented the Raw Footage - although they were posed more as assertions of fact to which the answers were obvious (all Ayes in favor of the "activists") than as questions. But I suspect that none of the journalists present at that event have looked at her footage carefully enough to see the evidence buried in it of the "activists'" premeditation and their preparations to, in fact, ambush the boarding members of the IDF.

But superimposing her nearly tearful words over this carefully crafted propaganda piece when she has diligently deleted all that evidence contained in the "raw footage" is simple, brazen dishonesty. Her purpose is
to promote the IHH narrative of events, including their allegation that several "activists" were shot from the first helicopter before any commandos rappelled onto the ship. Conveniently, the upper deck where all this occurred was restricted to only select IHH personnel both before the interdiction and during the IDF insertions by helicopter. And in accordance with the IHH narrative, we see improvised weapons in the hands of "activists" only after this alleged atrocity by the IDF, as they gathered up whatever "items" were (conveniently close) "at hand" to defend their lives.

This little video makes Lee's and other flotillistas' complaints of IDF "propagandizing" and fakery worse than laughable.

The entire TYT interview is interesting and was more informative than I expected it to be. I was particularly struck by Lee's description of her pleasure when the Challenger 2, the boat on which she originally was slotted to travel, broke down and its occupants were transferred to the Mavi Marmara:

I was happy because it was a bigger variety of nationalities and people from all walks of life and I knew it was going to be the action boat [but I never thought it was going to get that extreme].

When the interviewer questions her about her description of the Mavi Marmara as the "action boat", she tries to walk back her slip-up by referring again to the diversity of people on board. Anybody dumb enough to fall for that? Her arrogance is fortunate, in a sense, because she thinks people are too stupid to see what she's really up to.

She and probably everybody else on all six ships knew the Mavi Marmara was going to be the "action boat". Not everyone on the Mavi Marmara knew exactly what that meant, but they all had to have heard the power saws cutting metal. They could (and did as we see in Who Called the Shots*) walk past all the preparations for the IDF's arrival, but accepted that the IHH would not permit them to photograph them, as Neish tells us. Pictures in the wrong hands would undermine the myth of unprepared and unwitting humanitarian activists ambushed by the IDF. But they all had to have known that violent resistance against the IDF boarding parties was in store given the nature of the preparations they were witness to. The evidence was right in front of their eyes and literally buzzing in their ears.

Yet they all continue to pretend otherwise, continue to lie about it, and continue to propagate the myth of a heartless Israel and its demonic IDF. Because the myth was their real objective.

* A clip from confiscated footage recently released has been making the rounds primarily because it shows Hanen Zuabi arguing with the IDF to prevent them from taking seriously injured "activists" by helicopter to Israeli hospitals. Yes, prevent. But another interesting bit in that clip shows the man I call Mr. Portly in the page describing the "Raw Footage" casually walk past the preparations for the IDF's arrival without giving the gas masks and other paraphernalia so much as a passing glance.

Kevin Neish on IHH Censorship on the Mavi Marmara

2010-08-15T06:03:00.000-07:00

Kevin Neish, a Canadian aboard the Mavi Marmara when it was interdicted by Israeli forces, has provided independent evidence that supports my contention that Iara Lee's "Raw Footage" is lop-sided in part because of constraints placed by IHH organizers on photographing preparations for the IDF's arrival.

Listen to what he had to say on this subject:

After arriving back in Victoria to a hero's welcome, Neish gave a talk in Toronto on July 8 in which he detail what he claims to have seen and what he understands to have happened from fellow activists. It can be found here, here, here and here.

Who Called the Shots?

2010-08-12T12:07:00.000-07:00

Seriously, no pun intended. I'm referring to videography not weaponry.

Robert Mackey, editor of the NYT blog The Lede, headlined Iara Lee's Raw Footage as Unedited Video of Israeli Raid Posted On Line. Unedited. How does he know the footage is unedited? Apparently because Iara Lee said so, and that's good enough for him. I couldn't help but note that every time a commenter referred to footage released by the IDF, Mackey invariably diminished its value, even denigrated it, by describing it as "edited". He clarified that the IDF releases obviously had been labelled and were selective clips. [Yes, they are, although this does not necessarily mean that they are misleading. I, like many others, wish that the IDF would post all the footage they confiscated.] The unstated implication seems to be 'and who knows what else has been done to them'. So we get the message: unedited = good, edited = bad. There is clearly a tendency to equate "unedited" with good, whole and truthful, while "edited" is bad, distorted and misleading.

As I indicated in It's stupid to shoot Israelis, to try to [ ] soldiers, there are sufficient indications of what may in fact be editing in Lee's video that full disclosure of the uncompressed video file is not only warranted but essential. This aside, is it appropriate to assume that Lee's Raw Footage is whole and truthful, or at least more whole and truthful than the footage released by the IDF?

Lee's Raw Footage is 62 minutes 13 seconds long, and the footage bears no digital time stamp; it does bear a CulturesOfResistance.org logo, however. This does not necessarily mean that the content of the video has been altered, however, something Mackey seemed unwilling to concede might also be true of the IDF footage. Iara Lee, self-proclaimed activist, gets the benefit of the doubt but the IDF do not.

Those 60-plus minutes include more than 70 obvious discontinuities - places where the camera was turned off and on. According to Mackey, Lee said that "the camera had been turned off and on a few times". That is many more than a "few times" in my book. And this raises the obvious questions: why was the camera turned off when it was? Whose decision was it to turn the camera off? For how long was the camera off? How much real time elapsed over the course of those 62 minutes? Were there purposeful exclusions from the footage that reflected the interests and desires of the subjects and/or the videographer and film maker?

In fact, the bulk of video before the IDF boats came into close proximity to the Mavi Marmara constitutes what I call "fluff": nearly 2.5 minutes of various socializing scenes, more than 6 minutes devoted to Islamic prayer, more than 3.5 minutes of views of the media room and people in it, and 5 entire minutes devoted to showing on a flatscreen television or monitor interviews being filmed and broadcast from the ship! That's 18 minutes out of less than 32. Most of the rest of those early minutes show us 'activists' sleeping wherever they can or vigilantly standing at the ship's rail, often by rigged theatrical spotlights, dutifully watching out for a glimpse of the IDF.

Selectivity doesn't only happen in the editing room. Videographers and film producers choose which subjects to shoot and which subjects to ignore. Sometimes their subjects make the choice for them, refusing to allow filming. There is solid evidence in Lee's Raw Footage that selectivity, certainly at times by 'activists', leads to a very skewed depiction of activities aboard the ship in the hours before the IDF arrived.

Lee has claimed that her video demonstrates that the assault was initiated by the IDF, that 'activists' and other passengers aboard were caught unaware and unprepared, and that they merely acted to defend themselves with whatever items they could find at hand. In my opinion, having viewed Lee's Raw Footage very carefully and many times over, her video demonstrates several things, none of them the things she claims.

First, it is apparent that filming in certain areas and/or of some activities and/or things was not permitted by the activists. There are also fairly persuasive examples of the videographer turning the camera off and/or panning to another direction to avoid filming things the 'activists' did not want recorded. Consequently, we get only brief glimpses of the preparation and strategic placement of improvised weapons prior to the IDF's arrival.

Second, the 'activists' were far from unprepared although I will grant that they may not have been as prepared as they would have liked. They had brought aboard a great deal of paraphernalia that clearly was intended for use in a confrontation with the IDF, not humanitarian aid, including gas masks, lights that could be strapped to a person's forehead, huge flashlights, slingshots, and bullhorns. In addition, they also had numerous large theatrical spotlights and other lights that they set up at the ship's rail in those areas they thought an approach to the ship by the IDF was most likely to occur. Nests and snarls of extension cords and power bars were arrayed across the Level 3 stern deck to power them. We catch only a couple of glimpses of sawn off pieces of the ships rails and rigging in her video prior to the IDF's arrival, but there are two places where you can hear a power saw cutting metal in the background. One of these is in the first scene, starting at about 0:00:11 seconds in Lee's Raw Footage, which I did not notice before I put together the video below. The second, ironically (or perhaps not), is during a scene of men praying.

Third, Lee has demonstrated what is either stunning naivete or shameless duplicity in her public statements, including that which introduced her Raw Footage to the press on June 10. Or is she completely unaware of what her videographer captured on film?

I will address the issue of who initiated the violence in another post.

Meantime, here's a video I put together of some of the glimpses and hints of censorship in Lee's "Raw Footage".

"They get held hostage or they get chucked off."

2010-08-12T06:37:00.000-07:00

A scene including what I call "The Conversation" begins at about 0:15:52 in Iara Lee's "Raw Footage". Actually, a very short scene immediately preceding it is probably related, but I'll address that later.

Have a listen:

Before 0:16:02 in the "Raw Footage" only the odd word is discernible, even with audio filters. We hear two voices speaking - the first, Voice #1, in with what I think is some kind of European accent, the second, Voice #2, with a very distinctive (northern?) British accent.

Using two filters simultaneously, starting at 0:16:02 I hear this:

Voice#1:     What are you, what's happening? What are you guys going to do?

This is followed by more largely inaudible voices, although I think but cannot be certain that I hear Voice#1 say "What are you going to do to them?" I then hear this:

Voice#2:     They get chucked off.

Voice#1:     Huh?

Voice#2:    They get held hostage or they get chucked off.

Voice#1:     Checked off?

Voice#2:     [much more loudly] They get chucked off, they get thrown off.

Voice#1:     Oh, OK. [pause] What if they like, land in helicopters? Huh?

Voice#2:     There's people everywhere. These guys, these guys, these Turks, they're not like uh us coming    from the easy life. Come on a boat. To Gaza. They they they're like they they're always ready for these things.

Voice#1:     Yeah. [pause] So they, they're ready to fight, huh?

Voice#2:     Whatever whatever happens.

First, it is important to note that in the first clearly intelligible phrase, Voice#1 says "What are you guys going to do?" He obviously is asking an "activist" what their plans are for the IDF when they arrive, as we might reasonably infer from the rest of what we hear since we know the "activists" did not have helicopters at their disposal. He obviously is not asking what might happen to them - the "activists" - when the IDF arrive. On NYT's The Lede, the editor Robert Mackey insisted that there was no way to know who was going to get chucked off when several commenters pointed out the obvious, loud "They get chucked off, they get thrown off". Mackey apparently hadn't bothered to listen very carefully to this segment of audio and wasn't about to allow his preconceptions be demolished by the evidence in the video he himself headlined as "unedited".

I infer that Voice#1 is not a native speaker of English for two reasons: I detect a slight accent that I think is European as I mentioned before, but his inability to understand the colloquial phrase "chucked off" is also telling. And I get the distinct impression from his tone that he's not thrilled to learn this. When he asks "What if they like, land in helicopters?" his tone is almost challenging, as if he thinks the idea is, well, doomed to failure. And when he asks "So they, they're ready to fight, huh?" his tone is decidedly lacking in enthusiasm.

The Conversation is clear, straight-up evidence, 'untainted' by the IDF, that the "activists" aboard the Mavi Marmara planned not only to act to repel any IDF who attempted to board but also intended to attempt to take IDF commandos hostage. That such actions would involve violence on their part goes without saying, since they could not have hoped to accomplish either of these objectives by nonviolent means.

Ebrahim Musaji, who I call The Beard

It would be interesting to know who the speakers are. I don't know about Voice #1, although I'm pretty sure I hear his voice in the background on occasion in several early scenes showing "activists" on the stern deck of Level 3. I'm virtually certain, though, that Voice #2 is the man we catch a glimpse of at the end of The Conversation, the man I call The Beard. We can see that he is talking as we hear "Whatever, whatever happens", and in another scene we learn that The Beard speaks with a very distinctive (northern?) British accent. And stammers.

Turns out his name is Ebrahim Musaji, and he's a Bristol lad. You can hear him almost confirm at a press conference 'the plan' to take hostages he articulated, perhaps unknowingly, for Iara Lee's cameraman here.

"It's stupid to shoot Israelis, to try to [ ] soldiers."

2010-08-12T05:46:00.000-07:00

Remarkably enough, these words were spoken by a man - the man I call White Pack in the page describing the video - on the Mavi Marmara after the IDF had taken control of the ship. Have a listen:

Several things are interesting about this clip from Iara Lee's "Raw Footage". First is the man who says these words. White Pack appears to have been a flotilla member with some official responsibilities: he is seen briefing people in the media room about where the Israeli ships are and how they seem to be moving relative to the flotilla, and he carried a walky-talky as he did so. In the briefing he appears to have misinformed them about whether there had been direct contact between the Mavi Marmara and the IDF - he tells them no, but earlier we saw an Al Jazeera report that has to have been predicated on radio contact with the IDF. It's possible the Al Jazeera reporter was lying although unlikely; the IDF have provided evidence of their radio contact with the flotilla ships. Who is this guy?

Second, there is undoubtedly a word or phrase missing in the middle of the sentence; I hear a dead space, a blank, not a pause. I would really like to know what he said "activists" tried to do, beyond shooting Israeli soldiers. I don't know why a word or phrase is missing; I don't have the expertise to determine whether a word or phrase has been scrubbed from the audio track. It could be an error introduced by the compression software used when the video was uploaded to Youtube. Iara Lee could provide the answer because she has the original video.

Third, immediately after this statement there is a visual discontinuity in the video. Literally from one frame to the next - and in the video editor I have this is measured in 1/30ths of a second - the light is much brighter, the people are positioned differently in the frame, and two of them have moved their heads markedly: White Pack's goes from looking nearly straight down to looking straight across, and the man behind him goes from looking 90 degrees to his right to facing the camera. Could this indicate editing of the video, or is this yet another compression error? I don't know but I would like some answers from Iara Lee and her video production team.

Finally, neither the distinguished looking white haired man I call Mr. Portly nor the young woman sitting on the floor with her back against the wall seem surprised to hear that "activists" were shooting Israeli soldiers (and trying to do something else to them as well). It appears not to be news to them, and if it is it certainly doesn't look like it is shocking or unwelcome news. If anyone is startled by this revelation it is the cameraman who, if you watch the subsequent part of the scene in the Raw Footage, quickly turns and walks away with his camera bobbing around wildly. Maybe he was startled not to learn this but to hear someone say it on camera?

This raises a very important question about the credibility of all the passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara. When controversy was initially raging about Israel’s claim that several of its commandos had been shot by ‘activists’ why didn’t White Pack or any of the others who knew about this speak out? And the controversy about this rages on in some circles – the ones that don’t believe anything Israel says unless it sheds a bad light on her. Ken O’Keefe – the only ‘activist’ to admit having had an IDF pistol in his possession – continues to claim, somewhat circuitously, that no ‘activists’ used guns, even while elsewhere he has admitted that he cannot directly account for the other two weapons taken from captured commandos. I won’t even address the illogic of his rationale for hiding what he claims was an unloaded IDF gun.

If flotilla participants have not spoken forthrightly about this – which is captured on video by one of them and made public by one of them, and is ‘untainted’ by Israel – what else are they not speaking forthrightly about?