| Flotilla Follies keep on going. Comedy gold! Posted: 04 Jul 2011 07:56 PM PDT From AFP: Thirty pro-Palestinian activists on a Canadian boat bound for Gaza that was stopped out of a Greek port Monday for breaking a ban, defied authorities by claiming they had all captained the ship.
Greek coastguards halted the Canadian vessel Tahrir about 10 minutes after it left port on the island of Crete Monday afternoon with some 40 people on board, organisers said.
"We have been boarded by about 15 armed special forces," David Heap of the Canadian Boat to Gaza organization said by phone from the vessel.
"I'm being blocked by a man with a machine gun," he said over the noise of shouting from passengers he said were being pushed around. "We are not using force back," he added.
The Tahrir, which was carrying activists from Canada, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Turkey, was forced to turn back to Aghios Nikolaos port in Crete, as Heap and others shouted, "We have to go to Gaza. Let us pass!"
It had sailed without a captain in the hope of avoiding a severe legal repercussions.
Passenger Joseph Dube, a former Belgium senator with an expired captain's licence, had sailed the ship and agreed to take full legal responsibility, according to the Tahrir's spokesperson Huwaida Arraf.
When authorities boarded the boat and demanded to speak to the captain, some 30 passengers "claimed they were the captain," she said.
"Everyone took part in manning the boat in one way or another -- they all had a go at sailing it. The idea is that it will be difficult to arrest 30 people," she said.
It is not yet clear what will happen to the passengers on the Tahrir.
"We left as a volunteer crew. It was legal for us to do so under international law, they had no right to stop us," Heap said, adding: "Our destination is still Gaza."
Earlier on Monday, French activists had been joined by their American counterparts to stage a "symbolic departure," on the Louise Michel boat in defiance of the Greek ban.
"And we're off!" shouted the passengers, cheering and waving as the captain of the Louise Michele unfurled the sails and wildly beeped the boat's horn, chanting "One, two, three four, Occupation No More!"
Activists from the impounded Audacity had begun a hunger-strike in front of the US embassy on Sunday to protest against the arrest of their captain, who was allegedly being held in "shocking conditions".
They were quickly moved on by police.
French Captain Alain Connan said he had decided not to set sail because he risked being slapped with a long prison sentence.
Head of the Palestinian National Initiative (PNI) Moustafa Barghouti said the demonstration was an "exciting moment" and that people in Gaza had "already called to say how grateful they are for such a devoted show of solidarity".
Standing out on deck wrapped in a Palestinian flag, he said the protest was helping "expose not only Israel's blockade and occupation but also the complicity of the European and American governments". Fatah-oriented Palestinian Arab media are pretty much ignoring the entire flotilla story. Hamas prime minister Haniyeh saluted the would-be seafarers. The US Boat to Gaza website adds: Two boats from France – a cargo ship and a smaller passenger boat – are in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. (They did not set sail from Greece.) We are not sure what they are planning on doing.
The Irish boat was sabotaged beyond repair last week and the Greek boat was also sabotaged but we do not have an update on their status. Free Gaza called for a protest today in front of the Greek embassy in London. I couldn't find any footage of this massive London protest - for some reason none was uploaded to the Free Gaza site - so we will have to make due with footage of the Dublin protest, where a huge crowd of eight people or so got to listen to other people shouting unintelligible slogans with bullhorns: Montreal managed to scrounge about a dozen lethargic protesters in support of the floptilla: The flotidiot's tweets are also hilarious, as they compare the Greeks stopping them from sailing to Nazis "following orders." Their smug sense of self-righteousness - where they are now "fasting" for their flotilla - is classic. You can get a taste of their holier-than-thou attitudes in this report from Euronews: Of course, Israel is the source for all evil, and now the Greeks are guilty by proxy. And here are the poor, starving children that they are trying to help so badly: 
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| Grapel still in custody Posted: 04 Jul 2011 04:30 PM PDT Last week Yediot Aharonot published a rumor that Ilan Grapel would be released in by the weekend. Obviously, that didn't happen. Palestine Today says that Egypt rejected a US plea to release Grapel, saying it is a matter for the Egyptian judiciary. 
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| "Freedom Flotilla" - look closer Posted: 04 Jul 2011 11:18 AM PDT Doesn't "freedom" sound wonderful? Unfortunately, sometimes people use that word but they mean something completely different - or even the opposite. In those cases, you have to look closer. Click to enlarge. 
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| Boat people (Hitchens) Posted: 04 Jul 2011 10:14 AM PDT From Christopher Hitchens in Slate: The tale of the Gaza "flotilla" seems set to become a regular summer feature, bobbing along happily on the inside pages with an occasional update....
However, given the luxury of time, might it not be possible to ask the "activists" on board just a few questions? (Activist is a good neutral word, isn't it, with largely positive connotations?) Most of the speculation so far has been to do with methods and intentions, allowing for many avowals about peaceful tactics and so forth, but this is soft-centered coverage. I would like to know a little more about the political ambitions and implications of the enterprise.
Only a few weeks ago, the Hamas regime in Gaza became the only governing authority in the world—by my count—to express outrage and sympathy at the death of Osama Bin Laden. As the wavelets lap in the Greek harbors, and the sunshine beats down, doesn't any journalist want to know whether the "activists" have discussed this element in their partners' world outlook? Does Alice Walker seriously have no comment?
Hamas is listed by various governments and international organizations as a terrorist group. I don't mind conceding that that particular word has been used in arbitrary ways in the past. But what concerns me much more is the official programmatic adoption, by Hamas, of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This disgusting fabrication is a key foundational document of 20th-century racism and totalitarianism, indelibly linked to the Hitler regime in theory and practice. It seems extraordinary to me that any "activist" claiming allegiance to human rights could cooperate at any level with the propagation of such evil material. But I have never seen any of them invited to comment on this matter, either.
The little boats cannot make much difference to the welfare of Gaza either way, since the materials being shipped are in such negligible quantity. The chief significance of the enterprise is therefore symbolic. And the symbolism, when examined even cursorily, doesn't seem too adorable. The intended beneficiary of the stunt is a ruling group with close ties to two of the most retrograde dictatorships in the Middle East, each of which has recently been up to its elbows in the blood of its own civilians. The same group also manages to maintain warm relations with, or at the very least to make cordial remarks about, both Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Meanwhile, a document that was once accurately described as a "warrant for genocide" forms part of the declared political platform of the aforesaid group. There is something about this that fails to pass a smell test. I wonder if any reporter on the scene will now take me up on this. Read the whole thing. (h/t D) 
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| Hello Rafah, hello Gaza (video) Posted: 04 Jul 2011 08:10 AM PDT Don't know who made this, but it is pretty good. And since this gives me a reason to post it again, here was my version of that song from a couple of years ago: (h/t Omri) 
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| Did Abbas retract his Holocaust denial? Posted: 04 Jul 2011 06:00 AM PDT In an interview with Dutch media, PA president Mahmoud Abbas was asked about his views of the Holocaust: Is it true that you deny the extent of the Holocaust in which six million Jews were killed?
"No, I do not deny the Holocaust. I know that the Holocaust took place during WWII. I have studied and written a book about. I believe that many Jews were murdered and that other peoples of other nationalities were murdered . So I agree, I admit there were pogroms, that genocide was committed during the war against the Jews by the Nazi regime. "
How many Jews were killed according to you?
"I've heard from the Israelis that there were six million. I can accept that."
So are you yourself convinced of that number?
"I accept what they say. If they say six million, six million I say. It is up to them to decide, because they know better than e." In Abbas' doctoral thesis, he wrote, "the Zionist fantasy, the fantastic lie that six million Jews were killed." In the book he wrote based on the thesis, he wrote, "It seems that the interest of the Zionist movement, however, is to inflate this figure [of Holocaust deaths] so that their gains will be greater. This led them to emphasize this figure [six million] in order to gain the solidarity of international public opinion with Zionism. Many scholars have debated the figure of six million and reached stunning conclusions — fixing the number of Jewish victims at only a few hundred thousand...Following the war, word was spread that six million Jews were amongst the victims and that a war of extermination was aimed primarily at the Jews . . . The truth is that no one can either confirm or deny this figure. In other words, it is possible that the number of Jewish victims reached six million, but at the same time it is possible that the figure is much smaller, below one million." He also claimed that the Jews who were killed were victims of a Zionist-Nazi plot. So how can we reconcile Abbas from 1983 and Abbas today? Simple - he is a liar. When Israeli media asked him about his thesis and book, Abbas told Maariv, "When I wrote `The Other Side,' we were at war with Israel. Today I would not have made such remarks." Which means that he is willing to lie about his beliefs if the lies are politically expedient. So which is more likely - that he lied about his beliefs in a doctoral thesis and subsequent book that took hundreds of hours to write, or that he is lying now because he does not want to appear to be a Holocaust denier to the Europeans and Americans? (h/t jzaik) 
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| First person video of Syrian sniper shooting cameraman Posted: 04 Jul 2011 02:54 AM PDT From Ha'aretz: Syrian opposition released footage Sunday that it says was filmed in the restive city of Homs, in which a civilian cameraman is fired upon by troops dispatched by President Bashar Assad.
In the video, the photographer documents the security forces firing indiscriminately at citizens and homes in the Karm a-Shami neighborhood. As the photographer narrates what is happening around him, the camera focuses on a uniformed man hiding near a house below.
After a few seconds the soldier is seen pointing his gun at the photographer and firing, apparently hitting him as the camera drops. Media outlets outside of Syria have yet to verify the events documented. No idea if the cameraman survived. 
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