Israel deports five Free Gaza activists
03 / 07 / 2009
http://www.maannews.net/en/
Gaza - Ma'an - Five Bahraini citizens participating in the Free Gaza
Movement's voyage to Gaza were deported on Friday, following their Tuesday
afternoon seizure by Israeli forces in international waters off the Gaza
coast.
Coordinator of the Palestinian International Campaign to Lift the Siege
Amjad Ash-Shawa confirmed that one of the Bahraini nationals is a reporter
for the Al-Jazeera network. All five are expected to be escorted to Ben
Gurion International Airport where other Al-Jazeera journalists will be
awaiting their arrival.
Two Palestinian activists and organizers with the Free Gaza Movement were
released Thursday, and reported being held in unsanitary warehouse quarters
and were questioned by Israeli intelligence.
A report from the New York Times said the Bahrainis were kept in a separate
facility from other imprisoned solidarity activists like former US
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Irish peace activist and Nobel laureate,
Mairead Corrigan Maguire.
Ireland demands release of nationals
Ireland's Foreign Affairs Minister Micheál Martin called for the swift
release of two Irish nationals detained from the ship including the Nobel
Peace Prize winner and a second man identified as Derek Graham.
In a statement received by the Free Gaza Movement, Martin said his
department has been closely following the situation and was in ongoing
contact with Israeli authorities.
"My immediate priority is ensuring the safety and welfare of Ms Maguire and
Mr Graham and securing their release as soon as possible," the minister
said.
"I have been assured by the Israeli authorities that they are both well and
are being properly treated. An officer from the Irish Embassy in Tel Aviv
visited yesterday with Ms Maguire and Mr Graham to provide assistance and
will endeavor to make a further consular visit today."
"I would again renew my call for the release of Ms Maguire and Mr Graham as
well as the other nineteen passengers detained on The Spirit of Humanity,"
he added.
"I would also call upon the Israeli Government to ensure that the
humanitarian supplies for the people of Gaza being transported on The Spirit
of Humanity are made available as soon as possible to the Palestinian
authorities for distribution."
The minister called the current Israeli blockade of Gaza "completely
unacceptable" and called for all border crossings into the coastal salient
to be opened to humanitarian and commercial traffic.
The Free Gaza Movement's ship, the Spirit of Humanity, was overtaken by
eight Israeli naval warships in international waters on 30 June. All 22 crew
members aboard the vessel were detained and most will be deported, Israeli
authorities said. The Israeli navy threatened to fire on the boat, which
identified itself as a civilian ship bringing supplies to the Gaza Strip,
and noted they had been cleared for sail by Cyprus customs authorities.
The ship was nonetheless boarded and taken over, then brought to the Israeli
port of Ashdod where activists were taken to prison facilities.
===
http://www.juancole.com/
Saturday, July 04, 2009 Juan cole
Mediterranean Piracy on the Fourth US hostages held in foreign country on
Fourth of July<http://www.ajc.com/
including a former Congresswoman, after having been captured in a naked act
of piracy in international<http://www.
after the Americans attempted to respond to a crisis provoked by
crimes
against humanity, as detailed by Amnesty
International<http://www.
.
Once upon a time, Americans would have had the guts to
mind<http://www.pccua.edu/
a thing.
Gazans and other Palestinians under Israeli occupation do not enjoy "life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and have not been able to "institute"
a "government" of their own to secure those rights. The occupation authority
that rules them does not derive its "powers" from the "consent of the
government." The occupation government has become destructive to these ends.
I think we know what the American Founding Fathers would say the
Palestinians need.
This letter was originally
broadcast<http://www.youtube.
3rd
Letter from an Israeli Jail
By Cynthia McKinney
This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock
in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently
imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies -
and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for
children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire
on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and
arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We
have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have
been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to
the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel’s Operation ‘Cast Lead’ [in December 2008], I
boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day’s notice and tried, as the US
representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical
supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.
During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16’s rained hellfire on a
trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide.
U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME
weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated
before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who
were there in Gaza during Israel’s onslaught that Gaza had become Israel’s
veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the
kill ratio of their weapons.
The world saw Israel’s despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and
Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around
the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get
into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in
international water ... It’s a miracle that I’m even here to write about my
second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission
aborted by the Israeli military.
The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a
crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in
prison for collecting crayons to kids?
Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to
people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own
lives on the line for someone else’s children. Israel is the fullest
expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza’s
children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of
legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.
I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint
after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am
being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza’s children could
color & paint, that Gaza’s wounded could be healed, and that Gaza’s
bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.
But I’ve learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of
all, it’s incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a
dream ... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their
twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream
that their lives would be better ... The once proud, never colonized
Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and
become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free
their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than
human rights and self-determination.
My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the
exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a
dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for
them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can
only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn’t cheap. Many
of them represent their family’s best collective efforts for
self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission
for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their
certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they
made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them “there is no UN
in Israel.
The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole
of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud
women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked
them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign,
Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world’s
first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look
deeper.
The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of
these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped
in Ramle’s detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates
cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with
them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and
while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial
elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes
we can’ were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment,
individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed
in.
It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the
voters of America as was Israel’s marketing to the world. It tricked all of
us but, more tragically, these young women.
We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent
us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior’s letter from a
Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that
I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and
the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they’ve done to others around the
world.
What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am
in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people’s
children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I’m experiencing the harsh reality
which is why people need dreams. [But] I’m lucky. I will leave this place.
Has Israel become the place where dreams die?
Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I
see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:]
what are you willing to do?
Let’s change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings:
Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who
have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of
the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State’s
Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified
refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I
appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy,
George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the
Palestinian people.
I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine,
and to the women I’ve met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009,
also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.
---
Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party presidential
candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice.
The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney
served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and
from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while
attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June
30th. For more information, please see
http://www.FreeGaza.org<http:/
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