The photos and video compiled by Ali Abunimah below are valuable additions that tear down almost the entire Israeli hasbara lie about the attack.
Palestinians and most decent foreign reporters know from long experience that a culture of base lying, disinformation and sheer fabrication has taken root in Israel, in its media, among many of its politicians, parliamentarians, academics, etc. The state, after all, was built on the biggest lie of all, "a land without a people ...," repeated and internalized by generations of Israelis, in school books, in literature, in films. Many Israelis who participated in the ethnic cleansing, in the massacres and the systematic, violent expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian peasants and city dwellers from homes, orchards and villages that were later bulldozed, do know better. They prefer, however, to selectively delete this "inconvenient" part of the state's establishment out of their individual and collective memories.
Israel has now admitted that they've "edited" (read: doctored) the audio tapes carried by the world media in the last couple of days; that there was never any evidence of an Al-Qaeda connection; that the "weapons" found were normal hardware items found on any ship of the size of Marmara (including maintenance tools!); etc. Now, with the fresh evidence below, they may be forced to retract their original story of "mobs" trying to kill their soldiers, rather than simply defend themselves against heavily armed pirates that have no legal justification whatsoever to attack and hijack civilian ships in international waters.
The central point in Israel's hasbara effort is to divert attention from THE issue: Israel's attack was a clear violation of international law, a war crime, in fact, without ands, ifs or buts, and it should be held legally accountable for every bit of it. As leading international law experts have confirmed, the right to self defense lies with the defenders of the civilians boats, not the armed aggressors. If a rape victim reaches out to ANY weapon at the rape scene and hits back at her rapist, he cannot kill her and claim self defense!! It is as simple as that.
Well, not when it comes to Israel with its massive stranglehold over Congress and enormous influence over mainstream media in the West. When your defender is a Biden or almost the entire Congress, even a rapist can get away with murder on a self defense argument; such is the world we live in with its hegemonic powers. This time the rapist shouldn't be allowed to get away, at ANY price.
The rest is all detail, which still needs to be exposed to prove, again, how Israeli officials and most "journalists" (propaganda agents of the state by other name) lie like they breathe, forgetting the lessons of German propaganda during World War II. You can lie and lie and convince many with your lies; but when your true face is revealed your credibility collapses faster than a bullet, turning everyone against you. Israel should not come back after a year, after boycotts and divestments have really taken a toll, and shout: "Why does the whole world hate us?" GUESS why!!
As in every Israeli official lie, it will take time to refute it, bit by hard bit, with a western media that is complacent, for the most part, in propagating Israeli fabrications and misinformation without questioning or critical investigation. A journalist may be relatively good, but too scared to raise the truth lest she loses her job in her corporate media outlet. An editor knows it is safest to simply repeat, verbatim, the Israeli story, and let the burden of proof be on the victims instead.
Israel's problem is that this time their lies will be exposed by tens of countries and hundreds of activists. It is no longer a massacre in a dark corner of Jenin or Rafah against Palestinians where an Israeli media blackout and massive, well-fuinded propaganda campaign can make the world forget or dismiss the Palestinian accounts out of hand. This time Israel has "messed" with the world -- all of it -- and has, again, injured common human decency live on TV, after they had burned Palestinian children and mothers alive with phosphorus bombs in UN shelters in Gaza, also live on TV.
Palestinian and progressive Israeli students at Israeli universities demonstrated against the flotilla massacre raised the slogan "Fascism will not pass!" Everything is relative, but Israel has psychologically passed the threshold of popular readiness for fascism. Expressing it in policies and laws cannot proceed as many in Israel would wish, though, only because there is a world out there that is watching, making the price of fascism much higher than its "benefits." In Israel everything is measured according to this pragmatic cost-benefit formula; moral considerations, in this context, are as foreign as Chinese ... or Turkish!
Omar Barghouti
[If you cannot clearly see the pictures, go the link]
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