Interesting Facts about the Mavi Marmara "Humanitarian" Mission

Peter Hitchens investigates:

For instance, one of these 'activists' is a lawyer who once represented a terrorist for free (his client was the interesting Kozo Okamoto, still in the Middle East and anxious not to return to his native Japan). Mr Okamoto took part in the 1972 Lod Airport massacre, in which 25 innocents were massacred.


Aboard were others who are active supporters of Hamas, the despotic and murderous Islamist rulers of Gaza. Hamas hurled their Fatah opponents to their deaths from the tops of high buildings when they took over, and recently imprisoned in disgraceful circumstances a British freelance journalist, Paul Martin (look it up) to a chorus of almost total silence from the British media and left-wing intelligentsia.

Then there were some members of the Egyptian 'parliament', who are supporters of that country's rather unmoderate, and barely-tolerated, Muslim Brotherhood.

One of these legislators is reported to have said at a March 2010 conference, ‘A nation that excels at dying will be blessed by Allah with a life of dignity and with eternal paradise.’ He also said that his movement ‘will never recognize Israel and will never abandon the resistance,’ and that ‘resistance is the only road map that can save Jerusalem, restore the Arab honour, and prevent Palestine from becoming a second Andalusia.’

This is a most interesting statement. Andalusia, as Muslims call Spain, is the only territory Islam has ever permanently lost. The reference underlines the fact that the real issue in this conflict is not what everyone thinks it is. This has nothing to do with the 'rights' or 'freedoms' of the 'Palestinians', who would be oppressed and neglected by whatever Arab state (probably a Greater Syria) that arose on the ruins of Israel (and probably Lebanon and Jordan too). It is the Muslim belief that no territory, however small, should be conceded by Islam to be ruled by non-Muslims.

MEMRI also produce a photograph which purports to show one Yemeni Parliamentarian on the deck of the Mavi Marmara, clutching a rather large curved dagger, doubtless ornamental.

There were also some keen Salafists from Kuwait, not to mention our old, old friend Bishop Hilarion Capucci, whose idea of Christian charity once (in 1974) involved smuggling weapons to the PLO, misusing his diplomatic status to do so. (His release from prison was among the demands of the Entebbe hijackers - you know, the charmers who separated the Jewish passengers from the non-Jewish ones - back in 1976.) The Bishop (I particularly appreciate this fact) is also said to have appeared on postage stamps in Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, so much is he loved in the Arab world. I'm sure it's his sermons that they like, rather than his smuggling. Sorry to hark back so. I have this thing about history.

When one reads the above one can't help but relish the rich irony offered in the following tribute to the dead Turkish "humanitarians". The poet is an Arab blogger with a fanciful self-regard, and literary aspirations:

I watched the live feed,
All through the night,
I slept on a happy note,
Having seen the cheerful faces,
Of those who'd come from all places
To lift the siege
to end the collective moral handicap
of an apathetic world

but when I woke up,
I heard of the dead,
of the martyrs,
of the selfless
of the fearless
of those who'd put their lives
on the line
For Gaza
And Palestine

So this time around
our dead,
we wrap you in red
we wrap you in white
we wrap you in the crescent
and we wrap in the star, instead

A sincere poetical attempt