Israeli marines have boarded the ship Rachel Corrie, which was registered in Ireland. One of the 11 passengers aboard was Nobel peace laureate Máiread Maguire.
Apparently, officials in Ireland had already sent Israel a sternly worded memo asking the Israelis to show “restraint” if they stopped the ship. “There can be no justification for the use of force against any person on board the Rachel Corrie,” the Irish foreign minister had said. I take it this meant Israel would have Ireland to reckon with if anyone on the Rachel Corrie came to harm. Fortunately, it seems no one did.
Already there are protests against Israel in Belfast. The Deputy First Minister of Ireland, Martin McGuinness, has called the boarding “unacceptable.” “This is an attack on an Irish flagged vessel and it demands a strong response by the Irish government,” McGuinness said.
I wonder if Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly will have anything to say about this. Several rightie bloggers are commenting on the boarding of the Rachel Corrie already, but not one mentions, or seems to know, that the boarding could be construed as an act of aggression against Ireland.
Israel says the marines did not board the ship until they had the passengers’ permission. However, this account has not been verified with the passengers, because the Israeli military jammed satellite and radio communications on the boat.
Here is some raw video of today’s boarding being distributed by the Associated Press.
[Video no longer available]
The boat is being escorted to the Israeli port of Ashdod. Israel says it will inspect the cargo and send all humanitarian supplies on to Gaza.
Elsewhere — Liz Cheney has been babbling about the Turkish-Syrian-Iranian axis. Now will it be the Irish-Turkish-syrian-Iranian axis? The Irish managed to avoid getting themselves killed (they were “amazingly cooperative” chuckles Doug Powers at Michelle Malkin’s blog), so they are less likely to draw the full Wrath of the Wingnuts.
Powers implies that the Rachel Corrie crew behaved because they’d been taught a lesson by the deaths in the earlier raid. But maybe Israel doesn’t want to mess with the Irish.
Thank goodness no one was killed.
I really don’t understand what the Israeli’s are thinking.
Are they going to board EVERY fracking ship within 100 miles of Gaza? The U.S. reflexively supports Israel no matter what it does. So, I don’t know what WE’RE thinking!
America was a little slow on the whole South Africa apartheid thingy. We finally woke up to that. When will we start to realize that we support Israel, which is another apartheid nation?
Yes, “APARTHEID!”
Can you think of a better term?
One thing this has done is focus how desperately awful things are in Gaza. I did not know that (and I follow this stuff). I knew about the bombings from last year, which were terrorism in their own right, but the living conditions now, awful. How is this different from apartheid in South Africa? I have a brother who is, or was, a fundy republican rightie, but went on his Jesus Hajj and saw what Israel was doing with the Palestinians and compared it to slavery. Israel has done a fine job of losing this war on their own.
Wingnuts will always be wingnuts; what I’m interested in is when and whether Israel will finally go far enough over the line to alienate enough of their allies to sufficiently turn public opinion against them. There was a great post at GinAndTacos the other day along these lines:
thanks, moonbat. I’ll add – but certainly can’t explain – that Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since WWII. And, since 1985 she has received about $3 billion annually which she is given at the beginning of each year and is not required (unlike other recipients of foreign aid) to account for how it’s used. And, Israel is one of the top ten suppliers of arms world-wide.
I’ll certainly buy the ‘exceptionalism’ theory, but I also buy what Deep Throat said to Woodward during the Nixon mess, “Follow the money.”
Boarding ships on the high seas is Israel flexing its muscles. Face it, normally ships are inspected etc. when they dock – almost without exception. I remember when Sharon, referred to as ‘the tank’ used to periodically launch a tank attack on small Palestinian villages. Reason? Flexing his muscles.
As someone said and I believe, the holocaust is the Jew’s subliminal reference point, the veiled vision that defines their politics and angle of vision. The Holocaust did more than kill 6 million Jews, it cursed many of their generations to follow.
Pingback: Tweets that mention The Mahablog » Israel Vs. Ireland -- Topsy.com
A slight correction, Martin McGuinness is the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, not the Republic of Ireland. And as for the holocaust stuff, lots of countries including Ireland have suffered a holocaust. The Israelis act like assholes because they know that they will get away with it, the US will always be their bully boy, rubber stamp and sugar daddy.
As one of my (history) teachers put it: Stalin, who killed (Gulag can correct me) 20 million of his own people, makes Hitler, at 6 million murdered Jews, “seem like a piker”.
moonbat,
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. in his first “Gulag Archipelago,” estimated as many as 100 million, or somewhere near that territory. I think this may be a bit much. I think 20 million is a bit low, but not by too much. From what I’ve read, between the forced startvation in Ukraine, but also in other areas, and the terrors from the mid-’30’s to the early ’50’s, 25 to 35 million may be a good guess. But, that’s just me and what I know, and I’m certainly no expert… Also, add another 20+ million lost in WWII, and you come pretty close to half a million people. That’s like 1 out of 6 in the US disappearing, or dying in a war. It was a much higher percentage in the USSR, since the population, after WWI, The Spanish Flu, the Civil War, and the initial stages of collectivization, was much lower than ours is now.
Hitler WAS a piker compared to Ol’ Joe. Mao was pretty damn good, too. When is said and done, it may be Mao who holds the record. Dante will know.
Oooop, should be 1/2 a HUNDRED million people.
How the Hell do I preview, and still miss something as stupid as this? Never mind, don’t tell me…
There were more than 30 Americans on board the first flotilla, including two retiredU.S. ambassadors, Ed Peck and ret. Col. Ann Wright, and the 19-year-old New York-born Turkish boy, Furkan Dogan. Would that the U.S. State Department had issued a protest AFTER the Americans were kidnapped from the high seas and taken into custody against their will in Israel (and several of them were quite badly beaten in the process), much less issued a pre-emptive warning, as the Irish government did, not to harm our nationals. But then, I forget…Israel is the 51st state.
CUND Gulag – I understand the mathematics of Stalin’s abuses, at least 3 times what Hitler did. I am not sure over what expanse of time Stalin’s purges happened vs Hitler’s. But the horrific emotional impact of the hollicost is the methidical way a people were corralled in Europe and captured and processed for the sole purpose of extermination. In the starving of Ukraine, Stalin was out to subjigate the farmers and break the existing system. Once those political ends were met, the persecution of Ukraine ended. The enormous cost in terms of physical resources and manpower may have cost Germany the war. And it was for no strategic military or economic goal. Purges for political gain can be comprehended but what Hitler did was hate for the sake of hate.
The world turned its back on the plight of the Jews in Europe as they tried to escape. Out of the enormous guilt, the UN created State of Israel after WWII, and it should have been. No thought was given to the Pallistinians because they were Hitler’s allies. The result of the Treaty of Versailles should have hinted at the consequences of an unjust post-war contract. I believe in a 2-State solution, but not where the lesser state is a Jewish-run concentration camp. The UN is going to have to correct the mistake they made – that mistake was not the creation of Israel, but in the omission of the soveregn state of Pallistine. And then the UN will have to take up for the security rights of both nations for generations. And this won’t happen unless the US supports it.
Consider the parallels with northern Ireland. It’s been ruled by England since something like 1601, but the Irish have only recently started to accept the situation, after 40 years of terrorism. I know several people (my wife prominent among them) who still think the English should be kicked out. Imagine the American Indians trying to eject those of us of European extraction after all these years.Â
It’s religious,yes. But it’s also homeland. It’s been 400 years and it still hurts. And remember that the Irish still held the rest of the island. Â
There are living Palistinians who can walk into an Israeli town and point to the house they grew up in, which now belongs to an Israeli family. This forced loss of homeland isn’t 400 year old legend – there are living memories. It’s a raw, open wound.Â
I don’t see how this is easily resolved, by Israel, by the UN, or by the US. Â A Palistinian state is a good start, but this isn’t going to go away in our life times. Â
DOug,
“Once those political ends were met, the persecution of Ukraine ended.” Not entirely. It just took different, less lethal forms.
The point was not simply to collectivize, but to destroy Ukraine as a nation (and as a separate people) and to incorporate it into Mother Russia. The czars had this plan, and the Soviets continued it. They did so by resettling many parts of Ukraine with ethnic Russians, banning the Ukrainian language, persecuting and killing the intelligentsia/potential leadership. The GULAG continued to function well into Gorbachev’s time.
Dave S – Points well taken. The great hullabaloo in the US over illegal immigration is in actuallity a great hullabaloo over the large and growing number of ‘Spanish’ speakers ‘invading our countryside and cities – pretty soon Spanish will be our national language; pretty soon there will be more of ‘them’ than of ‘us’…the fears are unreal yet feel very real.
Between the two world wars the number of Jewish colonists in Palestine had risen from 70,000 to about 700,000, Jewish villages had increased from 50 to 250. With respect to the Arabic-speaking Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Palestine, the ratio between them and the Jews had decreased from ten to one in 1918 to about two to one in 1938.
Yet again another case of American/Israeli ‘exceptionalism.’ We’re having a shit fit about the increasing number of south-of-the-border types ‘infiltrating’ our country but find it perfectly unreasonable for the Palestinians to have or to ever have had a shit fit over the ‘infiltrating’ of mostly European Jews into their country.
This pales in the light of such a strong comment thread, but way back in the early 1980s, at the time of Gen. Sharon’s massacres at the Lebanese refugee camps, I heard a woman say (putting the Holocaust in context): “Israel is like the abused child who grows up to become a child abuser.”
It’s been nearly 30 years since I heard that, and it still sums up the bottom line for me. It explains the institutionalized racism, the exceptionalism, the muscle-flexing. A related old saw, regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship, is that “Friends warn one another when they’re headed down a dangerous path.” The U.S. has been a pretty crappy friend to Israel, abetting its worst behavior until it has become isolated from the rest of the world; our simpatico exceptionalism at work, I’d agree.
God is good! Sharon got just a portion of what he deserves. That big fat ass murderer is now probably down to skin and bones and wearing diapers. But if God was really, really, good and just…Dick Cheney would be wasting away alone in some private room wearing a diaper like Sharon.
I hear that Sharon’s favorite meal is vegetable soup!