Boat Show From the Air

Source: YouTube poster "idfnadesk". "Demonstrators Use Violence Against Israeli Navy Soldiers Attempting to Board Ship."  YouTube, May 31, 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU12KW-XyZE

Any, either side, may do this at home: web search term "IHH International Humanitarian Relief Organization".

With this event, whether I blog directly on it or interested parties embark on their own research missions, more will come out about the depth of Israel's commitment to peace with Gaza, its weekly throughputs of material and service aid, its reception of Gaza residents in its medical system as needed.  More information too will come to light on the precise makeup of the boat show's sponsors, their motives, and their customary ways of doing business.

I've read numerous op-ed or "news analysis" type predictions of this event as becoming a public relations nightmare for Israel, but I'm going to buck that tide here and suggest that what's coming is a far gone left winger's worst encounter with some truth, finally, about the character and nature of the company indulged, kept, and served.

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Comments

[tammy swofford]

Regarding Oliver's phrase "disproportional use of force" I must enter the fray. When I was at Fort McCoy and doing mat training and close quarters combat training we were taught that a person fifteen feet away holding a knife could kill another human if there was not an immediate response to the threat. There are only a couple of seconds available to address the threat prior to that knife slicing into your liver (a very vascular organ whose margin can be felt under the right intercostal margin) or possibly the lung - both insults which can be fatal.

Place someone fifteen feet from you and count how many seconds until they are in your personal space. Before you count "three one-thousand" it is already too late, my peace-loving friend.

Oliver, if someone lunges at you with a knife do you consider pepper spray sufficient to avert the attack? Defensive wounds to your hands? I was taught, to fire the weapon. Now that.... is military training.

Tammy Swofford

[J. S. Oppenheim]

Less than two weeks after the Chomsky episode, the loony left "in solidarity" (what what, God knows) proved itself again duped, and while today is not the day, quite true, who scheduled the launch and arrival time of this boat show for the U.S. Memorial Day weekend and, right now, Memorial Day. I'd rather honor the fallen of the Civil War, one among too many wars, than lend an egrigious benefit of doubt to what I've been following into this weekend.

[Oliver]

I don't think it's the right time for excuses now. Yes, the activists used violence. Yes, the whole bunch is not as peaceful and 'Gandhi-like' as they pretend to be. Yes, they had been warned.

But 9 people died as a result of disproportional use of force. Only weeks after the Chomsky episode, Israel once again showed the world its desire for (self-imposed) international isolation.