Jun. 1 2010 - 6:51 pm
Courtesy Of "True Slant"
The U.S. has decided that the best way to get to an unbiased account of yesterday’s incident in which Israeli commandos killed over a dozen passengers on an aid ship in the process of attempting to commandeer the vessel in international waters would be to have the Likud-led Israeli government look into the matter. I would suggest that Israel could get a great head start on this by releasing the entirety of their video footage of the assault rather than a snippet that suspiciously begins in the middle of the incident. If things happened as the IDF says they did – which is to say, if the passengers of a Turkish ship fought back against Israeli commandos who were attempting to seize control of those ships in international waters and who did indeed end up detaining its passengers in military holding areas after having killed at least a dozen of them – then, of course, Israel will be very much in the clear in the eyes of most Americans, as of course fighting back against soldiers who are attempting to seize one’s ship is fine when it is done by Jewish refugees as was the case with the S.S. Exodus (in which case it is also fine when the passengers leave a bomb intended to kill British soldiers), whereas if Turks and other swarthy sorts do anything of the sort while attempting to bring supplies to a civilian population that needs them, then they are of course global jihadists who have perpetrated an “ambush.” Such is the craftiness and inscrutability of the great portion of Near Easterners that simply by doing the same things that others have done, they are able to transform those things into something entirely different, something vastly more threatening. Arabs are more possessed of this magical power than Turks, but then Arabs are more likely to interact with Americans and Israelis, both of whom act as a sort of catalyst for the phenomenon.
Aside from the rather indefensible thing that the Israelis have done even by their own spurious account, it is quite possible that they have done something far more blatantly unjustifiable, as accounts from press, an Arab Israeli MP, and other witnesses depict the Israeli military as having fired on at least one of the ships before its passengers began attempting to fight them off with largely makeshift weaponry.
I will refute some of the individual claims being made by my various Likudnik sparring partners in the conservative commentariat soon. For now, I will simply note that those conservative pundits who are forever denouncing such institutions as The New York Times for releasing information without approval from the government that it is supposed to be monitoring and who take issue with such practices on the grounds that they may lead to the death of U.S. troops are invited to answer two questions: was Israeli’s conduct in this case a necessary measure for the nation’s defense, and is it likely that more American troops will die as a result of anger by those Iraqis and Afghanistanis who might have otherwise been disinclined to take up arms against U.S. forces? I look forward to the many intellectually honest responses that I will promptly receive.
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