Thursday, July 29, 2010
I'm glad to see Israeli officials taking it on themselves to get their own explaining done: The Flotilla Farce - Whether they are from Turkey, Ireland or Cyprus, those that participate reek of hypocrisy.
...Today, there are more than 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who are deprived of their most basic rights. The Lebanese government has a list of tens of professions that a Palestinian is forbidden from being engaged in, including professions such as medicine, law and engineering. Palestinians are forbidden from owning property and need a special permit to leave their towns. Unlike all other foreign nationals in Lebanon, they are denied access to the health-care system. According to Amnesty international, the Palestinians in Lebanon suffer from "discrimination and marginalization" and are treated like "second class citizens" and "denied their full range of human rights."
Amnesty also states that most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have little choice but to live in overcrowded and deteriorating camps and informal gatherings that lack basic infrastructure.
In view of the worsening plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon, it is the height of irony that a Lebanese flotilla is organizing to leave the port of Tripoli in the next few days to bring aid to Palestinians in Gaza. According to one of the organizers, the participants are "united by a feeling of stark injustice."
This attitude exposes the dishonesty of the whole flotilla exercise. Whether it is from Turkey, Ireland or Cyprus, those that participate in these flotillas reek of hypocrisy. There are currently 100 armed conflicts and dozens of territorial disputes around the world. There have been millions of people killed and hundreds of millions live in abject poverty without access to basic staples. And yet hundreds of high-minded "humanitarian activists" are spending millions of dollars to reach Gaza and hand money to Hamas that will never reach the innocent civilians of Gaza.
This is the same Gaza that just opened a sparkling new shopping mall that would not look out of place in any capital in Europe. Gaza, where a new Olympic-sized swimming pool was recently inaugurated and five-star hotels and restaurants offer luxurious fare.
Markets brimming with all manner of foods dot the landscape of Gaza, where Lauren Booth, journalist and "human rights activist," was pictured buying chocolate and luxurious items from a well-stocked supermarket before stating with a straight face that the "situation in Gaza is a humanitarian crisis on the scale of Darfur."...
Speaking of life in Gaza, Dave has a series of posts exposing the reality there. See here, here, here, here, and here.
But it's not all really about helping anyone, is it? It's about destruction. Purely.
Solomon, is there a handy single link to pictures of Gaza, with which to link to dispel the rats claiming Gaza to be humanitarian disaster, full of starving people with no basic supplies?
One place to start is this video from The Israel Project, a slide show of still photos taken this summer.
It's not perfect. Anyone have a better suggestion?
From a friend in Efrat:
Our Efrati friend notes that Al Ahram is the mouthpiece of the Egyptian government and that Egypt has some interest in dissing Hamas. But still. He's just saying.Egyptian Journalist: In Actual Terms, Gaza Is Not Under Siege
And another one. A lot of the pictures you're thinking of came from Tom Gross. Here's his post, which he's updated a few times to add more material and link to other stuff, including media coverage, or in the case of the MSM, the lack of coverage. This just doesn't fit their narrative of starvation and humanitarian crisis in the open-air prison, so they stick they shut their eyes, stick their fingers in their ears and say "La, la, la, la, la."
A nice new shopping mall opened today in Gaza: Will the media report on it?