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The Flotilla Debate Is Surreal

(San Francisco Chronicle) Joel Brinkley - Consider a co-incident on May 31, the day activists assaulted Israeli troops as they boarded the Mavi Marmara, prompting the Israelis to shoot and kill nine of them. In Lahor, Pakistan, that same day, gunmen stormed into a hospital, where they shot and killed 12 badly wounded patients lying in their beds. Those victims were survivors of murderous attacks on two mosques a few days earlier, when 93 worshipers were killed. One hundred and five people shot and killed in a hospital and two mosques, but Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, said almost nothing about the dead Pakistanis. The current debate is surreal. The week before the aid-flotilla incident, international discussion centered on North Korea and its attack on a South Korean naval vessel. A torpedo sank the ship, killing 46 sailors. The UN Security Council dropped the North Korea matter to take up a resolution condemning Israel first. At the same time, all of the blame for the sad state of affairs in Gaza falls on Israel, even though Egypt usually keeps its gates to Gaza tightly locked, too. Imagine for a moment that the activists had decided to storm Egypt's gates to Gaza instead and, when Egyptian troops tried to stop the aid caravan, activists assaulted the soldiers with iron rods and knives. If the Egyptians shot and killed nine people in the ensuing melee, do you think the UN Security Council would be dropping everything right now to rush through a resolution condemning Egypt? Certainly not. I wonder how many of the Free Gaza Movement's members have interviewed the leaders of Hamas, as I have - many times. "From our ideological point of view, it is not allowed to recognize that Israel controls one square meter of historic Palestine," Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas leader, told me. Without even a hint of irony or jest, Ismail Abu Shanab, suggested: "There are a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews." "We want to break the siege of Gaza," the Free Gaza Movement says. In the process, do they want to "free" the leaders of Hamas? Last week, these leaders made their position clear. They fired four missiles into Israel, toward Ashkelon and Sderot. The writer, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times.
2010-06-14 10:53:54
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