Title: ISRAEL ATTACKS JUSTICE BOAT; KIDNAPS HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS; CONFISCATES MEDICINE,
Topic: First Nations
Written By: Milton
Date: Monday, July 06 at 09:05
30 June 2009
 
[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30pm] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.
 
"This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip," said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. "President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that's exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey."
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Palestine, July 4, 2009 (Pal Telegraph) - This is Cynthia McKinney, I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies and even toys and crayons - I had a suitcase full of crayons for the children.

While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give presents to the children of Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
At the outbreak of Israel's Operation �Cast Lead' [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water ... It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime ... I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream ... like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better ... The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous.

I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap. Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and �yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I'm lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?

Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/g ... -in-israel

   

The fascist Zionist State is doing its own reverse scenario version of the Warsaw Ghetto upon the poor people of Palestine. The day the US Empire is defeated in the Middle East, and withdraws its financial and military support from the so-called "Israeli State", the Zionist State will fold like a limp dick before the Arab majority of the region.

Too bad really, though it was really Europe that should have been carved up to provide a Jewish State, and within that especially Germany, but even in the absence of that "justice" for the Jews, the Zionist State could have taken an entirely different approach to Palestine in the early going of the Jewish flight from Europe. amd accepted or agitated for Palestinian citizenry. Like the progressive rest of the world, after WW2, the Palestinian people, then under the heel of the British Empire, were sympathetic to European Jewry. Instead, with first British and European, then later US Empire, British, European and Canadian help, it took up the approach of its own European Nazi tormentors, and decided to bring down their own holocaust upon the people of Palestine.

With these kinds of incidents reported here, the Jewish State, and not all Jews, continues this policy and fails/ or does not want to understand the natural resistance of the Palestinians to their "conquest attempt". In the end, it will not auger well for them, as the hatred against them, equally as naturally, becomes irreversible.

Get ready for the boat people fleeing Israel on the Day of Judgement. They will be wanting their own "Right of Return" to Europe and Amerika. Of course.

Coyote

   

This Amnesty International report recived almost no coverage here or elsewhere, including the internet, seems like they have indeed got away with it and so a continuation of the same behaviour should not be a surprise!

"Israel's failure to properly investigate its forces' conduct in Gaza, including war crimes, and its continuing refusal to cooperate with the UN international independent fact-finding mission headed by Richard Goldstone, is evidence of its intention to avoid public scrutiny and accountability,"


http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-upda ... g-20090702

   

"
The UN inquiry team -- headed by Richard Goldstone, a Jewish South African judge -- held two days of public hearings in Gaza two weeks ago and another two-day in Geneva on Monday and Tuesday to give a chance to those who were not able to travel to Gaza to present their testimony."
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=10 ... =351020202
Nothing like being impartial.

   

Just who in the hell does ISRAEL think they are ? I am sick and tired of hearing ISRAEL bitching about the second world war and how Hitler treated them ...when their actions resemble those of Hitlers Nazis .

And before anyone goes off on me , I not racist and I am NOT a Jew hater ...but I and getting tired of their hypocritical actions. Lets face it the second world war is long passed and I suggest that ISRAEL stop using the second world war as an excuse for them to continue abusing others.

I turn off the news or any other program that talks about the holocaust...I have heard enough already ...I understand it and I get it. So if I get it why doesn't ISRAEL?

   

Right you are, as one person put it "Israel acts as though it had a one free genocide card.

   

Whoever is right war is not an answer to it. If Israel and Palestine will fight like this the time is not far when both of the countries will face a worse crisis ever before. I think the involvement of Israel Media also plays an important role in the war stage.