The propaganda flotilla offered violent resistance to Israeli naval forces, including small arm fire, and the Israel Navy opened fire on the Marmora ship sailing for the Gaza Strip. The link leads to documentary video clips. I think our marine commandoes are very courageous to go down on a rope into a violent Muslim crowd. Between 10 and 15 people were killed, with over 60 wounded. The European peaceniks imagined they are going to play-act demonstrating in an Oslo or a San Francisco campus, forgetting that this war is for real. The pro-El-Quaida Turkish activists on the ships were less illusional and they tried to lynch our soldiers, but of course the got killed and/or arrested. Now we have a real problem with Turkey and a general malaise regarding our reputation.
Update: Interestingly, the comments on the European press are NOT totally negative. in El Pais (Spain), someone commented:
Gracias Israel por defendernos a todos de la maldicion del Islam. Del malvado profeta, del pederesta, del sanguinario Mahoma y sus fanaticos. Gracias por mantener a raya a Siria,Iran,y sus compiches de la Liga Arabe.He is saying: Thanks Israel for defending all of us from the Islam.
27 comments:
If the Israeli sailors were really attacked by the flotilla people, I hope the Israelis were smart enough to videotape that. Otherwise, they have already lost this propaganda battle.
Yes, I think we are not winning this propaganda battle. They provoked us to fight them. Now we have 600 hostile foreigners that we dont know what to do with them. They will not go away. I would send them to Gaza.
Definitely a big mistake in the propaganda dept. This has fallen 100% into the hands of Hamas. Israeli divers should have entangled the propellors and left the ships drifting at sea instead. Anything but this, which plays into their script.
K
The Israeli Navy is not fighting a propaganda war, but a real war against murderous Muslim terrorists. We prefer bad press and being feared, instead of being massacred and praised.
"We prefer bad press and being feared, instead of being massacred and praised."
That's a false dichotomy. This raid was clumsy. Maybe the most talented Israelis no longer make a career of the military, and instead go into the tech business, I don't know, but it's sad to see such incompetence four years on from the Lebanon debacle.
To have commandos repel down into a melee where they were attacked, disarmed, and then other troops were forced to fire live ammo at the protesters? The American phrase for an operation like this is a clusterfuck. K had a good suggestion about entangling the propellers. Israel could have also ordered the protesters to clear the decks of the ships they intended to land on first, and if they didn't, fired on them with tasers or plastic bullets, or water cannons or some other non-lethal methods.
Also, Israel could have waited until the ships were in Israel's territorial waters. You just played into the hands of these propagandists. Very sad.
Israel could have torpedoed the ships these idiots were on.
It is difficult to believe that this could not have been anticipated.
In particular, the idea of dropping young soldiers/police ONE BY ONE into a predictably hostile crowd seems incredibly cavalier with the lives of these young IDF men, especially since the origin and composition of the ships was well known.
Hindsight is 20/20, but I hope next time they will contemplate more subtle and nuanced methodology.
On the other hand, maybe there is a message here for Turkey, for the EU and for BHO.
Anon.
I blame women's suffrage. In a man's world these ships would have been nuked, and the NYT headline would be AWESOME! Ok, maybe not quite.
I think Dave is right, and Gary Brecher would say everything he's saying.
NYT says there'd been a plan to snag the props, but then it was learned that the biggest of the props was too big to snag. I wonder about that. Can't you move up to some heaver netting material? Maybe there is no material strong enough which is also ductile enough - that's somewhat hard to imagine, though.
For example what about metal chain - infinitely ductile, arbitrarily strong if you are willing to use big thick links. And you could coat it with some non-polar substance that's really sticky.
I guess I mean flexible not ductile
It was definitely a clusterfuck. Total lack of intelligence. Dropping soldiers one by one. Paintball rifles. Very badly managed.
Torpedoes would have been a better option.
I have a gift for you J, before I go to work.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0EkxzIGBQQ
Bad Religion, is it?
This was a public relations problem which Israel analyzed as a military problem and applied a military solution. They could never have arrived at the "right" solution by military means to begin with. It's as if you are trying to solve a calculus problem using algebra. But then, even in military terms, the solution applied was STILL wrong - they couldn't even solve the algebra problem correctly either. A clusterfuck indeed, one that has played into the hands of Israel's enemies. An own goal.
K
Ehud Olmert, a master politician (and no commando himself like Bibi Netaniyahu) would have managed it better. But the police destroyed him. Pity.
Yes, the song was from Bad Religion. Don't listen to Supersonic while driving, especially not if you drive stick. Bad Religion has been around for almost thirty years now, and that song was from their second to last album. The last album of theirs that I recall was in protest of the Iraq invasion and was entitled The Empire Strikes First. The Greg Gaffin attempted to protray both sides in the war as identical religious fanatics waging war on behalf of God, so every son was written ambiguously. The last song on the album was Live Again that although intended to be about a suicide bomber was also intended as a jab at the Christians that supported the war. I think that Live Again would have made an excellent song for a movie about the 9/11 attacks. Can you imagine the final scene of the attack being filmed from within one of the doomed airliners looking forward from the passenger area, through the cockpit door with LA playing? the last part of the scene would be where the WTC comes into view as the final minute of the song plays. Once the WTC tower is seen through the cockpit door the screen would go black and the song would play for another thirty seconds before the credits would roll. I think my idea would have made excellent war propaganda.
Have you heard BR before, or did you just read the text accompanying the video?
Back to the dead protesters. I believe that you had three options in dealing with the seaborne leftists. The first option woul be to let them through while downplaying the whole matter.The second would be some clever scheme like K proposed. The third option would be to use force to stop the boats, such as torpedoing them on sight. A fourth option would have been to sink one of the vessels in another port before it made the trip to Israeli waters the way France sunk the Rainbow Warrior in NZ before it could make the trip to France's nuclear test site in the Pacific.
Some later reports say that the Israeli navy considered fouling the props but thought that the largest ship (the one with all the casualties) was too big to be stopped by nets. Maybe this was true but it did not then follow that dropping commandoes with paintball guns was the best Plan B. In hindsight it wasn't, to say the least, not on many levels. Now hindsight is always 20/20 but one did not have to be Nostradamus to figure out that the plan that they executed might not end well.
I don't think it is possible to put a charitable spin on this to the effect that the Israelis WANTED some casualties to send a message to its enemies (nevermind what the leftists would think). From the videos and accounts, this was a situation that spun out of control in a way that they did not properly anticipate. Once the commandoes realized that their lives were in immediate danger, blind panic takes over and the chain of command, strategy, etc. mean nothing next to sheer survival. These are 20 year olds with adrenaline and testosterone pumping, not armchair philosophers like us who can cooly analyze the PR and other implications of the situation. But the commandoes should never have been put in such tight spot to begin with.
K
K, It is different with Israeli commandos. They are trained to an excess and extremely disciplined. They received order to be "soft" on the peaceniks that supposedly peopled the ships, and they did not expect the mob with iron bars and murderous intentions. It was 0400 and the Muslims were expecting them. The first soldier to descend was thrown overboard. It was their officer who took the decision and opened automatic fire. I am not sure the soldiers were armed except with small caliber pistols and paintball rifles. Ludicrous. Apparently we had no one in the ship to tell us of what was being prepared. A textbook clusterfuck.
Whether they panicked or not, you had a situation where at one point there is 1 (or a handful) of Israeli commandos on deck and 500 angry "peace activists". You have seen the footage before of "peace activists" at Davos, etc. - these people are not Ghandi, despite their PR. Israel did not need spies on board to anticipate this (though they should have had them anyway). It was sheer hubris that led the Israeli military to think that such a large crowd could be controlled with a handful of men. No matter how superb their training they are not supermen. This is Exodus all over again, with the players reversed - an absolute PR disaster.
K
It's unfortunate that we have Jews and Muslims duking it out over Christian territory. In better times, both parties would have been kicked out.
Israel was "Christian territory" for no more than a couple of hundred years out of the last 2000. What are those "better times" you refer to? The year 1200? Don't make me laugh.
K
I found this article by way of fuckfrance.com:
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177134
According to the article in the future will use more force to stop incursions by these boats.
Fortunately Netanyahu speaks English well, unlike some previous tongue-tied PMs.
"...we have Jews and Muslims duking it out over Christian territory..."
In a way, I like the comment, since it shows equal distaste for Jews and Muslims. Europeans much prefer Muslims to the point of inviting Muslim colonization of their "Christian" territory. I dont think you can say that Amsterdam, for example, is Christian territory anymore.
Amsterdam was forsaken by the Deity a long time ago.
Anon.
hehe. if a group of israeli men wento to aid kurdish "terrorsits", i wonder how turkey would repond. very interesting.
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