Gaza Roundup 14: A video that deserves to go viral

Iara Lee’s raw footage of the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara, in its entirety. There is no narration, nor are there subtitles, but the pictures (clear and of excellent quality) speak for themselves. This is the video that was somehow smuggled to safety so the Israelis could neither abuse it nor destroy it, nor deny the truth of what happened on the Marmara.

What really grabbed me here was the way the Muslims on the ship try to remain peaceful inwardly as they say their pre-dawn prayers, right before the Israelis come on with the speedboats and helicopters. Many of them keep on praying even as others are rushing to the rail, looking for ways to fend off the attack they know is coming. A few of the younger men use slingshots against the helicopter that hovers menacingly over them with its searchlight on–a modern-day David-and-Goliath image that will be hard to deny (and awfully ironic for Israel, claiming David’s legacy as they do.) An Israeli speedboat then pulls alongside, and popping sounds of gunfire can be heard, along with a couple of deeper booms (which could be from a cannon firing the grappling hooks). At first it isn’t clear what’s being fired. Then some streaks of red appear alongside a ladderway. A reporter with a Scandinavian accent says they are paint, not blood–apparently this is the “paintball” phase of the assault. At some unspecified moment the paintballs are replaced by live ammo, and casualties begin to pile up. There is at least one man who appears to be dead, carried on a stretcher. An activist holds up a book with plastic-coated pages and blue Hebrew lettering on the cover–clearly an Israeli hit-list, indicating which passengers on the various boats to aim for. Meanwhile, medics and volunteers tend to the injured (which include some Israeli soldiers from the helicopter.) At the end come the now familiar calls over the ship’s loudspeakers, also heard on the video which was broadcast last week by al-Jazeera, urging “all the brothers” to take their seats and remain calm.

Well, hasbara trolls, looks like your version is now, by definition, a complete and utter hash. All your amateurish attempts to justify this attack are bullshit. The Israeli standard squawk about “self-defence” is shot to hell by the IDF’s own live ammo. The activists on the ship, as the video clearly shows, have no guns, no bullets, no grenades–only a few slingshots and improvised bludgeons to head off the Israeli assault. And the Israelis came with a hit-list of those they wanted dead–this much is now confirmed. All that remains is to determine whether they got everyone they came fully intending to kill, or whether some of their intended prey managed to make monkeys of them. There are still missing persons unaccounted for, and word is that the Israelis threw their bodies overboard.

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5 Responses to Gaza Roundup 14: A video that deserves to go viral

  1. Manaat says:

    Bina,
    Do you follow this blog?
    http://aliabunimah.posterous.com
    Has some interesting commentary. I didn’t know this, but apparently the paintball guns aren’t all cute and cuddly. Take a look at various recent posts.

  2. Jim Hadstate says:

    A couple of notes, ‘Bina. The guy that brings the ‘hit book’ to the camera to get photographic evidence in case the list is later taken away is the former US Marine who is a British citizen. That’s why he knew to search the IDF wounded guy that was brought by on the stretcher a few moments before and why he knew what he was looking at.
    The other shocking thing is that the IDF guy that the book was taken from was shot by friendly fire. There is no other way that he could nave received that wound. It was not life threatening, just bloody. To make it LOOK like the people on the Mari Marvara had guns. And the strangest part is that Bebe is going to shit his pants trying to explain why those “horrible terrorists” were tendering medical care to a guy that was trying to kill them a moment earlier. Unless they really were a peaceful group offering assistance to anyone who needed it.
    A Hell of a lot more than the IDF did for the boat passengers that they shot. Of course most of those the IDF had no intention of allowing to survive. They were on Bebe’s hit list and were to be executed on sight.

  3. Jim, I figured the volunteer who found the hit-list must have been a fairly experienced activist. He looks a bit like Kevin Neish, the guy from BC who was on the same boat, and who is also a veteran of many direct-action campaigns. I couldn’t tell where he was from by the accent, as Canadian voices sound similar to most US ones that don’t have pronounced accents, and this guy’s was one of those. His being a former Marine doesn’t surprise me a bit; Fmr. Col. Ann Wright was also on the flotilla. Amazing how time in the armed forces can turn so many soldiers into peaceniks. Must be the fact that war ain’t no fun and paintball games, after all.
    BTW, the medical aid to the enemy reminds me of the Cuban guerrillas and Che Guevara, in particular. If they took wounded prisoners, and the captives weren’t totally evil SOBs, Che patched ’em up before they let them go. It’s a characteristic leftist guerrilla thing–it works great for reminding the enemy’s grunts that the scary devils are, in fact, human beings, and HUMANE beings, too. I’m sure that Israeli guy who got shot by his own (so the flotilla could be blamed) is going to be doing some hard thinking in the weeks and months ahead about who really has the humane army, and who really are the pirates.

  4. Manaat says:

    OK, Bina. So the bank owned by the owner of Globo (a majority shareholder) just went down under.

  5. Heh…I guess that explains this, then:
    http://www.aporrea.org/contraloria/n159339.html
    (I’m assuming that’s the bank’s logo there on the pic.)

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