Apparently unmoved by the plight of victims of the recent earthquake in eastern Turkey or the quotidian slaughter of civilians in Syria, the semi-professional activists of ‘Free Gaza’ are back with another mini-flotilla, apparently set to reach Israeli waters by late Thursday or early Friday (the boats can be tracked here).
This particular publicity stunt is comprised of a mere two vessels, both of which participated in the failed flotilla of summer 2011. One is the Irish boat the MV Saoirse and the other the Canadian boat named ‘Tahrir’. According to their own publicity, the boats carry a total of 27 passengers from nine countries – a significant number of which appear to be journalists. Aboard the Canadian boat are a grand total of six activists along with five journalists representing DemocracyNow, Al Jazeera, the Iranian government’s Press TV and an Egyptian media outlet.
Of course there is no reason to suspect that during the long hours spent at sea the committed Canadian ‘human rights activists’ will be quizzing the Iranian reporter about the lack of rights for women and homosexuals in his own country or that they will address the fact that, far from being a victim of ‘Israeli apartheid’, their Israeli Arab fellow passenger Majed Kiyal is a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
The Irish boat appears to have seven passengers aboard, including former rugby player Trevor Hogan, Libyan/Irish citizen Hussein Hamed, the University of Limerick’s Zoe Lawlor, Belfast Friends of Palestine representative John Mallon, Waterford council member Pat Fitzgerald and Socialist Party MEP Paul Murphy.
The boats’ cargoes apparently consist of letters of support to the people of Gaza from concerned Westerners as well as an alleged $30,000 worth of medicines. Apparently demonstrations are planned in Gaza and Ramallah on Thursday afternoon to demand UN protection for the flotilla, despite the fact that the UN commissioned Palmer Report deemed the partial embargo on Gaza perfectly legal.
Here at CiF Watch we have covered extensively in the past the subject of the connections between the various ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla stunts and their extreme Islamist organisers. The facts behind these repeated operations are freely available for anyone to find, and yet the jaded scenario of Western ‘human rights activists’ engaging in PR stunts on behalf of a non-democratic, racist, repressive theocratic regime continues to be promoted by the supposedly ‘liberal’ Guardian’s Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood, who is apparently determined to avoid all serious investigative reporting at any cost.
