Mr Netanyahu insisted the raided ship was "not a love boat", but a "boat of hate" and he defended the actions of the Israeli commandos who interdicted the aid convoy.

"They were going to be killed and they had to act in self-defence," he said.

"It's very clear to us that the attackers had prepared their violent action in advance.

"They were members of an extremist group that has supported international terrorist organisations and today support the terror organisation called Hamas."

The link between one of the groups involved in the flotilla protest and terrorism is a point Israel is keen to drive home.

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Meanwhile, at the Kommandantur in Tel-Nazi-Aviv, The SS divisions of Hitleryanhu are preparing for their next blitzkrieg... While Goebbelsyanhu spruiks the virtues of the third IsReich against the inferior races — basically the rest of the world — who were not the "Chosen People".

The deputy head of the Israeli mission to the United Nations, Dan Carmon, asks: ''What kind of humanitarian activists insist on circumventing the UN, the Red Cross and other recognised international organisations?''

Two words: Aliyah Bet. Between 1934 and 1948 more than 100,000 Jews attempted to enter Palestine illegally; 142 voyages, 120 ships. More than 70,000 succeeded, violating restrictions imposed by Britain and sanctioned by the League of Nations and United Nations.

Among the most memorable voyages was that of the Exodus. Arriving near Palestine in July 1947, it was surrounded and rammed during a ferocious battle. Three Jews were killed and 146 injured. More than 4500 men, women and children were loaded onto ships returning to Germany.

Yes, this was life or death for those people and thousands of others. Yes, these were people, not material aid (which Jews smuggled in numerous ingenious and illegal ways). But Aliyah Bet played a significant role in breaking British resistance and leading it to give up the mandate.

The Gaza freedom flotilla takes a page from our own playbook; we are foolish to expect different results. Jews and Israelis are now Goliaths to Gaza's civilian Davids. We have become the tyrant.

Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation that wants Israelis and Jews like me dead. But nothing excuses the collective punishment, impoverishment, cultural deprivation and dehumanisation of Gazans that Israel has imposed. I cannot imagine anything more un-Jewish.

Judy Bamberger O'Connor (ACT)

The Turkish president has said that Israel's military raid on civilian aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip has caused "irreparable" damage to his country's relations with Israel, and will "never" be forgiven.

The raid "is not an issue that can be forgotten... or be covered up... Turkey will never forgive this attack," he said. 

Nine people - eight Turks and a US national of Turkish origin- were killed in Monday's pre-dawn raid on the Mavi Mamara, which was carrying aid to Gaza in a bid to break Israel's strangling blockade of the territory.

As their funerals got underway on Thursday, thousands poured onto the streets around the Fatih Mosque in Istanbul, chanting slogans condemning Israel and waving Turkish and Palestinian flags.

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The Israeli attack on the Gaza freedom flotilla was an act of lethal stupidity. Lethal for its victims, stupid for Israel. It might be well, therefore, to remind the Jewish people of their own history.

Two years after World War II, a rustbucket American steamship renamed Exodus 1947 sailed from France with 4515 Jews on board. Most were Holocaust survivors, bound for a new life in the Promised Land, then the British Mandate of Palestine.

The British refused to accept them as immigrants and stopped the ship off the Palestine coast. Three people were killed when the Royal Navy boarded it by force and sailed it to the port of Haifa. The Exodus 1947 Jews were eventually sent back to occupied Germany, of all places.

This was a priceless propaganda coup in the fight for an independent Jewish homeland. There was a tremendous international outcry. The novel Exodus, by Leon Uris, a bestseller based on the story of the ship, and the 1960 Hollywood film of the same name, starring Paul Newman, cemented the idea of Israel in the Western political and cultural imperative.

Some of this ought to have occurred to the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, when he ordered the commando assault on the Gaza flotilla. Evidently not. Beneath that silvery, Harvard-educated veneer there lies an unprincipled thug addicted to the use of Israeli military might and impervious to world opinion.

Endlessly repeating the errors of history, Israel now engages in a savage repression of the Palestinian people and their right to a homeland of their own. The policy platform of Netanyahu's Likud party makes no bones about it.

''The government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan River,'' it reads. ''The Palestinians can run their lives freely in the framework of self-rule, but not as an independent and sovereign state. Thus, for example, in matters of foreign affairs, security, immigration and ecology their activity shall be limited in accordance with imperatives of Israel's existence, security and national needs.''

The blockade of Gaza is a human catastrophe. It has created a ghetto of despair for 1.5 million people. Just this week the International Committee of the Red Cross reported again that: "Gazans continue to suffer the effects of siege-induced poverty and warfare.

"The closure imposed on Gaza three years ago and the effects of Israel's military operation in the Strip in January 2009 are crippling the entire economy. Humanitarian aid alone cannot address the massive needs in Gaza, where civilians are paying the price of the blockade and ongoing hostilities."

Writing in The New York Times on Wednesday, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz stated the bleedin' obvious, that no idea has ever been defeated by force. Israelis should understand this better than any people on the planet but, tragically, they do not.

We've been here before ... but Israel has failed to learn lessons of history

The cartoon by Pat Oliphant in the New York Times is a masterpiece of great brevity... A pirate-garbed Netanyahu storms a ship saying : "If you don't like piracy on the high sea — you're anti-semitic!..."

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I suppose we could claim Oliphant as one of our own:

from Wikipedia:

Patrick Bruce "Pat" Oliphant (b. July 24, 1935 in Adelaide, Australia) is the most widely syndicated political cartoonist in the world, described by the New York Times as "the most influential cartoonist now working". His trademark is a small penguin character named Punk, who is often seen making a sarcastic comment about the subject of the panel.

Oliphant's career, which spans over fifty years, began in 1952 as a copyboy with the Adelaide News. He continued in the newspaper business in Australia until he emigrated to the United States in 1964.

Once in the U.S., he first worked at The Denver Post. His strip was nationally syndicated and internationally syndicated in 1965. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1967 for his February 1, 1966 cartoon They Won't Get Us To The Conference Table ... Will They?. Oliphant moved to the now defunct Washington Star for six years, until the paper folded in 1981.

Oliphant's work has appeared in several exhibitions, most notably at the National Portrait Gallery. He has also crafted a series of small sculptures based on his caricatures of various political figures, which have been displayed alongside his drawings in some exhibitions.

In addition to winning the Pulitzer Prize, Oliphant won the National Cartoonist Society Editorial Cartoon Award seven times in 1971, 1973, 1974, 1984, 1989, 1990, and 1991, the Reuben Award twice in 1968 and 1972 and the Thomas Nast Prize.

Oliphant is the nephew of Sir Mark Oliphant, the Australian physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II, and later became Governor of South Australia.

From the beginning, it was clear that Israeli forces were concentrating in their largest numbers on the Marmara, a ship carrying some 550 peace activists. The remaining five boats were much smaller and easily commandeered. After the Marmara was subdued, the passengers silenced, and their recording equipment confiscated, Israel disseminated a carefully choreographed account of the events that night that would dominate the airwaves for the first 48 hours.

Only as eyewitnesses, traumatised by their experiences, started to return to their home countries, were serious questions raised about the veracity of the Israeli version of events. Israeli commandos initiated the attack on the Marmara with stun grenades, paintballs and rubber-cased steel bullets. They were met with water hoses as the ship's passengers tried to form a defensive cordon to prevent soldiers from reaching the wheelhouse. Next, the helicopters started their approach, hovering overhead as they tried to disgorge commandos.

From the other ships, passengers looked on helplessly: "The worst thing was seeing the helicopter come up because I knew they were going to invade," said Ewa Jasiewicz, a 32-year-old organiser. "You could hear the screams when they started shooting ... We wanted to stop and go back but there wouldn't have been anything we could have done."

From the moment the helicopters arrived, the sequence of events becomes confused. The dizzying number of claims and counter-claims serves only to present an incomplete account of a military operation that went badly, badly wrong. More than 1.7 million viewers have pored over the edited YouTube footage posted by the Israeli navy since Wednesday. In the dramatic clip, commandos rappel down on to the deck from a helicopter, where they are met by angry activists armed with iron bars and sticks.

This is a critical point, for Israel has rallied domestic opinion on the crucial claim that its soldiers dropped into a meticulously planned riot for which they were completely unprepared. Panicked, they acted in self-defence after they landed, shooting only those who threatened them.

The video is problematic, though. The images of angry protesters are striking, but they lack context. What happened before? What happened next? Had the soldiers started shooting when they descended to the deck? The only account offered by the Israelis of what happened next is left to Staff Sergeant S, a commando who claims he shot six of the protesters.

The last of 15 to arrive on the deck, he said he saw that two of his colleagues had gunshot wounds. Pushing others into a protective cordon around the injured soldiers, he shot at the protesters to force them to fall back. It's a neat account, but several eyewitness accounts tell a very different story.

Mr Elshayyal, a reporter for the Arab channel al-Jazeera, was standing to one side of the ship and had a view of the front and back of the vessel when the fighting started. By his account, soldiers fired down on the protesters from the helicopters before an Israeli soldier had even set foot on the ship. A man next to him was shot through the top of his head, dying instantly.

from Al Jazeera

The Israeli attack on the international aid flotilla - killing nine and injuring dozens more - is not the first example of non-violent resistance by Palestinians and their supporters being met by force.

Israel has, in fact, at different times reacted with repression or even extreme violence to cultural and political manifestations of Palestinian identity.

But the flotilla carnage is the first direct and officially declared attack by the Israeli army on foreign activists - taking Israel's reaction to solidarity activities to a new and unprecedented level.

Israeli claims that Turkish activists "resisted" its takeover of the ships do not change the reality that the Israeli army performed an illegal armed operation against activists who challenged the siege of Gaza - not with weapons, but by trying to deliver food and medical supplies to the besieged Palestinian population.

Israeli impunity has already been shown in the cases of Western peace activists Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndell who were killed while peacefully protesting against Israeli army actions against Palestinian citizens.

An act of fear

But Israel's reaction was not merely an act of arrogance. It was also an act of fear and weakness in the face of a rising tide of Palestinian and international civic campaigns.

The conundrum is no longer what shall we do to satisfy the Zionists but, more likely, what will the Zionists demand of us?

All that I have gathered from this world-wide problem is that it really does impact on Australia and New Zealand per se more than any other military aggression in history.

This is because the real or perceived “enemy” is already amongst us due to the Diaspora.  And that to me is the possibility of a new anti-Jewish “crusade” to protect the equal rights of all other states in the world.  Would that be wrong?

And the added irony is that “Israel” is a name bought from the US and in my opinion, does not exist in any form of international law.  But the settled Jewish families of some other 26 truly sovereign nations will be tarred with the same brush as the brutal and uncivilized military of the Zionists.

Perhaps the stories of the Jewish; Armenian; Russian or Bengali holocausts to name a few may have been exaggerated but, they certainly did happen. So did the infamous “Rape of the Balkans”.  Are we now more civilized?

There was a time when we Australians were considered to be a British based race with the overall protection of the United Kingdom and its mainly naval predominance.  (Shades of the Mining giants?) After WW 2 and the Churchill statement that the Allies would allow Japan to occupy Australia but that they would take it back later, our Labor government had to make a decision about sovereignty, and Curtin did.

So, the illegal occupation of Palestine is an example of how the US dominated UN has failed to deliver any semblance of peace anywhere in the world and as President Eisenhower warned; they have no intention of doing so.

If there was a genuine and unaligned Peace Force with power of trade and sanctions, which could punish transgressors for unilaterally disadvantaging other members, we may have an answer.

However, at this time, the world has a rogue group calling themselves Israelites, the majority of whom are Jewish by birth or persuasion and not descendants of the original Israelites or Judeans.

Are they really an American “burr under the saddle” or, are the Zionists in financial control of America and were they in the recent “meltdown”?

God Bless Australia and may we respect our leaders until they prove that they cannot be so honored.  NE OUBLIE.

Amr Mousa, the Arab League secretary-general, has said that the Israeli siege on Gaza must come to an end.

His comments on Sunday came after he arrived in the Gaza Strip, his first visit to the territory since Israel's imposition of a crippling blockade in 2006.

glorious mistakes

An Israeli military inquiry into the deadly raids on a convoy of aid ships has found a series of mistakes were made at a senior level.

An investigative panel has blamed flawed intelligence and poor planning for the fiasco which left nine Turkish activists dead.

But their report praised the Israeli commandos as courageous and professional.

When Israeli commandos stormed the Mavi Marmara in a pre-dawn raid, they claimed they came under immediate attack from the activists on board and had no choice but to shoot in self-defence.

Major General Giora Eiland's military inquiry has found their actions were justified.

"They did open fire only when they were under immediate real danger to their lives," he said.

"They took control of the ships in very difficult circumstances."

The investigative panel has presented its findings to the Israeli government and military.

Though it commends the soldiers, it admits mistakes were made.

"There were some professional mistakes reading both the intelligence and the decision-making process in some of the operational mistakes," Major General Eiland said.

The report says those planning the raids underestimated the potential for violence and should have had a backup plan when things went wrong.

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