Israel attacks aid ship


The Israelis requested to board the ships before darkness fell. If they had waited until the following morning, the ship would have been too near the coast - ship was not stopping.

It's very clear from the footage on the news that the people on the ship attacked the Israelis first.

People need to step back a bit and think about what happened. A ship load of people terrorist sympathies shouting "Death to Israel" with an unknown cargo sailing close to Israel and refusing to allow inspections by customs/maritime officials? What did they expect?

If a similar ship was heading into Dublin bay with people shouting "death to Ireland", would you expect Irish Army to use whatever force necessary to stop it, our would you wait until it sailed up the Liffey and exploded killing 1,000s?
 

Why should Israel be obliged to let any aid into Gaza? Gaza is part of Egypt, so why can the aid go through Egypt?
 
DublinTexas said:
.... Thank you Latrade, I than stand corrected in my interpretation of the EEZ for Israel, I was under the impression that a cost nation has the right to inspect vessels in the EEZ where needed...
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Which means it is now clear to you that all subsequent Israeli actions were illegal and any act of the captain, crew or passengers on the illegally boarded vessel were defensive and thus legal, as they were attacked by armed terrorists boarding their ship, unannounced and illegally, under cover of darkness.

It is evident from the statement quoted above by the spokesman / boss of the Israeli terrorists that there were no weapons on the ship other than those the Israeli terrorists brought with them.
Irrelevant nonsense and off topic. Israel cannot justify its illegal actions, i.e. piracy, terrorism and murder, on the basis that it's OK because other do it.
 

The ship would not have landed by first light. They could have waited or they could have done it earlier. It was a military operation.

Again it's not very clear from the footage that comes from one side. How do you know they were shouting "death to Israel"?

Not even going to acknowledge your last point which is stupid in the extreme. Israel never even claimed at any point that there was anything suspect in the cargo. It was about keeping the blockade in place.
 
csirl said:
Why should Israel be obliged to let any aid into Gaza? Gaza is part of Egypt, so why can the aid go through Egypt?
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It should be allowed in any way it can but the easiest way is directly by sea.

John Ging who is the Irishman in charge of the UN relief works in Gaza and is disliked by both Israel and Hamas so must be doing something right welcomed the attempts to break the blockade and has consistently called for an end to it. If he says there is a humanitarian crisis, I would rather listen to him than some Hamas, Egyptian, Israeli spokesman. How in this day and age, the idea of 'collective punishment' can be acceptable by any standards is beyond me.
 
To correct one of my earlier posts about the right of Israel to board the ship in International waters:

It does look like Israel did in fact have the right to board under the Proliferation Security Initiative. The pictures of the boats clearly show that they are flying Palestinian flags, yet none of the ships are registered in Palestine. This alone gives the right to board in International waters (bear in mind that the Marine Survey Office in Ireland seized one of the ships and made the owners remove Irish flags before departing from Dundalk because it was not registered in Ireland and so was not entitled to display the Irish flag).

Anyone know the country that the ship is actually registered in? Israel, Turkey, Cyprus and all EU countries are PSI signatories, as is Cambodia, where the ship seized by the MSO was registered.

http://www.state.gov/t/isn/c27732.htm
 
While there are many good people in the UN who, on an individual level, do great work I have absolutely no time for the UN as an organisation. It has shown itself to be utterly corrupt and incompetent and has been let by devious and contemptible men like Kofi Anan. When they answer the charges of child sex abuse, slavery and murder by their own people and they have Mr. Anan answer for his active participation in the continuation of the Rwandan genocide and they account for the millions and millions that disappear every year then they can act with some moral authority. Till then, and while Chine, the country funding genocide in Darfur, has a veto on the security council, the UN should be ignored whenever possible.
 
I find it strange that Sinn Fein are giving out about this. They have along history of smuggling stuff in on boats that they don’t want the authorities to look at. I heard that some of the cargo originated in Dundalk... is there a provo army surplus shop on eBay that the nutters in Hamas are buying from?
 

I agree that the organisation is a joke but as you say there are alot of individuals who do great work and try to do the best they can under difficult conditions. I don't have any time for UN security council resolutions or other political rubbish.
 

A country does not have the right to board a civillian ship in international waters using an elite commando unit, bring the ship and the people aboard into Israel, detain the people, deny them consular assistance and then make them sign declarations that they entered Israel illegally despite not wanting to go there in the first place.

Even Micheal Martin has said Israel has effectively kidnapped 8 Irish citizens.
 
Sunny said:
I agree that the organisation is a joke but as you say there are alot of individuals who do great work and try to do the best they can under difficult conditions. I don't have any time for UN security council resolutions or other political rubbish.
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+1, I've no time for the UN, especially when members of the council are constitutionally bound to destroy Israel and look for the genocide of the jewish population (you're supposed to be dedicated to peace to be part of the council) and they're voting on matters in the middle east directly affecting Israel.

So they're useless, but Israel can't pick and chose which bits of the agreements it uses to justify its aggression. It's all or nothing.
 

You should read both the PSI and the Geneva Conventions before posting.
 
I hear a lot of people calling for a bycott against Israel. Should we also boycott Israeli companies that operate here in Ireland?
 
csirl said:
You should read both the PSI and the Geneva Conventions before posting.
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By the way, what has PSI got to do with it considering that it was set up to deal with ships carrying nuclear material. I obviously missed the part where Israel accused the ships of carrying that sort of material.
 
csirl said:
You should read both the PSI and the Geneva Conventions before posting.
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This is another problem, because not only does Israel ignore the Geneva Convention when it wishes, but again there are parts of this convention that cast significant doubt on the legality blockade itself. In order to use it to justify the boarding of the ship, then Israel must accept the blocakde is against the Convention which would therefore mean that they had no right to board the ship in the first place.
 
UptheDeise said:
I hear a lot of people calling for a bycott against Israel. Should we also boycott Israeli companies that operate here in Ireland?
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No. Just like we shouldn't expel the Israeli Ambassador. It achieves nothing.
 
Sunny said:
By the way, what has PSI got to do with it considering that it was set up to deal with ships carrying nuclear material. I obviously missed the part where Israel accused the ships of carrying that sort of material.
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Actually, to be fair it includes Weapons of Mass Destruction and we all know the US (the main proponents of the PSI) need all the help they can in finding those. Besides which, you can do some real mass damage with a slingshot, I mean, if a really rather sore welt isn't mass destruction, then I don't know what is. And chocolate is toxic to dogs, obviously these terroist scum intended to feed the chocolate to dogs in Israel in order to ensure a huge biohazard problem with all the decaying mutts in the streets. There's no depths terrorists won't resort to, you've got to be one step ahead.

Though again, in support of Israel, if the chocolate was Hersheys, they had every right to stop that ship.
 
csirl said:
You should read both the PSI ...
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It's abundantly clear from the PSI's own website what its intent is. When and where did the Israelis accuse the ships of carrying WMD or materials to fashion them, unless of course Israel believes that fruit-juice is such a material.?

To quote from the site - the bolding is mine:

"Today, the Cold War has disappeared but thousands of those weapons have not. In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up." —President Barack Obama, April 5, 2009

The ISN Bureau:

  • spearheads efforts to promote international consensus on WMD proliferation through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy;
  • leads the development of diplomatic responses to specific bilateral and regional WMD proliferation challenges, including today's threats posed by Iran, North Korea, and Syria. Develops and supports strategic dialogues with India, Pakistan, China, and other key states or groups of states.
  • addresses WMD proliferation threats posed by non-state actors and terrorist groups by improving physical security, using interdiction and sanctions, and actively participating in the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI);
  • works closely with the UN, the G-8, NATO, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international institutions and organizations to reduce and eliminate the threat posed by WMD
  • supports efforts of the international community to prevent, protect against, and respond to the threat or use of WMD by terrorists; leads coordination for the U.S. government's as co-chair to the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, a partnership of 77 countries (and growing) committed to preventing, protecting against, and responding to nuclear terrorism."
I don't see where it mentions axes, knives, iron bars or fire-arms carried by the attacking pirates as justification for illegally boarding a vessel in international waters.
 
Now my beef with this is that the IDF underestimated the resistance that these people would put up. Stupidly they believed that the people on board were humanitarian peace activists and so the IDF were only armed with paintball rifles and hand guns. They should have known better, the handling of this by the IDF was bad.

Once it was clear that there were militants on board they should have either stopped trying to board or use other measurements to neutralize the militants. But unfortunately they were ill prepared and lessons need to be learned out of that by the IDF.

Now as to the legal right of Israel to inspect a vessel that might carry goods to a hostile group of people I’m sure there will be much discussion and maybe there will be some sort of consensus come out of it.

I still maintain that the IDF has the right to inspect any vessel that tries to get into Gaza and in fact I think that the IDF has the right to seize vessels that are not co-operating in depended on where the vessel is. This is and has been done worldwide by other states.

I’m all for giving the people of Gaza aid and Israel offered to ferry the cargo from the ships to Gaza after inspections (a needed step to prevent further terrorist attacks on their country). Why did the other ships accept that but this one vessel did not? It was a reasonable offer of Israel but clearly the militants on board of this one vessel had different intentions.

In fact I’m for a two state solution. I believe that both nations should exist side by side but until that has been archived Israel has the right to defend herself. And unfortunately at this moment in time it means an inspection of good going into Gaza.

The sooner the 2 states are established the better and it means that both sides need to compromise.
 
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