PatrickHenry: The quantity of nonsense in your brief posting is unpleasant and conversation-killing. One only has to read the Comments in the 3 recent Truthdig stories on this Turkey-Israel incident to see the degree of hatred. A few examples:

“…some courageous Turkish patriot should fire a bullet in the f…n bloody ass of this so-called Israeli Ambassador, who is no more than another fascist Zionist, spying on the host country!”

“Fuck fucken Israel!”

“From running sex slave operations and drug running down to ubiquitous fake brand peddling and con jobs they [Israelis] are persona non grata. There are no innocents. They’re all involved in it somewhere, somehow.”

Your comparison to apartheid is absurd. Palestinians used to be able to come and go in Israel with ease until they started blowing themselves up. Israel then started cutting off their access, thereby almost entirely stopping the murderous attacks by the Palestinians. That isn’t apartheid, it is self-defense.

Saying Israel is not a democracy is also absurd. It is certainly an imperfect democracy, as all are, but you should try running a country surrounded by people, and containing people within its borders, who are actively trying to end your existence, and see if you could approach anything like the level of democracy in Israel – which, mind you, peace-minded Palestinians are themselves trying to emulate, and have repeatedly said so in public.

And, finally, you reveal a disgusting kind of racism with your reference to a “monied minority” who “control a lot of the financial, media programming, movies and by that virtue the elected officials whose need it to the point of treason against the electorate.” This quote could easily join the others above in its repulsive evocation of a global Jewish conspiracy to control the world. And further, you suggest, the world is waking up to this conspiracy. One could hardly hope for a more perfect example of racist and paranoid accusations. BTW, just because you learned the words “hasbara” and love to throw it around, along with “fascist” – the favorite word of every half-wit who thinks he’s figured out the injustices of the world – doesn’t mean you should use them. They become empty words in your hands, indicating nothing more than a vague dislike for their target. Your ideas are malignant and you are not worthy of this conversation.

PatrickHenry: I’m afraid there is a misunderstanding. The hatred and bigotry I am talking about is not from Palestinians (that is quite a separate question) but from people in the West and elsewhere who have made a hobby of hating Israel - for some, it is more like a career.

I have in no way confused Jews with Israel (which can’t really be called a nation, but rather a country, considering the multiplicity of ethnicities, religions, and cultures). I mentioned Jews only once to explain that any complex and intellectually honest understanding of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict must spread the blame and the suffering around. And yet, many people, including most of those on this and similar Comments sections, regard Israeli Jews (as opposed to Arab Israelis) as the root of all evil in the region. This is, of course, nonsense on the face of it, and assumes a blameless, almost virginal characterization of the Palestinians, as if they were all peace-loving good guys versus evil murderous Jewish bad guys. And if the Israelis have their boot on the throat of the Palestinians, it is at least in part because the Palestinians have been trying to annihilate the (Jewish) Israelis in any way they can.

I believe the Israelis and the Palestinians both have legitimate claims and complaints, which could be quite easily solved if the right people were in power on both sides at the same time. But it doesn’t help the situation when Americans, for example, who either no little about the long and complex history of both groups, or have absorbed a very limited politicized narrative of that history, jump up on their high horses screaming about how evil the Israelis are (and less often, since there many fewer, how evil the Palestinians are) as if they actually had the depth of understanding to make such outrageous, ill-considered, factually incorrect, and hate-filled statements. These people behave, in my view, like soccer hooligans who get turned on by their anger and by “righteousness” of their cause, and meanwhile encourage the players on the field to greater and greater violence.

PatrickHenry: yes, the Palestinians do have a right to defend themselves, and so do the Israelis. This covers the point fairly well. Unless you begin by blaming everything that has happened between Israelis and Palestinians from Day 1 on Jews (which is a delusional but extremely common notion) you are left with a situation in which 2 groups have a right to defend themselves. In which case, a peace agreement is the only solution (and let’s not get into the long story of those struggles).

I do not believe in good guys and bad guys. What horrifies and disgusts me about so much of the rhetoric, is the demonization and sheer undisguised hatred for a country and a group of people that can only be described as outright bigotry.

And PatrickHenry, do you really think the Israelis are imagining those terrorist attacks? Ask the families of the dead how imaginary they are. And please don’t throw epithets at someone, me, that you do not know. Who knows, maybe we can have a civil conversation.

This report is a rare one from the UN in that it doesn’t pillory Israel for an infinitely imaginative list of crimes. Anti-Israeli resolutions are frequently produced by the UN, with its lopsided representation of countries who are: 1) predominantly Islamic and side with their co-religionists; 2) 3rd World countries whose struggles for self-determination and economic well-being have brought them into an ideological environment that presume Israel’s evilness (despite the fact that several of these countries once received direct economic and technical assistance from Israel); 3) ideologically rigid people on the left who participate in the anti-Israeli frenzy that has gripped Western Europe and certain corners of the United States.

Now, a UN report says that Israel has a right to defend itself from increasingly long-distance rockets aimed at population center. It says that a boat containing some individuals who were not non-violent, and in fact attacked Israeli soldiers with potentially lethal weapons, was a fair target for boarding. It may very well be the case that the Israeli response was excessive, but having watched a video of an Israeli soldier rappelling down a rope onto the ship, and immediately being attacked with a long metal pole and pushed overboard, and miraculously not dying in the process, does not strike me as the behavior of flower-clutching peace activists.

The capacity for people who simply detest Israel from square one to ignore the context in which this, and so many other violent events, have taken place is impressive. Say you lived in New Jersey and, one day, Hamas took over Delaware and declared that you had no right to exist and started lobbing rockets into your cities, getting to the smaller ones, like Camden, but daily being more able to hit the bigger places, like Trenton and Newark. Killing people at random. Would you do anything in your power to make it stop, or would you agree with people who have developed an outsized affection for Delawareans who insist that you should just leave them alone?

The language applied in several of the posts above makes plain the willingness to say anything at all to decontextualize, delegitimize, and demonize a country that has been far more restrained than others in dealing with extremely well-armed groups bent on murdering as many of their people as possible (eg. U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China, not to mention places like the Sudan or the Congo, whose plights seem to have somehow passed below the radars of so many justice-minded people who make a career out of hating Israel). And let us not forget that Hamas, like Hezbollah, is armed and deeply supported by Iran and Syria.

I’ll end with a few references to the above posts that exemplify the hyperbolic free-for-all that constitutes daily conversations about Israel:

- California Ray says that, “In May 2010, aboard a passenger ship in international waters, a U.S. citizen and five other passengers died in a manner consistent with extra-legal, arbitrary and summary execution at the hands of armed commandos.” I would say that it was, apparently, not extra-legal, certainly not arbitrary, and I wonder if Ray understands what the term “summary execution” means?

- Hendrik Van den Berg describes a conspiracy of right-wing pro-Israeli ciphers writing the report. Apart from the fact that this is just not true, I wonder how much time Mr. Van den Berg spends writing about all the times that UN commissions, headed by people who don’t even hide their dislike for Israel, have produced lopsided reports blaming Israel for every imaginable problem in the Middle East.

- 100PercentPureSemite is an extremely silly person. “Israel is a demon”? You sound like a really terrific conversationalist. And can we put an end to the “Semite” conversation? Everybody knows that Arabs are Semites, too. “Anti-Semite” is just a term with a precedent to mean anti-Jewish. Calm down.

So, let’s see, our tool Secretary General of the UN selects the former right-wing and U.S. supported President of Colombia, a former New Zealand Labour Party leader who was disliked by his own party members because he was involved in shifting policy towards “pragmatic” privatization of government assets, an Israeli banker and member of various zionist organizations, and a former Turkish diplomat who was known to be very close to several Western governments, and then we are surprised that their report exceeds its authority and claims Israel acted legally.  Why do we even pay attention to this phony exercise?

I was watching the live feed from the ship when Israeli solders attacked the flotilla.  The passengers were screaming for help and waving white flags and you could hear the Israeli solders continue to fire on them. This was murder - period.

Israel’s right to defend herself ....??

from humanitarians on a humanitarian mission?

What would happen if those humanitarians reached the starving and oppressed
people of Gaza? would israel have melted like salt in water after seeing children
being fed, given medicine and people being able to rebuild their communities?

So you are saying that Israel is a demon. Only a demon would need to defend
herself from such a thing.

Everyone in the world knows what Israel is, the most ANTI SEMITIC STATE on
earth!

Israeli’s are not Semitic! 95% of all jews are not of Semitic descent! they are
Khazairian asiatic turkish peoples who converted to Judaism in the 8th century
in mass. Check out Benjamin Freedman’s speech on youtube and the book “who
is Esua Edom”

Arabs are 100% Semitic. Palestinians are 100% Semitic. The overwhelming
majority of Jews are not Semitic at all. Israel is the biggest sham in human
history.

The UN had to do even more cause on the base of cause and effect:
if the blocade on Gaza Is legal, so breaking the blocade is not only “reckless” but illegal and israel had the full right to defend herself!!!

btw, did you know BDS founder is a Tel-Aviv University student? he calls on the world to boycott the university in which he studies.
in south africa the would have never let him study with the “whites” (jews for that matter)