Iran to escort flotillas?

Editorial

There is a phenomenon called “suicide by cop,” in which an individual provokes police into lethal action. In some ways, the nine dead on the Mavi Marmara were cases of suicide by IDF. In truth, how did those on board, when picking up metal bars and knives to attack boarding Israel Defence Forces personnel, expect the incident to turn out?

Never let us be accused, as is so often the indictment, that overseas Zionists will never criticize anything Israel does. Something went wrong, clearly. The IDF is a tower of restraint, which has shown for 60 years that it is capable of defusing the most explosive situations with the fewest possible casualties. Being unprepared for a brutal attack like the one that greeted them on the Mavi Marmara seems to have been a strategic blunder.

Yet the reaction of the world has been disproportionate in so many ways. Not least is the world’s continued obsession with condemning Israel wildly while ignoring the panorama of injustice in the world. About the same time that nine people were killed in battle with the IDF, 10 times that many people were slaughtered in Pakistan because they were members of the Ahmadiyya minority, a group against which the government of Pakistan practises open discrimination. The attitude of the Pakistani government may or may not have sent signals that mass murder was a practical approach to cultural and religious diversity. Where is the outrage about that and a million other injustices throughout the world?

Why is the sympathy for Israel, a country unilaterally defending the Western world on the frontline of jihadi terror, so inadequate and meagre, while sympathy comes so easily and abundantly for terrorists costumed as aid workers?

The world finds it hard to fathom that the organizers of the flotilla are jihadi thugs impersonating humanitarians. But the world also prefers to believe that Israeli soldiers detain ambulances and pregnant women at checkpoints out of base cruelty and inhumanity, rather than acknowledge the root cause, which is that ambulances and fake pregnancies have been tools in this dirty war against Israel for at least a decade. A world prepared to believe the very worst about Israel somehow fails to notice or acknowledge any evil in Israel’s enemies.

As Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has said, Israel is guilty until proven guilty. In the view of an apparently huge swath of world opinion, Israel has no right to defend itself. A country deemed illegitimate from the start, which deserves to be wiped from the map and from the pages of history, can hardly justify defending itself militarily when it has no defence morally. With no right to exist in the first place, why should Israel elicit sympathy when its legitimacy is challenged with knives, metal bars and guns? Why does Israel have to intercept foreign vessels in international waters, on the premise that they may be carrying missiles intended for Israeli civilians, when those Israeli civilians, in the view of the world, have no right to live there in the first place?

The ethical rules of engagement to which Israel adheres have no traction among those who care no more about the lives and well-being of their own people than they do about the lives of Israelis. In Israel’s ethical world, every life has value. In the worldview of most of their enemies, every life also has a value: a propaganda value. In their war, dead Israelis are good, but dead “martyrs” are also good. When ideology trumps life and everything else, we are in an asymmetrical battle of a different kind.

It is appropriate that the latest ship to attempt to break the blockade was named Rachel Corrie, after the young Washington state woman who died in 2003 while serving as a human shield. The International Solidarity Movement, which brought Corrie to her death, at the time tried to manipulate public perceptions by combining photographs that led to the impression that the 23-year-old’s death was not an accident but a deliberate act by an Israeli tank commander. Much of the world continues to subscribe to this perverted narrative and the flotilla organizers, exploiting the young woman’s memory further, sailed into the blockade in a ship bearing the name of this woman whose life was taken and then exploited by people whose respect for life is trumped by an irrational and irresistible hatred of Israel.

Now, with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard volunteering to escort flotillas to Gaza, it would seem the world has no choice but to acknowledge the nature of these “peace activists.” But will the world? Almost certainly not. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already promised to finish the job he denies Hitler started, and the world is divided over whether to condemn him or have photo ops with him. Do not expect the world to open its eyes now.

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