Looking for Trouble

Israel halts Gaza-bound aid ship carrying Jewish activists

From Media with Conscience:

An aid ship carrying eight Jewish activists from Europe, Israel, and the US was apprehended by the Israeli navy just miles off the coast of Gaza after being warned by a warship.

Navy commandos boarded the Irene, and then the passengers were led off the boat.

Rich Cooper, an organizer with Independent Jewish Voices, said that his group is now demanding the immediate release of the activists.
The ship had left the port of Famagusta in Turkish-held northern Cyprus on Sunday afternoon.

The Israeli army had said it would offer to transfer the ship’s aid supplies to the port of Ashdod and then ask the crew to turn back.
Ehud Barak, Israel’s defence minister, had repeatedly warned that Israel will intercept any ship nearing Gaza, which is governed by the Palestinian group Hamas.

“In the tradition of the civil rights movement … we assert our right to continue to Gaza under international law,” Glyn Secker, the Irene’s captain, said on Monday.

Jewish gesture

The 10-metre catamaran was tiny in comparison with the six-ship May 31 aid convoy that contained 10,000 tonnes of aid and over 700 activists.
But the voyage was a gesture by left-leaning European Jewish groups to highlight what they see as a flawed Israeli policy of collective punishment against 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza.

To read more of this article, click here.

Meanwhile, according to the Institute for Public Accuracy, the group Jewish Boat to Gaza released a statement several hours ago saying, “The Irene, a boat carrying nine passengers and aid for Gaza’s population, has been taken over by the Israeli navy and denied access to Gaza. The boat is flying a British flag and its passengers include citizens of the U.S., the UK, Germany and Israel. Two journalists are also on board.”

The IPA said in a press release today that, the passengers, reportedly now being detained by Israel include Reuven Moskovitz, from Israel, a founding member of the Jewish-Arab village Neve Shalom – Wahat al Salaam (Oasis of Peace) – and a Nazi holocaust survivor; Rami Elhanan, from Israel, lost his daughter Smadar to a suicide bombing in 1997 and is a founding member of the Bereaved Families Circle of Israelis and Palestinians who lost their loved ones to the conflict; Lilian Rosengarten, from the U.S., is a peace activist and psychotherapist and was a refugee from Nazi Germany; and Yonathan Shapira, from Israel, a former Israeli military pilot and now an activist for Combatants for Peace.

The IPA also forward news that journalist Gareth Porter just wrote a piece titled “UN Fact-Finding Mission Says Israelis ‘Executed’ U.S. Citizen Furkan Dogan,” which says: “The report of the fact-finding mission of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) on the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla released last week shows conclusively, for the first time, that U.S. citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.

“The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old U.S. citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground. …

“Although the report’s revelations and conclusions about the killing of Dogan and the five other victims were widely reported in the Turkish media last week, not a single story on the report … appeared in U.S. news media.” http://www.truth-out.org/un-fact-finding-mission-says-israelis-executed-us-citizen-furkan-dogan63609