Help the poor people of Gaza!

Supported by trendy-lefties*, hippies and anarchists, a new flotilla has set sail from Western Europe with the aim of "breaching the Israeli blockade" of Gaza and providing much needed supplies to the residents of the Gaza Strip.

Of course, this now well-established PR stunt will serve to stoke the anti-Israel rhetoric and will most likely give people whose moral compasses are somewhat wonky a chance to holler their crazed beliefs and consipracy theories into the microphones of the world's press.

Unfortunately for them, their efforts are unlikely to help the average Gazan on the street, as it were. Aside from relentlessly shooting rockets at Israeli villages and cities and public executions of anyone who publicly disagrees with its extreme religious or political stance, Hamas should also be known for its repeated stealing of supplies intended for the very citizens it is supposed to be governing and looking after.

But this does not concern the jolly group of solidarity activists; this is more about decrying Israel as a despicable country that perpetrates war crimes than it is about supporting and caring for their fellow human beings. No, if they really cared, they would go to countries where real abuses of human rights take place, where no one is permitted to strike a balance for minorities, where there is no journalistic freedom, where there is no judicial review. They could go to Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe but that none of these are a real cause celebre is telling.

Meanwhile, 97 trucks laden with building materials were permitted into the Gaza Strip earlier today. And this is no one-off. So much aid has been entering Gaza, that MFA Spokesman Yigal Palmor announced earlier today that, "Since the ceasefire in January 2009, well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza from Israel - that is almost a ton of aid for each man, woman and child in the Strip." (Source: here)

If this is a siege, Israel's mighty and imperious evil war machine isn't exactly doing its job efficiently, is it? The truth is that there is no seige of Gaza, there is no blockade, there is no illegal collective punishment being wreaked upon the Palestinian people. There undoubtedly are shortages of many goods, but none to the point where people are desperate for them. In any case, for as long as the tunnel industry is able to smuggle in items as large as cars, (in addition to augmenting Hamas's massive stockpile of rifles, rockets and other weaponry) it is quite clear that Gazans are not in a dire need for anything. The unfortunate truth is that the blockade is a lie; something these activists are unwilling to admit.

So it seems to me like these "pro-Palestinian" activists are no more than a rowdy bunch of hate-filled nuts who need to mouth off about the "despotism" of the Israeli government. I would say that they would be better served by reading the news, but no doubt they'd find some way to twist what they read to their agenda, too.

In the meantime, I post this video below. It makes for highly recommended viewing and serves to set the record straight about the people these activists plan to meet with.





* You know the type; the kind who invariably have immense trouble placing Israel on a map, let alone answering correctly questions about its size relative to the countries surrounding it. Or indeed those who posit that Israel has a population of over 100 million or some such exorbitant figure, that it's national language is Jewish and that it practices apartheid. You can spot them a mile away; they like to wear designer spectacle, T shirts bearing slogans such as "End Poverty Now!" (any suggestions on how to overthrow corrupt African regimes without sparking a war, sweethearts?) and with that most sickeningly omnipresent of fashion statements — the keffiyeh — carefully draped around their necks.