Last Straw

While I was party­ing at Sun­rise Cel­eb­ra­tion in Somer­set recently my good friend Ken O’Keefe was sail­ing off to Gaza on the Mavi Mar­mara, as part of the Gaza Free­dom Flo­tilla.

The flo­tilla was car­ry­ing human­it­arian aid, med­ical sup­plies, and con­struc­tion mater­i­als, intent on break­ing the Gaza Strip block­ade being per­pet­rated by the apartheid state of Israel against the people of Palestine.

In the middle of the night on 30 May, while in inter­na­tional waters, they were for­cibly boarded by armed Israeli com­mandos. The pas­sen­gers defen­ded their ship against the invaders and nine of them were murdered, most shot at close range in the back of the head.

Ken helped over­power two com­mandos and man­aged to dis­arm one of his pis­tol and empty it’s ammuni­tion. The com­mandos even­tu­ally over­powered the flo­tilla, then promptly kid­napped every­one, tow­ing the ships to a deten­tion camp. After steal­ing everyone’s pos­ses­sions and gen­er­ally treat­ing them like dogs the kid­nap­pers relen­ted to inter­na­tional pres­sure, releas­ing and deport­ing most of those they had kid­napped. Ken wanted to appeal his deport­a­tion to Ire­land and instead go to Gaza, but, hav­ing already been ser­i­ously beaten twice by Israeli sol­diers while cap­tive, his soli­citor advised him that for his own safety he should leave Israel.

For his troubles Ken was laugh­ably lis­ted on the IDF’s offi­cial pro­pa­ganda web­log — IDF Spokes­per­son — as “known to be involved in ter­ror­ist activ­ity,” and con­tinu­ing with:

Ken O’Keefe (Born 1969), an Amer­ican and Brit­ish cit­izen, is a rad­ical anti-Israel act­iv­ist and oper­at­ive of the Hamas Ter­ror organ­iz­a­tion. He attemp­ted to enter the Gaza Strip in order to form and train a com­mando unit for the Palestinian ter­ror organization.

To form and train a com­mando unit? I’ve had some heated argu­ments with Ken over the years but ‘ter­ror­ist com­mando’? Someone in the IDF pro­pa­ganda unit’s been telling porkies. (Note to IDF: when you’re falsely accus­ing someone of being a ter­ror­ist try not to get their nation­al­ity wrong. Kind of makes you look like you don’t know what you’re talk­ing about.)

So let’s get this straight. They kid­nap Ken (whose life story hap­pens to be an open book). Then they deport him. And then they tell us he’s a known ter­ror­ist? Wouldn’t it per­haps be a little more prudent to hold onto a terrorist?

Someone in the IDF pro­pa­ganda unit doesn’t know how to tell porkies.

External links

• Ken’s state­ment on the Israeli attack
• BBC HARDtalk inter­view with Ken, 28 June 2010

Open let­ter from the Camp for Cli­mate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Super­in­tend­ent of the Met­ro­pol­itan Police Service. Worth read­ing in it’s entirety.

Could be interesting. Jon Hen­ley for The Guard­ian: The Met­ro­pol­itan police have announced a new strategy for next week’s Cli­mate Camp  –  put­ting women officers in charge of the oper­a­tion. Will this avoid the viol­ence seen at the G20 protests? Per­haps the most noted Amer­ican researcher into gender dif­fer­ences in poli­cing, Joseph Balkin, observed that “police­men tend to see […]

Sign and send a mesage: freeezra.org Join Naomi Klein, Neve Gor­don, Noam Chom­sky and thou­sands of oth­ers and tell Israel not to jail Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most cour­ageous human rights act­iv­ists. His crime? He tried to stop a mil­it­ary bull­dozer from des­troy­ing the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. Nawi, a […]

The Reason Pro­ject, co-founded by Sam Har­ris, launched today: The Reason Pro­ject is a non­profit found­a­tion devoted to spread­ing sci­entific know­ledge and sec­u­lar val­ues in soci­ety. The found­a­tion draws on the tal­ents of prom­in­ent and cre­at­ive thinkers in a wide range of dis­cip­lines to encour­age crit­ical think­ing and erode the influ­ence of dog­mat­ism, super­sti­tion, and […]

Bind­mans, a Lon­don law firm, is pre­par­ing to launch a legal chal­lenge against the UK police’s use of ket­tling: Bind­mans is … pre­par­ing to launch a legal chal­lenge against the use of “ket­tling”, the police tac­tic used to pen in 5,000 people dur­ing the G20 protests and a strategy which led to pro­test­ers suf­fer­ing asthma […]

You might remem­ber my post about a new pro­ject in the UK called Land­share. Well they’ve just launched their new website.

George Bush over­sees tor­ture and com­mits the “supreme war crime” of aggres­sion, caus­ing suf­fer­ing and death for mil­lions. Gets to go back to his ranch. One of the vic­tims of these crimes throws a shoe at the per­pet­rator. Gets 3 years in jail. The Guard­ian did get one thing wrong in their report. Mun­tazar al-Zaidi is […]

Abso­lutely bril­liant idea intro­duced by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on his UK TV pro­gram River Cot­tage last night: Land­share, link­ing people who want to grow their own food to space where they can grow it. Check it out at Landshare.net and register your interest. I have a flat with a small garden  —  which helps me stay sane liv­ing in […]

Des­pite the Israeli government’s threat to for­cibly stop them the Free Gaza group made a second suc­cess­ful sail­ing to Gaza Strip today. Their first sail­ing, on 24 August, made them the first people to freely enter Gaza Strip in forty-one years. Israel has imposed an immoral and illegal1 block­ade on Gaza Strip since June 2007, in an attempt to […]