Shurat haDin’s Nitsana Darshan Leitner

Melanie Phillips provides an excellent summary of the legal race led by Shurat haDin to thwart the flotilla, writing:

Is a bunch of young Israeli lawyers working round the clock sustained only by Diet Coke, falafel and cigarettes about to pull off the legal equivalent of the Six-Day War?

Israel famously won that war before it even started by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. Now it’s beginning to look as if the Gaza flotilla of fools and fanatics may be holed below the waterline before it even sets off on its cynical and potentially murderous stunt.

She includes a damning section on flotilla organizer and International Solidarity Movement leader Adam Shapiro in which he spells out the purpose of the campaign as one of total assault on Israel — not humanitarian aid to the Palestinians:

Our ground is the whole world. And that’s where our resistance has to be. The whole world… We already have a third intifada. It’s going on right now. It’s going on all over the world.

Read it all.

NGO Monitor has translated a Dutch news story about a number of its journalists gathered on Corfu to participate in the flotilla who have decided the project is not for them. Under the headline “Pers vertrouwt Gazaboot niet” (“The Press Doesn’t Trust Gaza Boat”) the story recounts tensions between organizers and journalists seeking information about flotilla participants, funding and other issues. The account notes:

Eric Beauchemin (47), a journalist for the ‘Wereldomroep’ (Dutch World Broadcast station): “I’ve been doing this work for 25 years, but never have I seen a more closed organization. When we would ask critical questions they would accuse us of being unprofessional. Restrictions were imposed on us that hadn’t been agreed upon beforehand. We were prohibited from telling which island we were on, even though they had promised we could.

The same reporter said of the activist participants: “Their gullibility is shocking. They are blinded by idealism.”

There was also reportedly dismay at the appearance of an operative with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, Amin Abou Rashed, though assurances had been given there would be no such Hamas connections.

Hamas activist Muhammad Sawalha

JCPA has an informative exposé worth reading, “Who Is Behind the Second Gaza Flotilla?”. Ehud Rosen writes:

The second flotilla is coordinated by Muhammad Sawalha, a senior UK-based Muslim Brotherhood figure connected to Hamas. Many of the participating organizations can be directly linked with the Union of Good (UoG), a coalition of European charities affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, which in 2008 was designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury for transferring funds to Hamas. The UoG was initiated by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, leader of the Muslim Brotherhood on a global scale, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000.

See also the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center for more on Muhammad Sawalha and his involvement in the previous flotillla.

Ha’aretz‘s Jack Khoury errs today, writing that Free Gaza movement head Huwaida

Arraf herself has sailed to Gaza several times in the past, and was on the Mavi Marmara during the Israeli raid last year.

In fact, Arraf was not a passenger aboard the Mavi Marmara, the only ship which saw violence. She was on the Challenger 1. Did Arraf mislead the reporter on this point? If so, it wouldn’t be the first time she doled out flotilla misinformation.

The Guido Fawkes’ blog stamps “Fraud” on Johann Hari for fabricating large parts of interviews

Those “interviews” conducted by Johann Hari, journalist at the UK’s Independent, continue to unravel. CAMERA has had long-running concerns about grossly biased articles by Hari about Israel and about the indifference of the newspaper to errors and distortions in coverage.

As the Guido Fawkes blog observes

Guido is fairly sure Johann Hari has breached Article 1 of the PCC Code. He has admitted misleading his readers. Despite the desperate attempts by his editor, Simon Kelner, to spin that his favorite son is being attacked for political reasons, the Hari-wagon is coming off of the tracks.

He adds:

The Telegraph are coming down on him heavily. Firstly there is Brenden O’Neil rightly pointing out that “the notion that one can reach “the truth” by manipulating reality should be anathema to anyone who calls himself a journalist.”

In The New Statesman, Guy Walters cautions against accepting Hari’s self-exculpatory apology for his inventions, citing outright plagiarizing of an interview with Hugo Chavez:

It now appears that Mr Hari has made quite a habit of pinching quotes given to other interviewers, and claiming that they were given to him.

It also appears that that Independent editor Simon Kelner is eager to forgive:

“What Johann did was wrong. He accepts and we believe it,” Kelner told The Media Show presenter Steve Hewlett.

“It was born from an honest ambition to give the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee was saying. In the grand scheme of things it is not a great scandal – it’s a naive error which we recognise.”

Kelner suggested Hari would not face any disciplinary action – other than being “spoken to at great length” – and said the young columnist had suffered punishment enough with the vilification he’s had on Twitter

CAIR, a self-described American Muslim civil rights groups, but one whose extensive ties to Islamic extremists have been documented by CAMERA here and here, is in the news again. This time it’s for revocation of its tax-exempt IRS status and hiring Hassan Shibly, an Israelphobe and apologist for terrorists, as chief of its Tampa chapter.

News media that continue to cite CAIR and its officials without putting the council in its extremist context would seem to undermine their own credibility.

Mohammed Salim al-Awa is an Islamist who regards the entirety of Israel as part of the Muslim-controlled waqf and seeks its dissolution.

He wants Jews to live on Muslim-controlled settlements that they cannot leave without permission.

He regards Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel signed in 1979 as a hudna or cease-fire and wants the treaty torn up.

He wants Egypt to serve as a base of operations for terror attacks against Israel.

He wants Egypt to form an alliance with Iran.

He wants the Iranian Revolution to serve as the model for the Egyptian Revolution.

He wants Coptic churches to be routinely inspected for weapons.

He wants Egypt to cancel its economic agreements with the United States even if that means Egyptians go hungry.

With this agenda, Al-Awa has apparently been anointed as the Muslim Brotherhood’s “undeclared nominee” for the upcoming election.

In an article
published on Sunday June 26, Al-Masry Al Youm, a privately-owned newspaper in Egypt, cites a number of experts on Islamist movements in Egypt. One expert, Ammar Ali Hassan, stated “There is a high possibility that Awa is the Brotherhood’s secret nominee, and he may even be backed by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).”

People ignore al-Awa’s candidacy at their own risk.

Snapshot readers who speak Arabic can hear al-Awa’s speeches in his own words in the various youtube videos listed below. (Copy and paste the link into your browser.)
(more…)

The Washington Post continued to soft-pedal the connection between terrorism and Hamas (the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement) in a June 19 report headlined “Zawahiri faces hurdles as Bin Laden Successor”. The Post spotlighted al-Qaeda’s new leader, Ayman Al Zawahiri, by interviewing Huthaifa Azzam, who lived in Osama Bin Laden’s home in the 1980s. The newspaper described Zawahiri as a terrorist within the first paragraph: “Ayman al-Zawahiri was then well on his way to terrorist superstardom.”

In a June 17 dispatch, “Bin Laden successor had early bent toward Islamist activism” The Post again used the word terrorist in the first paragraph, applying it to bin Laden and Zawahiri and al-Qaeda by extension. The newspaper reported that it was “ … [Zawahiri] who helped Osama bin Laden in his terrorist assault on the West.”

The theological connection between the Islamic extremism of al-Qaeda and Hamas is made clear in The Post’s June 19 report, but in regard to Hamas, the terrorist description disappears: “[Huthaifa] Azzam recalled that Zawahiri would feign respect for Azzam’s father, Abdullah, a cleric who helped found the Palestinian militant movement known as Hamas” and influenced bin Laden.

By definition, terrorists threaten or use force against non-combatants to influence larger audiences and achieve political, economic, religious or other ends. In the cases of al-Qaeda threatening or using force against Americans and Hamas attacking Israelis, Post usage implies a double standard. It sanitizes Hamas despite its actions and even though it and al-Qaeda both long have been designated terrorist organizations by the U.S. government. — by Sophie Linshitz, CAMERA Washington research intern.

Prime Minister Netanyahu reverses the Government Press Office’s earlier decision that it would sanction foreign journalists who report aboard the Gaza flotilla. Ha’aretz reports:

GPO director Oren Helman had announced on Sunday that any foreign journalist on the flotilla would be treated as an illegal infiltrator, meaning they would be deported and then barred from entering Israel for 10 years. But yesterday Netanyahu’s bureau issued a press release rescinding that decision.

“When the matter was brought to his attention, the prime minister directed that the regular policy against infiltrators and those who enter Israel illegally not be implemented,” the terse statement said. “It has also been agreed that members of the Israeli and international media will be attached to Israel Navy vessels in order to create transparency and credible coverage of the events.”

Accounts by Amira Hass and Gideon Levy notwithstanding, their own Ha’aretz today reports:

Israeli military spokeswoman Maj. Avital Leibovich on Monday cited intelligence reports saying extremists in the flotilla have “dangerous incendiary chemicals” for use against Israeli forces.

Senior Israeli officials said at a press briefing on Monday that even though the Turkish organization IHH has withdrawn from the upcoming flotilla to Gaza, information recently obtained by Israel indicates that some passengers are planning on carrying out violent acts.

Since IHH was chiefly responsible for the violence aboard last year’s flotilla, its withdrawal had initially seemed to obviate that threat. But it now seems that members of the group will be sailing on some of the ships, along with other Arab and Muslim activists, the officials said.

Two of these activists, they said, have known ties with Hamas: Amin Abu Rashad, who formerly headed a Hamas-linked charity in Holland that was shut down by the Dutch government for financing terror, and Mohammad Hannoun of the Italian ABSPP foundation, which Israel claims is also involved in financing terror.

The information also indicates that flotilla organizers may be stowing chemicals aboard for use against soldiers who board the ships, the officials said, adding that a few extremists among the organizers had been heard threatening in recent days “to spill the blood” of Israel Defense Forces soldiers.

Senior defense officials told Haaretz that the chemicals, including sulfur, are aboard ships carrying French and American passengers, among others.”This is a dramatic development,” one defense source said. “The picture emerging here is that some of the flotilla participants clearly intend a violent clash.”