CAKE POLICE

Very good opinion piece by my fellow Seymour, Richard, about the Israeli propaganda campaign surrounding the murder of nine activists on board the Mavi Marmara, from his blog Lenin's Tomb:

"You know how it is. For days, it's been impossible to log on to Twitter without some frantic Israeli apologists urgently messaging you to say - no, look, it's really clear, these so-called 'humanitarians' attacked Israeli soldiers who merely responded, yadda yadda yadda. They lynched those servicemen... Or, better still - peace activists don't carry weapons, they were there to get themselves killed... Rarely has such a toxic mixture of the desperate, the cowardly and the callous been compressed into 140 characters or less, and almost all of it is directly inspired by the carefully crafted tweets of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. (Anyone who doubts the Israeli government's online virtuosity should check out what they can do with Flickr).

"Israel, as noted before, never has any agency in any of this. Not one of Israel's apologists can contemplate for a second that the IDF, and the commando outfit Unit 13 that perpetrated the massacres, made a choice at every step leading to the murder of those aid workers - each of whom was deliberately executed with several bullets from close range. Their solidarity with the murderers is complete: 'We are all Unit 13', as the Israeli protesters have reportedly taken to chanting. This is a pretty pathetic position to be in. Just as well Max Blumenthal has taken the trouble of trawling through the Israeli media's build-up to the attack, and documented that the attack was planned down to every detail, and that the use of lethal force was planned on the pretext that the flotilla's occupants were 'terrorists'."

Full piece.

Also, this site has begun an effort to combat the Israeli media offensive.