By Luke Thomas
June 10, 2010
San Francisco supervisors John Avalos and Sophie Maxwell introduced a resolution yesterday condemning Israel’s botched raid of a Gazan-bound aid flotilla, an attack that occurred in international waters and resulted in the deaths of at least nine aid activists – including a US citizen – and scores of others wounded.
The resolution, filed with the Clerk of the Board, urges President Obama and Congress “to actively seek an end to the Gaza blockade,” and to “call for an independent investigation into the events surrounding the raid on the Freedom Flotilla and, in particular, into the raid itself, the use of force and rules of engagement by the Israeli Defense Forces.”
“The Freedom Flotilla which carried approximately 800 civilians representing volunteer grassroots communities from all over the world, in itself is a significant humanitarian effort to bring much needed aid to a besieged Gaza region,” said Supervisor Avalos. “A military attack on this kind of civilian effort, particularly carrying US citizens, is an attack on our right to speak against injustice and to provide basic necessities such as medicine and shelter to our brothers and sisters in need.”
Supervisor John Avalos
Supervisor Sophie Maxwell
The non-binding resolution was introduced following Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting when dozens of advocates representing several organizations urged the Board to condemn the May 31 attack and to call for an end to Israel’s blockade of Gaza.
“I went on this humanitarian mission because the crisis in Gaza is a global issue for all people who believe in allowing basic needs for all people,” said Gene St. Onge, an aid flotilla participant who resides in Oakland. “As a city on the forefront of working for human rights, San Francisco must take a stand to end the blockade and to condemn the violent attacks against us.”
Freedom flotilla particpant Gene St. Onge.
“I and many other ordinary civilians went on this mission in order to uphold the rule of law and bring humanitarian aid to Gaza because governmental and other international bodies have not taken the necessary action to ease the crisis in Gaza,” said Janet Kobren, retired math teacher in Oakland and flotilla participant. “As a city in the forefront of working for human rights, I hope San Francisco will take a strong stand pressing for an end of the blockade of Gaza.”
“These Supervisors are doing the just and humane thing in urging Obama to help meet the basic human needs of civilians in Gaza,” said Stephen Spector, member of Jewish Voice for Peace and a San Francisco resident. “I hope the entire Board will do the right thing here. I came to testify, not in spite of, but because I am a Jew, and Jewish people have always stood up against injustice.”
“San Francisco is a city of immigrants and a City of Refuge,” said Renee Saucedo of La Raza Centro Legal. “We are inextricably tied to international issues and we have a long history of working for human rights locally and globally. This resolution is part of that long and noble tradition.”
The full Board is expected to vote on the resolution within the next two weeks.
Luke Thomas
Luke Thomas is a former software developer and computer consultant who proudly hails from London, England. In 2001, Thomas took a yearlong sabbatical to travel and develop a photographic portfolio. Upon his return to the US, Thomas studied photojournalism to pursue a career in journalism. In 2004, Thomas worked for several neighborhood newspapers in San Francisco before accepting a partnership agreement with the SanFranciscoSentinel.com, a news website formerly covering local, state and national politics. In September 2006, Thomas launched FogCityJournal.com. The BBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, New York Times, Der Spiegel, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine, 7x7, San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian and the San Francisco Weekly, among other publications and news outlets, have published his work. Thomas is a member of the Freelance Unit of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, TNG-CWA Local 39521 and is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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The Hunger Site
June 15, 2010 at 9:56 am
Oh, the suffering Gaza masses! Another lie from the Islamists.
http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2010/06/suffering-masses-of-gaza.html
June 14, 2010 at 6:46 pm
Mr. Anderson should spend two weeks in Gaza and a week in the viiagle of Bilin, then I’ll respect his input on Palestine/Israel.
If you would like to take me up on this offer, please let me know, I’ll gladly arrange that for you free of charges but for the roundtrip airfare.
June 14, 2010 at 6:36 pm
First I would like to thank John, Sophie and Gene for their courageous participation in the humanitarian mission to break the Gaza blockade. Also, to all the commentators on this post with the exception of the Zionist apologist Rob Anderson.
Mr. Anderson needs to pull his head out of you know what. He should ask the Israeli Killing Machine (IKM ) and the Israeli press to the truthfulness of their press releases. They cannot even get their story correct, they keep changing the story of what happened every hour.
Mr. Anderson, you should educate yourself about the history of Israel from the day it was founded until modern days. Israel could not survive without spilling civilians blood, ask the children of Palestine.
Mr. Anderson; this was not a tragedy, it was a massacre, an atrocity perpetrated in the middle of the night victimizing human right activists.
Mr. Anderson, you should be ashamed of yourself for spreading lies until you believe your own lies. The Israeli press has more integrity than you or any American media outlets, including but not limited to CNN, MSNBC, NYT and WP. You are NOT doing a good service trying to hide the most obvious, not to yourself, the American people and the true people who believe in Judaism.
Mr. Anderson, You are a pathetic flier, a Zionist apologist and if I may add a racist. Shame on you for scarifying human-beings to advance the Zionist agenda.
“Wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. They’re usually fought for hegemony, for business. And then of course there’s the business of war.”
June 13, 2010 at 9:30 am
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/10/exclusive_journalist_smuggles_out_video_of
June 13, 2010 at 9:00 am
Preposterous analogy. Interesting that you don’t even mention Hamas, which subsequently rejected the supplies that the flotilla delivered. Why didn’t you publish any links to the actual videos of what happened on the Mavi Marmara?
June 12, 2010 at 10:00 am
Rob, you can’t get away from the fact that Israel killed 9 people during an illegal raid of a ship in international waters laden with humanitarian aid for Gaza . You’re essentially justifying the killing and clouding the issue to disparately help buttress your justification.
Why don’t you just admit you’re sympathetic and biased towards Israel?
Also, is it any wonder terrorism is rampant in the Middle East when those oppressed and imprisoned have no other means to resist occupation?
Israel is to Gaza as the Nazis were to Warsaw, Poland.
June 12, 2010 at 9:22 am
Just like Goebbles eh Rob? If you repeat the same lies often enough people will eventually believe them?
Every direct description of the attack that I have heard from activists who were actually there, many of them from the West, not Turkey, indicates that the Israeli forces fired live rounds -before- they boarded the ship.
And the contention that ‘Islamic’ militants were on the ship waiting to attack the Israelis has been completely debunked. It is fiction.
Most egregiously, once the ship was under Israeli control, Israeli soldiers also punched and kicked activists who were trying to administer emergency medical care to the Turkish activists who were mortally wounded, in an effort to interrupt the care so that more of the Turks would bleed to death.
It is the Israeli soldiers who are the monsters, and always have been…
June 12, 2010 at 8:40 am
“Murder isn’t illegal if Israel commits it. An illegal raid and attack on an aid flotilla in international waters is not illegal if Israel does it. Is this what your saying, Rob?
It isn’t murder if you’re acting in self-defense. Of the six flotilla ships, only the Mavi Mamara had a mob of Turkish Islamists attack the Israeli commandos. The “aid flotilla,” as the organizers admit, was about breaking the blockade, not delivering aid to Gaza. Of course the Islamists, leftist ideologues, and other enemies of Israel don’t think Israel has the right to prevent Hamas from rearming for another rocket attack. Then they shed crocodile tears for the poor Gazans when Israel defends itself after 10,000 rockets are fired into Israel.
June 11, 2010 at 2:27 pm
Rob, the Israeli argument is predicated on the assumption that the Gaza blockade is legal (and then it is a tenuous argument). However, the United Nations and its Secretary General have made clear in public that the blockade is absolutely -not- legal. Hence, Israel had no legal claim whatsoever to preemptively act to protect an illegal blockade.
June 11, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Murder isn’t illegal if Israel commits it. An illegal raid and attack on an aid flotilla in international waters is not illegal if Israel does it. Is this what your saying, Rob?
June 11, 2010 at 10:56 am
“Rob, your response conveniently ignores the point that Israel’s action was patently illegal.”
Wrong! The Israelis deconstruct the legalistic argument against the blockade.
http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/Government/Law/Legal+Issues+and+Rulings/Gaza_flotilla_maritime_blockade_Gaza-Legal_background_31-May-2010.htm
June 11, 2010 at 10:15 am
Yes. Thank you John and Sophie. However let’s go a full step further and institute a City boycott and divestment of Israel.
If we can boycott Arizona for -its- racism and territorialism, we can certainly boycott Israel for its even more serious and more long standing racial and territorial oppression against the Palestinians.
June 11, 2010 at 8:48 am
Thank You John! Thank You Sophie! Thank you for standing up and having the courage to do this.
The days when it was “unspeakable” to utter any criticism of Israel, are over.
June 11, 2010 at 8:15 am
Rob, your response conveniently ignores the point that Israel’s action was patently illegal.
June 11, 2010 at 7:51 am
It does not matter. The ship was in international waters. Irrespective of any claimed blockade, illegal in this case, potentially legal in others, it is piracy to board any ship without permission. Israel might as well have killed Turks on Turkish soil as it killed Turks on a flagged ship.
Israel is behaving like a 9 year old child who has been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, but is shamelessly spinning each and every shard of the circumstance into the form most favorable to her in an effort to avoid the inevitable punishment.
Such tenuous legalistic sophistry is reminiscent of BP as well, denying objective reality to spin a tale that only contains favorable points.
Israel, like BP, is doomed as it appears to really believes its own bullshit.
-marc
June 10, 2010 at 4:24 pm
The images in this video show wounded people, but the violence took place on the deck of the ship. Interesting that one image is of a man with a slingshot. Now why would a “peaceful” passenger have such a weapon? As the videos of the violence show, there was an armed mob of mostly Turkish Islamists who attacked the Israelis as soon as they boarded the ship. And why did the Israelis allegedly single out the Mavi Marmara for special violence, even though the other five ships were boarded peacefully? The answer: they didn’t but in fact were met by the mini-mob of Islamists armed with metal bars, broken bottles, and slingshots.
June 10, 2010 at 1:40 pm
Here’s video footage shown Democracy Now that managed to get past the IDF.
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/6/10/exclusive_journalist_smuggles_out_video_of
check out images of the people on board the Mavi Marmara treating IDF commandos around 41:35 minutes into the section of the show. There are also many who believe that the Mossad had helped to delay the Rachel Corrie in Cyprus.
June 10, 2010 at 12:17 pm
Rob, you’re ignoring the fact that Israel had no rights in international law to board that ship, let alone unleash lethal force when the illegal raid was met with sticks and stones.
June 10, 2010 at 11:57 am
You folks are ignoring the video evidence of the Israeli commandos being attacked by an armed mob as they boarded the Mavi Marmara. But I understand that for progressives ideology trumps reality.
June 10, 2010 at 11:01 am
We absolutely must stop calling the Israeli attack on the aid flotilla a ‘botched raid’. According to the Democracy Now report today, six of the people who were on the attacked ship have disappeared without a trace, and we don’t see anyone claiming that any activists have been kidnapped and disappeared.
This means that Israel Mossad agents were likely on the ship carefully planning and coordinating the operation with the commandos.
According to the report, with its dead-of-night attack, Israel falsely believed that it could carry out the assault while completely stopping all recorded footage of it from escaping the ship.
However, some of the reporters, anticipating confiscation, managed to deliver digital footage via satellite and other means anyway, and that has blown Israel’s propaganda ploy.
Also note that on a ship with hundreds of foreign nationals from all over the world, Israel somehow only managed to kill 9 activists -only- from Turkey; no other nation..
How is that possible without careful planning?
Clearly Israel was intending to attack the ship violently, kill only Turks, eliminate all film and audio footage of the event, and then build a compelling case that they were attacked by armed Turkish terrorists.
So Israel didn’t ‘botch’ its attack. The attack went exactly as planned.
What Israel botched was its planned media cover-up and deadly cynical spin, of its illegal murderous assault; which was apparently planned to turn public opinion back in Israel’s favor. And if they had done it 15 years ago before the advent of rapid digital internet communications, they might have gotten away with it…
June 10, 2010 at 10:17 am
Be real,
Anyone who reads the history of the region and the history of war will know that history repeats itself and every available weapon is always used. Thanks to the BOS for waving a small flag from SF but this will end in nuclear war with millions dead. All available weapons will be used. They always are.
h.
June 10, 2010 at 9:06 am
This will join the shameful “progressive” BOS resolution on cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal of five years ago.
http://district5diary.blogspot.com/2009/12/philly-cop-murdered-28-years-ago-this.html
As the videos clearly show, there was an armed mob of Islamists waiting to attack the Israeli commandos as they boarded the Mavi Marmara, the only ship that resisted with violence. Testimony from an Israeli commando tells us what happened next.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177445
June 10, 2010 at 8:26 am
This is great, thanks to Sophie and John.
-marc