Muzzlewatch: Lost at Sea

God how I miss those weeks in May and June when the Jewish Voice for Peace crew were busying themselves with trying to spin the dogshit of defeat of their failed BDS campaigns in California into the gold of fantasy victory. For four blissful weeks, Muzzlewatch stayed silent, allowing me to do something other than shooting their latest “fish-in-a-barrel” arguments.

Alas, four accusations in one week require four responses. One and two can be found in last week’s postings, so today we take on Muzzlewatch’s take on the “Freedom Flotilla” in which a boat load of Turkish mercenaries suffered the fate that inevitably comes to those who bring a knife to a gunfight.

Muzzlewatch has a sticky problem with regard to portraying the recent Flotilla incident as nothing more than Israeli butchers dropping down to peaceful aid ships for Gaza and massacring or beating everyone in sight.

It’s not just that the world has seen video evidence demonstrating what happened before and after Israeli soldiers boarded the Mavi Mavera. After all, JVP and friends can simply rant on about how such evidence was “obviously” doctored (quoting like-minded Web sites as their only source for de-legitimizing overwhelming, clear-cut evidence regarding how violence broke out on that ship). After all, when JVP and its pals act as judge and jury (as they do at Muzzlewatch), it goes without saying any evidence Israel and its supporters provide for the defense will be immediately thrown out of court.

No the trouble for JVP is evidence those participating in the Flotilla provide. After all, there were six ships in that convoy (seven if you include the Rachel Corrie which rode on the wake of the previous week’s mayhem). And on all those ships except one, no one was shot, no one was wounded. Like every other ship that tried to run the legal, legitimate Israeli blockade of Gaza (including at least two gun running ships from Iran), the crew and passengers of all ships that did not go on the attack were brought safely to an Israeli port and sent home.

Israel’s video evidence is not all that’s needed to show the difference between the many blockade running ships where no one was hurt, and the one ship where several people were killed. For once the survivors of Mavi Mavera returned home to Turkey, they were not wailing about how they had been victimized. No, they were bragging about how they had drawn the blood of Israeli soldiers.

In other words, just as JVP and other friends and allies of the Flotilla are painting a picture of pristine victims on every boat that’s sailed towards the Gaza coast, crews full of nuns and orphans who would never lift a finger against anyone, other Flotilla friends (including those that participated) are boasting in national newspapers that attacking Israelis was why they set sail in the first place.

Here you have an interesting example of the dual role proponents of violence and propaganda play in the Arab-Israeli conflict with some parties (like Turkey’s IHH terrorist organization or Hamas) providing the muscle, the blades, the bullets and the rockets that allow the folks at JVP to get off on surrogate violence. In the meanwhile, JVP’s job is to turn the propaganda volume up to 11, trying to turn self-proclaimed warriors into the reincarnation of Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Jesus Christ.

According to JVP and Muzzlewatch, their hands are clean (except, perhaps, for the whitewash).