Via Gateway Pundit. Remember, the “charity” to which the organizers of the flotilla belong is the Turkish branch of an official U.S.-designated terrorist organization, so that accounts for some of the “jihadist ties” here. Whether there were people aboard who have connections to terrorists above and beyond that one is the question of the moment. Early indications seem to be … yep:
Israel’s investigation has revealed some 100 people infiltrated the peace and humanitarian aid activists making their way to Gaza, with the explicit design to attack Israeli soldiers using cold arms.
Some among that group are believed to have ties with World Jihad groups, mainly al-Qaeda.
The majority of suspects are Turks, but some are Yemenites and Indonesian. One Yemenite Islamist was photographed with a dagger in his belt prior to the raid…
Some of the suspects were found to be carrying large sums of money. Others had Kevlar vests and gas masks; and all were found to be carrying weapons such as knives, metal clubs and slingshots.
As you’ll see in the first clip below, they confiscated a bunch of fine skull-crackin’, flesh-piercin’ weapons from the Emissaries of Peace on deck. What apparently hasn’t been confiscated thus far is any sort of essential humanitarian aid. According to the JPost, everything found on the ships to date (which are still being searched) is already in supply in Gaza. So here’s a krazy kwestion for you, assuming that some of the detained passengers do indeed turn out to be bona fide jihadists: Given that Turkey’s fingerprints are all over the flotilla, and given that their bottom-feeding prime minister is now maxing out on demagoguery by calling this “a turning point in history,” will the Turkish government’s associations with radicals become part of the investigation into Israel’s actions aboard the ship? Since the world’s now on a big fact-finding mission and all, it might be worth finding out whether a full-fledged member of NATO is, to some greater or lesser extent, using jihadist proxies to instigate international crises.
I’m giving you four(!) clips here, the first of the weapons cache recovered from the ship and the other three of various spokesmen and experts explaining what happened. The consensus I’m seeing from Israeli analysts is that, yes, the troops had to do what they had to do to defend themselves but it’s all the IDF’s fault anyway for conceiving such a poorly planned, badly executed operation. There’s truth in that — the more inept they look, the more dangerous things get and the more easily the world is distracted from pressing business — but it smacks of Israelis absolving the other side of their moral agency in this, from the armed and plotting passengers to Turkey’s unbelievable cynicism in cooperating in this charade. Read this hugely depressing piece by Ronen Bergman just posted at the Journal for a gloss on that. Exit quotation:
“It makes no difference what we do, or how careful we are, or how we tackle the matter of the flotilla,” I was told by a very senior military source two days before the operation. “Whatever we do, they’ll all be against us, they’ll condemn us at the U.N., and we’ll be scolded. We might as well at least preserve our national dignity and maintain the blockade of Gaza.” In other words, the war over world opinion is over—and Israel has lost.
