By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu
The “massive flytilla” of PA supporters so far has numbered a grand total of nine activists, all of whom were arrested at Ben Gurion International Airport Sunday morning. Three of them were deported immediately.
Several Opposition Knesset Members objected to what they called “exaggerated” fears of the pro-Palestinian Authority demonstrators, but Likud Minister Yisrael Katz said, “We are going to defend the borders in every possible way.”
“These are not people who want to be interviewed or who want peace,” he added. “These are not simple people; they are people who want to harm the State of Israel.
“What if tomorrow they want to enter from the border with Jordan, Syria or Gaza? We have the right not to grant entry, just like any other state.”
The office of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated, ”The provocation was conceived by extremist Islamic and anti-Israel organizations that object to peace and call for Israel’s destruction.”
The tiny number of activists who managed to land at the airport was dwarfed by approximately 650 police officers who fanned out in preparation for trouble.
Airlines canceled most of the reservations made by the activists after Israel warned that they would not be allowed into the country, in which case the airline companies would have to pay for the return trip.
Unable to arrive in Israel, several demonstrators staged protests at the airport in Paris.
The planned demonstration came one day after the Passover and Easter holidays, when tens of thousands of visitors had booked return flights from Israel. No travel disruptions were reported.
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Source: CiF Watch
Submitted by correspondent Tom Ifrach
Earlier in the week the organisers of the ‘Airflotilla 2′ (‘Welcome to Palestine’) campaign held a press conference in Bethlehem. Among the speakers the organisers chose to address journalists was the mayor of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh who urged Israel to allow the flytilla activists in.
“These people are coming to talk about peace, they are not coming to wage war against Israel,” he said. “They are coming to visit the Palestinian people who are under occupation and to talk to them and to help them because these people are isolated.”
“We are asking our neighbors the Israeli government to make it easy for these people to enter the Palestinian National Authority, so that we can have this message of peace starting from this holy city of Bethlehem.”
He called on Europe and the United States to support the protest. People who speak out about Israel’s policies are called “anti-Semitic,” he said, but urged the US and Europe not to fear this label.
Whilst he can certainly talk the talk, Mayor Batarseh’s ‘message of peace’ should be seen in light of the fact that he recently took part in the ‘Christ at the Checkpoint‘ conference held in his town, during which he told the audience that the Palestinians were being crucified by Israeli security measures, Bethlehem was a giant prison and that Jesus Christ, embodied by the Palestinian people, was imprisoned in the city by the security barrier.
Batarseh is known to be allied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a terrorist organization proscribed by Canada, the EU and the US. In January this year Batarseh attended a memorial service for PFLP founder George Habash held in Beit Sahour. Terror attacks perpetrated by the PFLP include:
On July 22, 1968, the PFLP hijacked its first plane, an El Al flight from Rome to Tel Aviv.
In September 1970, the PFLP hijacked three passenger planes and took them to airfields in Jordan, where the PLO was then based; after the planes were emptied, the hijackers blew them up. In response, King Hussein of Jordan decided that Palestinian radicals had gone too far and drove the PLO out of his kingdom.
In 1972, PFLP and Japanese Red Army gunmen murdered two dozen passengers at Israel’s international airport in Lod.
In 1976, breaking a PLO agreement to end terrorism outside Israeli-held territory, PFLP members joined with West German radical leftists from the Baader-Meinhof Gang to hijack an Air France flight bound for Tel Aviv and landed the plane in Entebbe, Uganda. In a now-famous raid, Israeli commandos freed the hostages. [Despite the overall success of the raid, three hostages were killed in the firefight and one was killed by Ugandan Army officers in a nearby hospital.]
Also speaking at the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ press conference was project organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh who said of the campaign’s participants:
“These are not hooligans. The people who are coming are normal, average Europeans who want to learn and visit people under occupation,”
Hooliganism is defined as ‘rowdy, violent or destructive behaviour’ or alternatively; ‘willful, wanton and malicious destruction of the property of others’. Some might say that the attempts of Mazin Qumsiyeh and his Palestine Justice Network to eliminate the Israeli state amount to little less.
Certainly, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Mustafa Barghouti – an endorser of the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ – do not qualify as being best placed to define hooliganism in light of their equally suspect definition of the recent March 30th ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ events (which they also co-organised) as ‘non-violent resistance’ and Barghouti’s active participation in the Qalandiya riots.
Normal Europeans do not march under the flags of terrorist organisations such as Hizbollah and Hamas who indiscriminately murder civilians. Average Europeans do not disrupt cultural events and call for boycotts of a democratic country as a means of bringing about its dismantling. And ordinary Europeans certainly do not try to deliberately get themselves deported from other countries by knowingly engineering provocations.
But let’s say they did. A viewing of this video made by Mustafa Barghouti shows exactly what participants in the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ will be ‘learning’ on their trip – should they actually arrive.
And here is an antidote to the utterly ridiculous video above, which is full of lies and attempts to rewrite history. The basis of Israeli society is to help others in every possible measure.
- Michelle
The video below was also submitted by
correspondent Tom Ifrach.
