Dozens of our friends and comrades, wonderful compassionate activists, are dead and wounded in the pirate attack in the high seas on humanitarian aid boats. This is a dreadful crime that will forever be remembered and should be punished.

The Israeli pirates attacked the humanitarian aid Freedom Flotilla in the international waters over 90 miles (150 km) out of their territorial waters. The boats carried no arms; the participants strictly adhered to Gandhian mode by asking the Greek and Cyprus authorities to search the boats to avoid later claims that they were armed. It did not help them: the pirates boarded the boats in the high seas, and they turned the boats into killing fields.

“They attacked us as we boarded their vessel, and we killed them in self-defence”, - claimed the murderers afterwards, and thousands of willing accessories to the murder repeated this nonsense. An intruder can’t claim self-defence; while the activists were entitled to defend themselves against the unlawful attack

The Guardian newspaper editorial correctly stated: “the responsibility for the bloodshed was entirely [Israel’s]. The Israeli navy said they were forced to open fire to avoid being lynched. What did the commandos expect pro-Palestinian activists to do once they boarded the ships – invite them aboard for a cup of tea with the captain on the bridge?”

Our friend Yvonne Ridley reminded that “under article 3 of the Rome Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation of 1988, it is an international crime for any person to seize or exercise control over a ship by force, and also a crime to injure or kill any person in the process. One cannot attack a ship and then claim self-defence if the people on board resist the unlawful use of violence. In other words, according to international law, the actions of the Israeli military were beyond the law and those involved should be treated no differently than, say, the Somali pirates who are also in the habit of boarding ships by force. Any rights to self defence in such dramatic circumstances rest purely with the passengers and crew on board. Under international maritime law you are legally entitled to resist unlawful capture, abduction and detention.”

Israel became a pirate state, like those established in the Caribbean in 16th century or one that flourished on the Barbary Coast as late as in 19th century. Pirate states should be suppressed and dismantled; otherwise normal communications will be disrupted. And the high seas piracy has a well known remedy: the yardarm. The names of the pirates are well known; the first of them is Ehud Barak, the ‘defence minister’ of the pirate state, whose place is at the yardarm.

This is not the first time Israel acts like a pirate state. Years ago, the Israelis had decided not to be bound by international law, by borders and frontiers, by conventions but by its own will. They seized boats in the international waters, hijacked airplanes, kidnapped people overseas and killed whomever they fancied. They kidnapped Mordecai Vanunu in Rome, they killed everywhere from Norway to Cyprus, they cloned and forged foreign passports, they seized liners and bombed airplanes. Nobody is safe from their by-far-too-long-arm; their arm should be countered by the yardarm.

Inability of the world community to deal with the pirates seriously undermined the Law of Nations and unhinged the Israeli minds. The Jews of Israel and many of their brethren elsewhere had come to an entirely wrong conclusion that they are above the law, a breed apart. “Who cares what the goyim say; what matters is what the Jews do”, said the founder of Israel, David Ben Gurion in a moment of elation, though he was well aware of the permissible limits: when the American president ordered him to roll back his troops from Sinai, he obeyed within 24 hours. Since Ben Gurion and Eisenhower, not many people tried to stop Israel.

Their luck lasted for fifty years and caused a rupture between Israelis and reality; the Jews of Israel do believe now that they can do whatever they wish for they are real human beings, and the rest are not. And anyway “the world hates us”. So they try to justify this hatred. In real life, people of the world do not “hate” or care this way or other about Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Tutsi and other small ethnic-religious communities who throw their weight around. These guys usually get their stroke of luck, but they push it too far and eventually they come to grief, so the world has to save them from utter annihilation.

Insanity is not a defence, especially in the case of simulated insanity. Israelis believe in the Mad Dog strategy attributed to Moshe Dayan or Pinchas Lavon: “Israel must be a like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.” So they pretend they are even crazier than they actually are. However, if they can’t be contained, mad dogs have to be shot.

Our friend Jeff Blankfort proposed the diagnosis and the treatment: “Israel is a nation controlled by the criminally insane and supported by and large by a criminally insane public that has total contempt for the rest of humanity and for those Jews who do not support their racist enterprise.  With its nuclear weapons, it is Israel that is holding the rest of the world hostage. The goal must be to find a way to disarm and dismantle it.”

Lifting of Gaza blockade is the first goal, while the second is introduction of democracy and equality in the whole of the land between the Sea and the River. It’s time for the Jews of Israel to come to terms with reality: Jews are ordinary human beings, not some supermen or space travellers or angels; they have to observe the customary law of nations. They can’t go around killing people in neutral waters; they can’t lock up a million of Gazans just because they are not Jews.

The dastardly attack on the Freedom Flotilla provides an opportunity: not only should the pirates be placed in the dock, but their supporters overseas as well, for aiding and abetting. The anti-terrorist laws promulgated by many nations allow for a legal framework to do it. Israel is a terrorist state, thus its supporters and lobbyists are supporters of terror network. They should be arrested immediately and their assets seized.

While this will bring freedom to people of Gaza, it will incidentally solve the financial and economic crisis as well, because the terrorist supporters head such criminal structures as Goldman-Sachs and Pentagon. They occupy not only Nablus, but the Capitol Hill and Wall Street as well. Their removal will save millions. The Greek debts and American mortgages will be evaporated; Afghanistan and Iraq will find peace. Even democracy will become real, instead of demo version.

[Courtesy shamireaders]