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'Flytilla' Day Approaches: Israeli Reaction 'Paranoid, Hysterical'
Airlines begin to comply with Israel, 2000 activists still on the way
Thousands of peace activists will be attempting a "fly-in" or "flytilla" to Israel's Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv this weekend before heading to Bethlehem in the West Bank in a call to end the occupation and bring attention to Israel's blockade and control over the occupied territories.
Scene from last year's Flytilla arrests (Getty) Israel has reacted by creating a blacklist of names of activists to block them from flying out of their home countries, and plans on singling out any activists when they arrive at Ben Gurion to deport them upon arrival.
Now, "Dozens of passengers who bought a plane ticket to travel to Tel Aviv Sunday on April 15 were notified Thursday by the airline Lufthansa that their reservation was canceled, 'by order of Israel,'" writes the organizers of the action Welcome to Palestine Initiative 2012.
"Israel has produced a list of names of persons to whom this country denies entry. Yours is on it, which brings us to cancel your ticket and we immediately after will refund to your credit card," employees of Lufthansa reportedly said to the passengers.
Jet2.com has also complied with Israel's request to deny activists passage to Israel.
However, up to 2,000 Palestinian sympathizers, mainly from Europe, will still attempt to board planes en route to Israel this weekend.
Israeli authorities have warned they will not permit entry to "hostile elements" and "provocateurs". Hundreds of police will be deployed to Ben Gurion airport from Saturday night.
Israel's response was "paranoid and hysterical", said Mazin Qumsiyeh, one of the organizers of the Welcome to Palestine programme. "They simply don't want the world to know what's going on in Palestine," he said, The Guardian reported.
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The Guardian/UK: Israel expected to block 'flytilla' of international Palestinian sympathizers
"The provocateurs will be dealt with in a determined and quick way," Israel's public security minister, Yitzhak Aharonovitch, said this week. "If they arrive in Israel they will be identified, removed from the plane, their entry into Israel will be prevented and they will be moved to a detention facility until they are flown out of Israel." [...]
Airline representatives were reportedly warned that they would be expected to bear the costs of flying activists back to their point of departure. Flights carrying activists will be diverted to a smaller terminal, where security forces and immigration officials will check and question passengers.
Israel's response was "paranoid and hysterical", said Mazin Qumsiyeh, one of the organisers of the Welcome to Palestine programme and a university professor in Bethlehem. "They simply don't want the world to know what's going on in Palestine," he said. [...]
The mayor of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh, told a press conference this week: "These people are coming to talk about peace, they are not coming to wage war against Israel. 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."
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39 Comments so far
Show AllThe equivalent to a PM in the US would be a combination of House Majority Leader and Speaker of the House. In such functioning democracies, power is imbued in an elected majority political party who must rule by consensus. There is no "unitary executive" with excessive power as in the US. There is also nothing like the ridiculous US Senate. Sure, Canada has a Senate but it is equivalent to the UK House of Lords - it has no real power.
"Democracy in the....."
That apply to congress & senate are literally groomed & elected by CORPORATIONS. There is a word for that CORRUPTION not democracy that is why the country, the world is being privatized.
As for the initiating democracy abroad THINK AGAIN self included, its dictatorship, tyrannies or client states.
Remember ""OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM""
It gives itself over to berserk belligerence and violence, always justifying its abusive conduct as a response to arrant provocation-- essentially legitimate preemptive self-defense, arising from a paranoid hypervigilance that perceives every critic or dissenter as an implacable enemy.
Whether spewing vitriolic bluster or implementing ruthless and draconian polices and actions, Israeli authorities imperturbably assert or imply that their targets and victims are wanton instigators acting out of dubious motives-- typically delusion or malice, i.e. madness or badness, or a combination of the two.
This is all secured, supported, and rigidly held in place by a self-sustaining, even self-escalating, chain of presumptions:
they started it; they are making us do these unpleasant things-- which are not so dreadful as they are made out to be, in any case....
... Because the World has always been unwilling or incapable of truly seeing things from our point of view; we are a perpetually embattled, beleaguered people who accordingly have been perpetually wronged and betrayed by the rest of the World; if our attitudes and methods seem unduly or reprehensibly harsh, it's only because those who judge them thus either despise us in the first place, or don't know what it is to have one's collective security constantly threatened and compromised; we expect little sympathy and give less...
This goes on and on, but I'll stop at "he who is not with us is against us" because I've belabored the point already.
Such is the tragic, pathological mind-set that infuses Zionist Israel's culture and politics.
While some low-functioning psychopaths exhibit such naked aggression and rage, you will never know if you are standing next to your average psychopath. Those are the ones who are very adept ay MIMICKING human behavior and emotional response, without understanding it. Think Obama instead of Bibi.
If you want a 'textbook' description of psychopathy, look at the Hare Psychopathy test, here: http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html#b
We see that in the differential way they treat other people. Someone with paranoia suspects the worst of different people without regard to what you or I would think of as logic. Someone with psychopathy carefully selects their victims and controls them through lies, terror, etc., so that he (usually he) can exploit them.
People with paranoia want others to stop oppressing them and let them alone.
Individuals with psychopathy want to control and prey on others.
It's a big difference.
The Zionist state is a psychopathic one that uses paranoid-sounding claims to justify its behavior. A certain number of individuals do fall somewhere on the paranoia spectrum, but you can bet that it's a small number just as it is anywhere else.
I only meant to characterize my impressions of Israel's general, officially espoused public posture.
The malignant double helix of behavior and rhetoric is in the nature of a role, or script, that doesn't necessarily speak to what's really inside the heads of the individuals acting it out.
Just off the top of my head, I guess there is a range of idiosyncratic attitudes and beliefs: simple-minded or radical True Believers at the bottom, confused or anguished followers milling in the middle, and on top cynics exploiting mass insecurity and paranoia to maintain power and control.
As you point out, just like in the good old You Ess of Eh.
He mentions that the Jews who were tortured by the Nazis suffer a sort of "Stockholm Syndrome" where they identified with their tormentors, then act out their fantasies in a similar manner.
Where are Jews safest today? America or Israel? Or even compare Israel with England, France, Spain, and even Germany. Israel has failed as a safe haven because is is built upon a massive injustice, and justified by a distorted history.
For example, it is forbidden in America's mainstream media to discuss the Jewish community's contribution to their fractious relation with non-Jewish Europeans. But this has been discussed by Jewish researchers. See Chapter 2 "The Causes of Hostility Toward Jews: A Historical Overview" at: http://www.whenvictimsrule.blogspot.com
And while the Nazi Holocaust was a grotesque tragedy that should never again happen to ANYBODY, it is merely a part of a bigger story. Notably, it was not the main force behind the establishment of a Jewish state. It was, however, used by the Zionist movement to push the state into existence. Jewish writer Amira Hass, Ha'aretz columnist, has said that without the Holocaust there would be no Israel. http://uctv.tv/search-details.aspx?showID=19985
Leading up to WWII the Zionist movement was pushing the idea that Jews inherently could not be loyal citizens of any country except a Jewish state. This fed directly into the same idea espoused by the Nazis. Most Jews in Western Europe strongly opposed this idea. They had been assimilating into their respective countries quite successfully, and felt the Zionists most definitely did not speak for them. A Jewish Englishman (who thought of himself as such), Lord Montague, wrote a famous letter in 1917 strongly objecting to the Balfour Declaration on these grounds.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15584.htm
Most Jews in Western Europe and America agreed with Montague, but big bankers wanted a separate Jewish state, perhaps to be more independent of European governments. As early has 1896, before the First Zionist Congress, Jewish bankers tried to buy Palestine from Turkey in order to create a Jewish state. Zionist leader Theodor Herzl was their emissary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Herzl
Their boots on the ground were extreme fundamentalist Jews from Eastern Europe, who wanted a Jewish state and were willing to be the armed "settlers" needed to take over the land. Jewish Americans were won over to the cause with stories about the plight of Jews in Eastern Europe. Some research on the state of Jews in Eastern Europe is in chapter 7 "A Closer Look at the Jews in Polish and Eastern European History" at: http://www.whenvictimsrule.blogspot.com
Israel's terrible treatment of the Palestinians today is a direct extension of their terrible treatment from the start. This terrorism has been a bedrock tactic for taking the land. It's beginnings are described here, especially in the slaughter at the village of Deir Yasin: http://www.controversyofzion.info/Controversybook/Controversybook_eng_43.htm
With the heartlessness of Wall Street bankers, the hard-core Zionists have built a major arms industry, with accompanying mercenary services to unsavory regimes around the world, described in Chapter 28 "Israel and Zionism" at: http://www.whenvictimsrule.blogspot.com
All the while they maintain the myth and cover story that they speak for all Jews, while they most definitely do not, as this Nazi Holocaust survivor declares emphatically at Common Dreams:
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/04/29-2
Gradually, more and more Jewish Americans are finding out the truth and reclaiming their humanity.
Obviously these people would back a camel to go through the eye of a needle in pretty much the same way as Israel is backing peace.