No Comfort for Gilad Shalit: the mean-spirited face of "humanitarian" aid to Gaza


Under different circumstances, the notion of sailing across the seas to bring aid to a beleaguered people would be laudable.  However, in this latest Gaza Aid convoy we see a bunch of misguided, publicity-seeking foreclosed adolescents who merely wish to make a grand gesture by highlighting the alleged plight of the Palestinian people at the hands of the Israelis.
 
(We have heard this before, haven’t we?    That the people of Gaza are “starving” and lack medical and other supplies, but look at this – note the food and sweets on the market stalls – and this).
 
Most of Gaza is growing and thriving but CiF and these useful idiots are  apparently oblivious to the fact that Hamas is following the example of the Nazis in WWII.  The Nazis built a show camp at Theresienstadt (the so-called “model ghetto”), in which Jews lived apparently contentedly and well-fed, because their jailers wished to give the lie to accusations of brutalisation and genocide.  Hamas however is deliberately doing the direct opposite:  instead of maintaining a model of good living for these Palestinians who elected them into power, Hamas prolongs their misery and parades it to foreign visitors and deliberately encourages them to believe that the rest of Gaza is a wasteland too and that this is all the fault of Israel.  Unfortunately, most of the visitors are very easily fooled.
 
We don’t yet know what the flotilla’s “aid” consists of but the IDF says that it will all be searched and only items which cannot be made into weapons against Israel will be handed over to the United Nations for distribution to those who need it (which means, of course, that the recipients will have to pay Hamas for it).
 
We do know, however, that CiF, The Guardian and the western media will make much of this “plucky” little convoy.  You will not hear anything negative about it from them and particularly not the following which is little short of shameful:
 
Corporal Gilad Shalit was kidnapped by Hamas in a cross-border raid on 25 June 2006 and has been held incommunicado by them ever since.  He was only nineteen years old at the time of his capture.   Hamas refused all requests from the Israeli government and pleas from his family for news of him, or to allow visits from the Red Cross as was his right under international law.  So far as other governments are concerned, he does not exist.  For a long time his family did not know whether he was alive but after much pressure Hamas released a video of him in October 2009, three years after he was captured.
 
Nevertheless, in true Hamas fashion – Hamas may miss many opportunities to make peace with Israel but nary a one to display their barbarity – they made Shalit the laughing stock of a show before a gleeful audience of thousands in Gaza on 14th December 2008 as part of their 21st anniversary celebrations.
 
What, you may ask, links the captivity of Gilad Shalit to the “humanitarian aid” Gaza convoy?  Eight boatloads of aid are en route to Gaza, we are told, chock-full of much-needed supplies.  Gilad’s father had asked the convoy leaders to deliver a letter and parcel and to intercede with Hamas for their son’s freedom, in return for which the Shalit family would appeal to the Israeli government to let the convey through.   The convoy leaders refused. (See also here).   They refused to take one parcel and one letter from the Shalit family to their captive son!
 
Adolescent hostility and idiocy and lack of awareness of how they are perceived by others?   Yes, of course.
 
Utter lack of humanity or even the dregs of the milk of human kindness?   Most definitely.

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