Op-Ed: More Than One Ship of Fools
Published: Monday, September 01, 2008 11:32 PM
The Israeli public does not know the whole story.
Lee Kaplan
Lee Kaplan is senior intelligence analyst with the Northeast Intelligence Network and a contributor to Front Page Magazine. He is also the national director of Dafka.org and heads Stop the ISM.Thanks to the cowardice and ignorance of Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Israel's Foreign Ministry, there is another Ship of Fools besides the Free Gaza Movement that is being allowed to sail with impunity into and out of Gaza. That other Ship of Fools is the ship of state in Israel. The Israeli public does not know the whole story behind the Gaza flotilla and the people involved, nor the real damage that will be caused by it.
Right now, officials in the Israeli government are claiming they denied the ISM the publicity they sought, when in 
The ISM that organized this event is run by the PLO.
fact they have enabled something that will make any possibility of peace or separation from the Arabs impossible in years to come, and one day could indeed spell the end of Israel and Jewish self-determination. What they have done is criminal, lazy and just plain stupid, and will result in more dead Israelis. They have opened the sea lanes to Gaza just as they opened the gates to Egypt earlier; only this time, weapons smuggling from Iran will be facilitated more easily.
The ISM that organized this event is run by the PLO.
fact they have enabled something that will make any possibility of peace or separation from the Arabs impossible in years to come, and one day could indeed spell the end of Israel and Jewish self-determination. What they have done is criminal, lazy and just plain stupid, and will result in more dead Israelis. They have opened the sea lanes to Gaza just as they opened the gates to Egypt earlier; only this time, weapons smuggling from Iran will be facilitated more easily.First, let's be clear on something: the ISM that organized this event is run by the PLO and the various Arab terrorist groups and has Arab handlers in the background at all its demonstrations. The ISM is not just some "liberals" or delusional useful idiots (although they have some in their ranks) running around on their own doing so much anti-Israel activity. They have a bottomless pit of money with which to operate courtesy of the Saudis, the EU and even the US taxpayer, as the US State Department funds Fatah. At the same time, its organizers in the US enjoy non-profit tax status despite open violations of US tax laws. The US State Department looks the other way as ISM activists violate US passport laws to get into Israel. When Condoleezza Rice makes an inane remark that ISM activists are the equivalent of US civil rights workers during the period of Jim Crow in the South, and that Mahmoud Abbas is another Martin Luther King, she is parroting what the ISM pitched to her in some meeting between the ISM and US State Department officials in Washington where they told her they were "peace activists."
I know this because I've attended their training sessions undercover, where they teach wannabe revolutionaries in their training manuals to never admit they are "human shields" for the terrorist groups, but to say they are "human rights workers." Most journalists who then interview them are too lazy to check things out and so repeat the lies that they are a "humanitarian group." They consider murdering Israelis, and in particular Jews, as "legitimate resistance," as part of a revolutionary code making revolution "by any means necessary." The worst thing is, they are like ants over here in the US and in the UK, infiltrating universities, churches, libraries, labor unions, anywhere they can get people in a group. Then they try to convince these groups that Israel commits the worst atrocities imaginable against innocent Arabs, so there should be only one state, Palestine, instead of the "Zionist" one. And let's be clear also that when they say "Zionist," they mean Jews.
This flotilla was not the first time factions of the ISM tried this boat routine. In 1988, Scott Kennedy of the Resource Center for Nonviolence in Santa Cruz, California, also tried sailing a boat from Cyprus to Israel full of Palestinian Arabs to exercise their "right of return." That time, the Israeli government scuttled the boat before it 
He took photos of himself cavorting with armed Hamas terrorists that he showed on US campuses.
could leave Cyprus. I wrote about Kennedy also using the ploy of being a "peace activist" to get into Israel recently after touring the US with a group called the Parents Circle, which falsely claimed one of their Arab speakers' sister had been knifed to death by a Jewish settler. In fact, the woman was killed by another Palestinian Arab who thought he was killing a Jewish woman. Kennedy was touring US synagogues and college campuses with his show and trying to weaken US Jewish support for a Jewish state. He recently revisited Israel as the head of an "Interfaith Peacebuilders" group, one of the myriad ISM groups, again portraying himself as a "peace activist." The bureaucrats in the Foreign Ministry, who, G-d forbid, should ever do some research or read my articles, accepted the Big Lie that he was promoting peace and let him in even though Kennedy and his fellow anti-Semites are all active ISM acolytes who tour the US pushing for the dismantling of Israel.
He took photos of himself cavorting with armed Hamas terrorists that he showed on US campuses.
could leave Cyprus. I wrote about Kennedy also using the ploy of being a "peace activist" to get into Israel recently after touring the US with a group called the Parents Circle, which falsely claimed one of their Arab speakers' sister had been knifed to death by a Jewish settler. In fact, the woman was killed by another Palestinian Arab who thought he was killing a Jewish woman. Kennedy was touring US synagogues and college campuses with his show and trying to weaken US Jewish support for a Jewish state. He recently revisited Israel as the head of an "Interfaith Peacebuilders" group, one of the myriad ISM groups, again portraying himself as a "peace activist." The bureaucrats in the Foreign Ministry, who, G-d forbid, should ever do some research or read my articles, accepted the Big Lie that he was promoting peace and let him in even though Kennedy and his fellow anti-Semites are all active ISM acolytes who tour the US pushing for the dismantling of Israel. And despite the fact that US law disallows private American citizens contacting Hamas, Kennedy was given permission by a State Department official in Jerusalem, later rubber stamped by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, to visit Ismail Haniyeh in Gaza, where he took photos of himself cavorting with armed Hamas terrorists that he showed on US campuses. This is the same clueless Israeli Foreign Ministry that wrote a letter to the Gaza flotilla people stating that it was sure the Gaza flotilla had "the best of intentions." Those intentions are to help terrorists smuggle in weapons to kill Jews.
The mavens in the Israeli government have short memories. Remember Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor? The Israeli government also then allowed ISM internationals to pour into that border area for years where weapons were being smuggled in via tunnels. ISM useful international idiots like Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall were allowed to run around in combat zones interfering with Israeli soldiers; and when they were killed, the ISM made it world news that brought American and EU pressure to open that border with Egypt. Once opened, weapons flowed in that killed Jews in Sderot and elsewhere in southern Israel. Now, the Arab handlers and their ISM proxies are looking to the sea as another route to smuggle weapons.
The Arab leadership of the ISM is simply following the same game plan. Iran ships weapons in by sea and the IDF Navy stops them, so now the ISM will be used to open the sea lanes to import more weapons to kill Israelis, just as occurred in Rafah.
Of the ISM activists on board the two ships, Huwaida Arraf and Jeff Halper are Israeli citizens who should be
Arab handlers and their ISM proxies are looking to the sea as another route to smuggle weapons.
subject to Israeli law making it illegal to visit Gaza or to aid terrorist groups like Hamas. The Free Gaza Movement had a letter of invitation from a high-level Hamas official named Bassam Naim addressed to Paul LaRudee, who was deported from Israel in 2006 trying to enter under a false identity. LaRudee once boasted of sleeping in the bed of a suicide bomber as a human shield to stop demolition of a bomb-making factory. LaRudee, who was in Lebanon as a human shield for Hizbullah next, was banned from Israel for ten years and has admitted he knows he is entering Israeli controlled territory illegally. If he was arrested and prosecuted and jailed, it wouldn't create publicity for Palestinians, it would shut down one of their most active and destructive operatives in the US who organizes the blood libels heard everywhere today over here about Jews and Israel. Greta Berlin, another organizer is in reality such a virulent anti-Semite her own family admits it is true.
Arab handlers and their ISM proxies are looking to the sea as another route to smuggle weapons.
subject to Israeli law making it illegal to visit Gaza or to aid terrorist groups like Hamas. The Free Gaza Movement had a letter of invitation from a high-level Hamas official named Bassam Naim addressed to Paul LaRudee, who was deported from Israel in 2006 trying to enter under a false identity. LaRudee once boasted of sleeping in the bed of a suicide bomber as a human shield to stop demolition of a bomb-making factory. LaRudee, who was in Lebanon as a human shield for Hizbullah next, was banned from Israel for ten years and has admitted he knows he is entering Israeli controlled territory illegally. If he was arrested and prosecuted and jailed, it wouldn't create publicity for Palestinians, it would shut down one of their most active and destructive operatives in the US who organizes the blood libels heard everywhere today over here about Jews and Israel. Greta Berlin, another organizer is in reality such a virulent anti-Semite her own family admits it is true.The most logical thing was to arrest these people and put them in jail. That is what laws are for. Instead, the Israeli government can expect more flotillas coming from Cyprus filled with still more ISM terrorist enablers.