Israel Mocks Turkey’s ‘Show Trial’ for '18,000 Years in Jail' A Turkish court begins an in absentia trial of former IDF officers and demands jail terms of 18,000 years. Israel: A show trial.

A Turkish court on Tuesday began what Israel calls an in absentia "show trial" of former IDF Chief of Gabi Ashkenazi and three other former senior military officers over the 2010 clash with the terror-linked IHH organization.

The prosecutors are demanding multiple life sentences that would amount to 18,000 years in jail for the four officers over the clash that plunged relations between Israel and Turkey into deep crisis. Hundreds of protesters gathered outside the Istanbul court waving Palestinian Authority flags and chanting "Damn Israel" as the trial opened, AFP reported

Israeli commandos boarded the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara, the largest ship in a flotilla dispatched by the IHH, ostensibly a relief agency but which has been proven to include terrorists. Their ship presumably was headed to Hamas-controlled Gaza with humanitarian aid in an effort to break the maritime embargo against the smuggling of terrorists and arms into Gaza. After the Mavi Mamara ship was led to the post in Ashdod, it was discovered there was no aid on board.

Nine IHH terror activists were killed in the clash after they brutally clubbed IDF Navy commandos who had boarded the ship virtually unarmed. Reinforcements were sent in after the IHH kidnapped, shot and knifed commandos, kidnapping three of them until their rescue.

"This is not a trial but a show trial and has nothing to do with law and justice," Israeli foreign ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor told AFP, saying the defendants had not even been informed about the nature of the charges.

"They haven't been given even a symbolic chance to have legal representation," he added. "It's a propaganda showcase. The government of Turkey, if it really wanted to do something about this issue, would engage with Israel."

The defendants in the trial are Ashkenazi, former navy chief Eliezer Marom, former military intelligence head Amos Yadlin and former air force intelligence chief Avishai Levy.

Israel ruled that those who took part in the raid did nothing wrong, and one of thelawyers for the plaintiffs said they expected the court to issue an arrest warrant for the men.

Last year, an Israeli probe ruled that the raid did not violate international law, and a United Nations report said that although the IDF used “excessive force,” the flotilla organizers acted “recklessly” and that the maritime blockade was legal.

In May, Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon had said he was expecting foreign diplomatic pressure on Turkey to stop the trial, saying it could have "wide-ranging implications for NATO and US forces," which frequently board ships suspected of terror activity.

Turkey insists ties will not return to normal unless Israel offers a formal apology, compensates the victims and lifts the blockade on the impoverished Gaza Strip.

Yet another group of fools attempting to reach Gaza

Yet another group of activists misguided fools is scheduled to reach Gaza over the next few days, and in Israel, the government fears anoverreaction to it by our own UN Ambassador. 

Government officials on Thursday raised eyebrows at a letter Israel's UN envoy Ron Prosor wrote UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon this week asking for international intervention to "stop the provocation" of a small ship sailing to Gaza.

According to one official, the letter – which said the Vikings had a better moral compass than the passengers of the Estelle which is expected to arrive near Gaza in the coming days— gave a publicity boost to the ship that is challenging the IDF's naval blockade of Gaza.

"One ship does not a flotilla make," said one official of the ship carrying what Prosor called "weekend revolutionaries" with "radical and extremist agendas."

Israel's blockade policy remains intact, and the ship will be stopped, one official said.
The ship, sailing under a Swedish flag, set sail in Juneand has stopped at numerous European ports trying to drum up support and publicity. The vessel, carrying over a dozen passengers, took on additional food and passengers off the coast of Crete earlier this week.

 I wish these 'activists' would go do something useful like cut their toenails or something.

The flotilla and the third intifada; Young Israeli lawyers may pull off the legal equivalent of the Six-Day War by MELANIE PHILLIPS

Is a bunch of young Israeli lawyers working round the clock sustained only by Diet Coke, falafel and cigarettes about to pull off the legal equivalent of the Six-Day War?

Israel famously won that war before it even started by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. Now it’s beginning to look as if the Gaza flotilla of fools and fanatics may be holed below the waterline before it even sets off on its cynical and potentially murderous stunt.

It was supposed to have sailed by now. Today, however, it was reported that it now may not set sail before next week. The main reason is a series of unprecedented and ingenious manoeuvres by Israeli lawyers which have tied up the boats in legal actions mainly concerning insurance and registration issues.

And I can reveal that a separate legal move today threatens fourteen of the flotillistas with arrest if they enter Israeli territorial waters.

Two Israeli soldiers in the reserves are seeking to bring a private prosecution against those activists who took part in the first Gaza flotilla — and who are planning to take part once again in the current one — for the crimes of assault and soliciting aid for an attack.

The fourteen comprise one person from Ireland, two from the US, one from Cyprus, two from England, two from Spain, one from Greece, two from the Netherlands, one from Norway, one from Sweden and one from Qatar. Separately, the captains of the flotilla boats also face the possibility of criminal charges from a similar attempt at a private prosecution.

In addition, the US Attorney General has threatened the 36 Americans on the flotilla that they will be liable for criminal prosecution if they sail.

Already, the number of flotillistas has been whittled down from 1500 to 350, and the number of boats from 15 to ten. Most of the credit should surely go to the Israeli activist law firm Shurat haDin which believes in bankrupting terrorism through a creative use of the law. Here are some of the legal challenges to the flotilla which Shurat HaDin has initiated with seismic effect.

•It sent letters to all the maritime insurance companies in Europe and Turkey, warning them that if they provided the flotilla boats with insurance (a necessary component in the effort to smuggle contraband to the terrorists) that they themselves would be legally liable for any future terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas.

•It filed an unprecedented lawsuit to seize the flotilla boats. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of an American terror victim injured by a Palestinian suicide bomber.

•It sent warning letters to a French insurance company warning it not to insure a boat that was to be launched from Marseilles. The company accordingly decided not to provide the French boat with insurance.

•After the main Turkish boat the Mavi Marmara pulled out of the flotilla, the New York Times reported that one reason (along with political pressure) was the boat’s inability to obtain maritime insurance.

•It sent warning letters to the UK and US based global satellite company INMARSAT, stating that it might be liable for massive damages and criminal prosecution if it provided communication services to ships used by suspected terror organizations in the flotilla. Then a resident of the southern Israeli town of Sderot filed a legal suit asserting that, under US law, Inmarsat was aiding and abetting terrorism by providing satellite services to the flotilla vessels.

•This week the New York Times reported that Greek authorities had detained two of the ships docked in Greece, including an American vessel, after Shurat haDin complained to the Greek Coast Guard suggesting that seven of the ships might be lacking insurance or were improperly registered.

For the flotilla is out to provoke violence and mayhem. The claim that its mission is a humanitarian one to relieve Israel’s ‘siege’ of Gaza is patently ludicrous. There is no siege. Israel allows in regular supplies, and Egypt recently opened its own Gaza border. No, the flotilla’s real aim by its illegal breaking of the legal maritime blockade of Gaza is to provoke Israel into violence against those on board so that they can pose as martyrs and will thus trap Israel into blackening its own image.

Yet however transparent the flotilla’s real purpose, the media are sanitising its true aims and potential for violence, as Just Journalism spells out here and here.

Well, the true aim was actually spelled out by Adam Shapiro, co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and a board member of the Free Gaza Movement (which is behind the flotilla), at a meeting last November at Rutgers university in New Jersey to raise money to fund an American flotilla boat. I have obtained a video of this address (no link, I’m afraid). This is what Shapiro said:

What we’ve been doing over the last ten years with the International Solidarity Movement, Free Gaza, and all the other outgrowth organisations and movements and groups is to …work with Palestinian society to ramp up the resistance. This is all part of a Palestinian movement for Palestine…This is truly an international movement … It’s only Palestine, this cause that has been going on for over 60 years, that generates this kind of activism, this kind of resistance…
Free Gaza is but one tactic of a larger strategy, to transform this conflict from one between Israel and the Palestinians, or Israel and the Arab world…to one between the rest of the world and Israel… [applause]
It’s not just the conflict, it’s not just the siege, it’s not just the home demolitions, it’s not just the wall on the West Bank, it’s not just the effort to continue to dispossess Palestinians of their land…it’s also the attempt to define a place where 20 per cent of the population is Palestinian, to define the land underneath their feet as Jewish, to further dispossess them and subject these people to permanent second third or fourth class citizenship…Free Gaza is a tactic…all of it is part of a strategy now to transform the conflict and internationalise it and really undermine Israel where it gets its most support…
Our ground is the whole world. And that’s where our resistance has to be. The whole world… We already have a third intifada. It’s going on right now. It’s going on all over the world.

So from the horse’s mouth we learn that the prime aim of the flotilla is not to provide humanitarian supplies to Gaza. It is not even to protest Israel’s ‘siege’ of Gaza. It is instead a tactic in a campaign to undermine Israel itself on account of its 60-plus year existence as a Jewish state. In other words, the flotilla is part of a strategy designed to destroy Israel altogether.

All decent people should hold their breath that Shurat haDin pull this one off, and turn ‘lawfare’ into a boomerang against the jihad and its nauseating fellow-travellers whose true aim is to exterminate the national homeland of the Jewish people.

Israel Law Center (Shurat HaDin) Exposes Flotilla Organizers

Here is a video of Adam Shapiro, of the ISM and Free Gaza movement, speaking at Rutgers last year. In his speech he says explicitly that the flotilla is a tactic in a larger war there the goal is to undermine Israel altogether, where he wants to change the conflict from Israel versus the Palestinian Arabs into Israel versus the world -to internationalize the conflict: