Breaking the blockade of Gaza. One dead body at a time.

This morning I woke up to news that made my stomach churn with anger and utter disbelief. The Freedom Flotilla, a convoy of nine boats carrying aid to Palestinians living under siege in the Gaza Strip, was attacked in the early hours of Monday morning in international waters by Israeli security forces. Video cameras streaming live showed the moments the Israelis being lowered down on ropes from a helicopter gunship, while heavily-armoured warships flanked the aid boat on either side.

The men that came on board from the helicopters were armed to the teeth with automatic rifles, bulletproof vests and night vision goggles. It must have been the most alarming sight to see them descending from the ropes, fingers on hair triggers.

The activists on the deck of the Mavi Marmara, the lead vessel in the convoy, were obviously frightened but determined they would not go down without a fight. There was an ensuing melee. I did see an activist give an Israeli a good couple of thwacks with a folding chair, just like they do in the fake wrestling programs you see on TV. But I never saw a wrestler get shot dead for hitting someone with a chair.

As yet, the Israeli government has still not confirmed the exact number of dead, but sources have put it at 19 thus far, with up to 60 people wounded. The remaining activists were escorted to the port city of Ashdod in Southern Israel, where the wounded were taken to hospital and the others were held in a makeshift detention camp where they would be processed and probably deported later. The 10,000 tonnes of aid in the boats would be unloaded, checked, searched and slowly “dripped” into Gaza at the mercy of the Israeli government. Dangerous and subversive contraband, such as cement, would not be allowed into the Strip due to a ban already in place.

The Free Gaza Movement organised this flotilla with the aim of breaking the siege that has been strangling the people of Gaza for three years. The group was comprised of approximately 700 pro-Palestinian activists from over 50 countries, including a Nobel Laureate and several European legislators (including a Turkish MP who was found to be one of the victims killed in the military operation).

However, the Israeli Army (I refuse to call it the Israeli Defense Force) would have you believe that the people who organised the flotilla are part of a “radical Muslim organisation” with ties to Al-Qaeda and Hamas (yeah, like my grandmother. If you had to believe the Israelis, only that Muslim gal who was a stripper before she became Miss America doesn’t have ties to Al-Qaeda, and that’s probably only because she doesn’t wear enough clothing for her to conceal a bazooka underneath).

Andy David from the Israeli foreign ministry would like to convince you that these people “were not there to deliver peacefully (sic) humanitarian aid. They were waiting with knives, with metal bars. They were there to attack.” The Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister, Daniel Ayalon, referred to the Freedom Flotilla as an “armada of hate and violence”. And to think that they pay their PR people top dollar.

Other spokespersons from the Israeli Army tried to defend their trigger-happy behaviour by saying that the activists were waiting for them and they were “lynched”. Because that’s what peace activists do. And the Israelis were so defenceless and afraid for their lives. They are also obviously too underfunded and backwards to have heard of tear gas, rubber bullets or crowd control training.

I hate that anyone had to die or even get hurt for this, but if anything, it will make Joe Bloggs more immune to the brown stuff that is constantly being spewed out of the Israeli PR machine. It also shows the power of social media. Twitter and Facebook have been overloaded by today’s events, and I’d like to think that ordinary folk have made a difference in bringing the issue home to all of us. Today, we shared, discussed, argued, re-tweeted and got information directly from the ground.

That’s the kind of democracy and freedom of speech that counts, but it’s also the kind that the leaders of the “free world” don’t really like because it can’t be edited to suit them. Today, the Israelis found themselves on the back foot while trying to bluff their way out, and everyone in the world has called their bluff.

Social media gives mainstream media the finger

At the start of a new year and decade, it is a time to pause and reflect upon both past, present and future, a way, if you will, to mark a large “You Are Here” in red on the timeline. It is a time to note emerging trends and make predictions about the year ahead.

One thing that cannot have failed to have grabbed everybody’s attention by now is the rise of social media. You would have to be living under a bridge, or approaching your second heart bypass, to be unaware of things like Twitter, YouTube, blogging and Facebook and the impact that these media are having on modern society.

The younger generation of the world is one that demands many things. This crowd is not known for their patience or understanding. They want to have contact with their peers at the touch of a button and they expect news and information to be constantly at their fingertips.

They are also not very good at keeping things to themselves. While I would call this “oversharing”, teenagers and twentysomethings are telling the world about their angst, their heartaches, their funny stories and the things that make them angry.

Their thirst for information is insatiable. Sure, they might not be reading as much as their parents or grandparents, but they are adept at gleaning the bare facts from 140 characters or less. Their parents had to go to the library and search through dusty old tomes for the information they sought, learning to summarise and make their own notes from printed textbooks. But now all that is required is to pick up a mobile phone or turn on a laptop, point it in the general direction of Google or Wikipedia and the gist of the information is absorbed.

It is perhaps not surprising then, that the mainstream media, generally led by wrinkly men with a grey hair or twelve, are struggling to keep up with the spread of news and views on the internet. These would be “unauthorised” news and views. They haven’t been vetted. These stories never sat on a news editor’s desk and the angle of the story wasn’t carefully calculated.

You could argue that it has turned the entire internet into a large corporate office, rife with rumour and gossip, snatches of misinformation whispered between cubicles. But on the other hand it could be said that it keeps the fat cats on their toes and checks their ability to get away with murder without creating a tsunami of whispers and suspicions.

The rise of the use of Facebook and Twitter as means of communicating news has led to many young people questioning the role of the mainstream media and the relevance thereof.

A typical case in point was the recent gathering of about 1400 Gaza Freedom Marchers from 48 countries. They gathered in Cairo, Egypt, intending on travelling through the Rafah border crossing into Gaza and holding a demonstration to draw attention to the plight of the people living in Gaza under blockade, a year after the Israeli attack on the area.

The Egyptian government refused to open the Rafah crossing for them and Egyptian police attacked a group of European female demonstrators, punching, kicking and tearing off headscarves. One French protester reportedly died of her injuries.



Through all this, however, these images were nowhere to be seen in the international media such as the BBC or Sky News, and nowhere in the local media outlets. This is a clear indication that the news corporations are too concerned with toeing the political line. Bad press for the Israelis is something they usually avoid at all costs – even when the cost is a human life.

Climate change is also a big bone of contention which threatens to turn on world leaders and bite them in the rear ends. With the leaking of documents at the Copenhagen climate change summit, the world saw a cancerous clot of greedy bureaucrats stuffing up the last real chance we had to undo decades of pollution and reckless consumerism.

Perhaps an inevitable conclusion is that the social media-using millions will begin to grow restless in the coming years when it begins to sink in – years of inaction and cover-ups by politicians, as thick as thieves with the newsmen. Unfortunately, this may mean years of unrest and demonstrations, perhaps also civil disobedience from protesters and heavy-handed punishment from governments clutching desperately onto power.

I sincerely hope that when the discontent reaches fever pitch it will usher in some kind of new era where ethics and accountability prevails, but the undying cynic in me is prone to point out that the “free” world is more likely to end up resembling the end of George Orwell’s prophetic but terribly depressing novel, 1984.