friends they are friends of the palestinian people as well and they are a representation of a much larger collective of civil society activists here in america but all over the world who as of late kind of changed or affected a paradigm shift of how things or the type of relationship that palestinians have where the rest of the world we're going to try to i'm going to try to make it short as possible to bring ritter and bill over here but before i would like just to make sure to give a very brief background at least from a palestinian perspective of why is this book important why azure and new discourse when that cobbles words with action and why that matters first i would like to say that nothing can be as demoralizing for any nation any nation any oppressed nation then to feel alone victimized oppressed cornered subjugated year after year not knowing whether the world out there cares at all  for nearly six decades that's the type of relationship the government or government palestinians and their relations to the rest of the international community neighbors who pay lip service and they didn't do much  way of coming to the aid of the palestinians international law that exist on paper but is never enforced by any means and of course the those who define what the international community is or is not the u s government the e u and various other supporters and backers of israel so for many years there was this kind of lack of understanding what is the international community as writers we always put it action and i would say it was the siege on gaza following the democratic elections in january two thousand and six in palestine that provided that trigger two thousand and seven in particular and that's was civil society here in seattle as much as it was in hundreds of cities across the world people grew ordinary people just getting together in churches mosques synagogues universities everywhere else and talking what can we do are we going to just sit here and watch or are we going to do something well that involves the freedom stealers there were forty four of them but of course the network it was much larger the support that they have received involved all sectors of many societies all across the world and they've decided that they want to do something about it something if you do show you something unique and something different it doesn't promise to change the world but at least promises to bring the world of change and to all of those sailors are with us today and are going to tell us their story we are very honored to have them with us this evening and so please help me welcome were concerned about el salvador and nicaragua well nobody was saying anything about israel's invading lebanon and killing fifteen to thirty thousand people in a month so i got involved then i went to the middle east for the first time in eighty five i've been there six times since including the free gaza movement and i want you to i want you to get to know somebody who is just a very special person grettir berlin but before we get to gretta who is the main star of the show i want to tell you a little bit about gaza this is has a has a is the most densely populated place on the church on the planet perhaps hong kong but people in hong kong can come and go gaza is twenty five miles long it averages five miles wide hundred twenty five square miles one point seven million people it is surrounded by a wall that is more hideous than the berlin wall on the israeli border they also had an iron wall with egypt it was blown up in two thousand and eight but thanks to us taxpayers we convinced the egyptians to build a stone wall so it is trapped by land overhead f sixteen s helicopter gunships and drones but troll the air and by sea the israeli navy in fact gaza fishermen can only go out depending on the temperament of the israeli navy three to six nautical miles even less sometimes people get shot at people get killed people get maimed and fishermen are denied their livelihood farmers on the periphery are denied their livelihood they risk life and death getting killed by snipers for trying to cultivate their crops in the most d populated place on the planet now there used to be israeli settlers here there were spoke about a thousand of them in two thousand and five they were pulled out and ariel sharon proclaimed that gaza was free well we in the free gaza movement decided we would challenge that hypothesis because of gaza's free we should be able to just take a boat and sail right in there don't you think hell will open up a ferry service why not this is what it looks like this is this is the population density from this is from aldo hospital on the rooftop in japan are you a refugee camp hundred thousand people in refugee camp there's eight refugee camps there's three major cities there's all these towns just crammed in there and you can see on the rooftops there's pilings for the next generation because there's nowhere to build horizontally there's only room to build vertically so what is the future of this what is the future i'd like to turn over this discussion for the moment to grettir we're going to go back and forth tonight this will be fun i hope you know i'm the kind of individual that when the light goes on in the refrigerator i do five minutes to the fruit high fur route so i do hope to entertain you tonight and also to encourage you to get the book and to give you a little bit about how insane this idea really was there are a couple of you i see in the audience who i have known since the very beginning of this people who believed in us because and believe me very few people believed in us my children thought we were pretty much on a palestinian they thought it was nuts that we were even considering trying to sail a boat to gaza so how do we get that cup where do we get this idea a man by the name of michael shaikh sent out an e mail to us in two thousand and six and it was when israel was busy attacking lebanon and he said you know i have this idea i think maybe we should buy a boat in new york and then we can sail it to europe and we can go down the coast of europe and we can go through the straits of gibraltar and we can stop and we can talk about palestine and  then we can sell it to gaza i was sitting in my friend's living room her name is mary hughes thompson and she's one of the founders of the free gaza movement and i looked at her i will never forget i looked at her and i went leant now you have to remember we had no idea what a boat was we had no idea what we were going to do we had no idea for example that we couldn't rent a boat that's the first thing we tried while you will rent a boat and go to go to gaza well of course every time we were trying to rent a boat they said where are you taking our boat and they would say gaza they go gonna know gaza where is gaza where you know it's that little tiny strip over here i'm sorry we're not running a boat to you so we realized that the only way we're ever going to do this was to raise money you need to remember there was no twitter there was no facebook it's amazing when you think only what six years ago seven years ago none of those things existed we had google and we organized everything on google we didn't know mary and i knew the founders there were three other founders that did this with us but we didn't know anybody we pretty much said for everybody who wants to get involved in this and maybe wants to go you have to have two recommendations most of the people the initial people who went on the boat came out of the ice and they came out of the international solidarity movement  oftentimes they came out of the christian peacekeepers we had an eighty one year old nun for example who was onboard that's where we got everybody i think what was unique about this particular trip is that we really were just plain ordinary people nobody was famous i suppose the most famous person was lauren booth you all know who she is oh good you do we didn't win when they said lauren booth was going to show up  went is she related to john wilkes booth i had no idea who she was and she was a trooper she was marvelous but she was probably the only one she and jeff helper with the israeli what is our stimulation they were really the only two everybody else were activists many of us had been kicked out of the west bank many of us were not allowed to go back please explain who was laura booth lauren booth was tony blair's sister in law so it was a very appropriate q so it was very appropriate of course and what she didn't tell us is that he hadn't spoken to her in years but you know it looked good in we were trying to put blair on the spot when we decided that this is what we were going to do we were actually going to sail we decided we could do that because israel said that gaza was free that's what they said do you remember all the settlers again be taken gaza's now free so we didn't have to ask permission we were just going to go sail straight from cyprus which is where we ultimately sailed from and into gaza without asking anybody for permission and that's what we decided to do so we organized ourselves we got very very good we're very good at i teach engineers so i'm a really good organizer because they are very linear so i had all of these lists and i sent them all out mean and you know that i sent them all out to everybody we gathered everybody by the time we finished this we had thousands of people thousands of people who believed in us and we started to collect money then we had to find a boat buyer and we had a man that i had known for years from austin texas his name was riyadh hamada any of you know and who he was i know some of you do he was an amazing amazing lebanese activist he he said to me my father ran a coca cola business i know where to buy you a boat so if you will spend all of two thousand and seven and so will i i will go and buy you a boat he had one problem and that is he he was a thorn in the side of bush and ashcroft and everybody else i'm going to let they all read just a small part of what he wrote riyadh was a bit of an uppity arab and after nine eleven of course people were under fire people were being imprisoned without due process people were afraid not riyadh let me read a note that he sent to attorney general john ashcroft regarding my children monitoring of my friends family intrusion and my privacy and civil rights my neighbor came up to me a few days weeks ago and informed me that an agent of the federal bureau of investigation called him again regarding some information about my activities and other personal matters mr frank are specifically told me that the agent inquired about the kind of car that i drive since your agents cannot find any records of car ownership for me in travis county in the state of texas that's austin by the way your agent should know the car that i drive since it has more than twenty bumper stickers in support of the people of palestine against the occupation of palestine against the war in iraq and one that states quote a village in texas is missing its idiot unquote and i think that he now lives on sixteen hundred pennsylvania avenue in washington d c if you cannot a demo for the car and for your convenience i have written i am an arab b in large characters in english in arabic on the rear window that even a visually impaired person can see unless they are blind in the mind and the heart like you and the rest of the ministration that you represent hostile and i have a pink shirt right there when i want to get in touch with my feminine self because i know you so we spent a year all of us collecting money and we had collected about seventy five thousand dollars it took a year because nobody knew who we were we were sending out please we had set up a pay pal account finally riyadh in  february said there's enough money for me to go buy the boat i have the boat but i don't want to tell you where it is so send me twenty five thousand dollars and i will match it with my twenty five thousand so him twenty five thousand dollars and the next day the i r s and the f b i came after him they knocked on his door they said that he had to come and answer some questions and the way so did his children riyad didn't care what they did to him he was remarkable but when they went after his daughter in medical school and they went after his son in college he was in absolute despair he didn't think that they had the right to talk to his children but they had taken everything including our money by the way we never got our money back ever but they had taken all of the money they had taken all of the paperwork work for free gaza they had taken everything and he can became increasingly depressed he was getting more and more depressed and more and more frantic because he was worried about his children on april fourteenth two thousand and eight he committed suicide now a lot of people said that the government killed him yes actually the government killed him they just didn't pull the trigger but they drove riyadh into despair and he thought the only way he was going to get out of it and save his children was to commit suicide which he did ironically of course the government dropped everything against his children for me who had known him for years and years i was devastated i had lost a friend i had lost one of the craziest people i'd ever met i had lost somebody who believed in palestine and wasn't he wasn't palestinian he was lebanese i'll tell you one quick story and then we'll go on to the rest he got a letter from a little boy in communist and it was one of the times that israel was bombing at random in gaza and the little boy said my house is gone i have nothing and it's ok will be all right but i lost my red bicycle and if you can do anything about it is it possible that you could send me a red bicycle now remember riyad in austin the little boys in gaza and forty eight hours later there was a red bicycle at the little boy's tent that was riad i don't even know how he got it in there but we lost an amazing man and by the way we had told everybody by then we were going to go in may of two thousand and eight is a commemoration on the not by day we had no money we had lost our best friend we had no boat buyers we had no idea where the boat was and we now had eighty eight by the way we started out with eighty eight passengers with eighty eight passengers who were trying to figure out how they were all going to get to cyprus because that's where we were we were going to leave from mary one of the co founders put out a plea many of you got that plea and she said this is what has happened in riyadh to memory please donate we cannot get a boat to gaza unless you donate we got seventy five thousand dollars and seventy two hours those little miracles that came from people who were just average people people were sending us their social security checks the u s list you know the u s s liberty you know the story all of you about the u s s liberty how it was bombed during the six day war they were sending us their pension checks we got a dollar fifty from burma just because they wanted to be part of this after this all happened we finally got enough money to buy a boat and we had no idea who to contact and i had a greek friend of mine and she said oh don't worry about it i'll find the greeks for you and of course i thought of course she what post site in greek islands surely they must know how to find a boat and that's what we ended up doing we found all of the old greek communists i am not kidding you their average age was seventy but they were ok they were sixty but they said yes we'll find you a boat yes you we can meet your deadline maybe we'll all go in july instead now they have between may and july to find a boat and to get it ready you want to read the piece of it sure in fact what they had to do was find two boats and they found two ranch up ramshackle fishing boats and they had to pull him into dry dock because they've been sitting bald for years and they pulled him ashore and they did all this clandestinely now these people that overthrew the were part of the overthrow of the greek fascist dictatorship in one thousand nine hundred seventy four had experience in clandestine operations zionists had been able to gain access to the boats on sale and managed to cancel their purchase on the other hand even if a boat could be purchased for free gaza it was always at risk of being found and sunk by the zionists this means that an absolutely legal action as it is not illegal under international law to send two thousand has to be a competition in secret as if it were illegal so for everyone's safety and for the success of the mission we needed to conduct all of our operations in the strictest secrecy every step of the way until including morning of the two boats clandestinely in separate harbors around athens the whereabouts of one boat and crew would not be known to the other boat and crew each of us involved in the project would function on a need to know basis keeping the overall details as quiet as possible i didn't have to give it a lot of thought i would join the mission of once and he did and we of course all the rest of us who are internationals when we say there were forty four people that we find out they were from seventeen countries so i mean it was almost insane because not only are we trying to do this but we don't understand each other it's not that everybody spoke english it's just that nobody spoke english in the same way and so we americans who tend to be very blunt and want to get things done on time couldn't understand why greek mean time meant three days from then and by the time we finally sail nobody was speaking to anybody by the way it took being out on the sea and being and having all of our communications cut off and having everybody sick when we finally realized that it was probably a lot better to stick together instead of worrying about who didn't make the deadline they found us two fishing boat they were we thought they were beautiful and you can see them on the front page of the book of course you saw them up here they were the most ram one had no bunks underneath that's because that's where they stored all the fish both boats reeked of fish but we thought they were beautiful and there was nothing on the boat there wasn't even a steering wheel on the so they install the steering wheel there ready to come bill is in greece i am trying to keep all the passengers who are not either overtly hostile because we are now a month late are restless i'm trying to keep them occupied and they said ok the boat is ready to go they launch the boat they turn the boat right and the boat goes left they push the fear that they push the wheel forward and the boat went backwards and ended up sandbar because it was installed backwards so of course we lost two days because we had to wait for the tide to come in so that the free gaza would be released and would be able to go let me tell you about these boats and let me tell you about greece has been to greece you know what's really cool about greece well first let's talk about nine hundred eighty eight the p l o ship of return in one nine hundred eighty eight they wanted to outfit a boat with palestinian refugees clerics an elderly statesman exodus and sail it into haifa harbor in palestine israel what happened was the boat was sabotaged israeli frogmen blew up the engine and the next day the three organizers were killed in a car bomb so that's what we had to go with so that's why we had to hide but what's cool about greece is it has lots of violence and it has lots of harbors and it has lots of boats nicholas and greek now there are lots of little villages in greece name st nicholas and there's lots of little boats named st nicholas and maybe counties and so i guess nicolaus was the name of one boat in the other but was to me that is copper so i was dispatched to greece and i finally at the end of my twelve days there's got to see the liberty that was hidden in this harbor called eritrea so we pretend that we are a crew of marine biologist about to embark on a research excursion we are warned by evangelists not to talk about our real mission even among ourselves as others can hear us and some of the villagers can understand english for gaza we say mykonos agree island and tourist destination we try our best but several times we slip up and periodic we mention the g word during the next few days it will become my one of my jobs to mediate conflicts between the people working and travelling on the boats without taking sides let me state the obvious a mission such as free gaza movement attracts folks who are hard headed independent minded stubborn and ingenious individuals do you know anybody like that and there's nobody in this room like that i'm sure with these attributes comes an ego we all tend to be opinionated and to no one's surprise sometimes see the world differently it's a very interesting social experiment we have created you put different kinds of people united by human rights cause on a couple of boats together and add a bunch of logistical hurdles delays different cultures different nationalities different languages and customs and then add deadlines and fear and paranoia and stress there's bound to be conflict the patterns are almost predictable i really got off from understanding where the term ship of fools came from and it was several of our jobs to try to keep this whole thing from degenerating into a ship  fools now did i tell you the subtitle of this book is how we succeeded in spite of ourselves it's true in the meantime i'm in cyprus trying to keep everybody occupied because we were supposed to leave the thirtieth of july and we don't even know where the boats are we have no idea remember we eventually left on the twenty second of august so we're trying to keep people interested interestingly enough only four people left they all waited in cypress they all waited for the boat to come they were people were living on their credit cards i still haven't paid my credit card off by the way for the expenses and two thousand and eight because we were trying to raise money we were trying to get the supplies we were staying at the university and so we would try to do something every single day we would talk about the mission we would talk about gaza and one day we decided that we had everybody would write a will which in retrospect by the way was very wise because when the israelis murdered the nine passengers on board the mavi marmara two of those people did not write a will and they their parents didn't know where they were so we had written a will one was to go back to somebody in the country where we were in the other one was going to be held by a man by the name of ramsey who was our land crew so everybody has done that everybody is talking about it it took us a whole two days to figure out what we wanted to do and then we said all right now supposing you die on board what do you want done with your body well of course all of us said just throw about the same size the bill is so what musharraf said is just put me in the refrigerator and take me to gaza the problem was is that the only refrigerators on those boats were those little teeny tiny refrigerators you know that you can put under a counter somewhere and they were only cold enough to make one coke cold and he was determined he said i don't care put me in there anyhow i'll never know just put me in there send me t gaza fortunately we didn't have to do that we finally realized that the boats were coming when bill came back and said yes there's actually boats by the way for after a while we thought that maybe there weren't any boats so i was sending out press releases because i was doing all the press and i don't know if any of you remember but i would send out a press release and posted and say the boats are ready to leave alexandria egypt so the port authorities an alexander egypt would call the port authorities in cyprus because they knew and they would say you know we've got some israelis down here they're looking for these boats do you know anything about  it fortunately for us the cypriots were on our side at that particular time and they said they didn't know anything so then maybe four days later i'd put out another press release and say the boats are now in turkey and so they'd send a crew to turkey to find out where the boats were i was having a lovely time doing this and in retrospect it was probably very wise because we were actually coming out of greece the other thing is we never changed the names on the boats they were busy looking for the free gaza in the liberty and as bill said they didn't exist so we were able to slip out of greece they were able to come they managed it took four advert for them to come to cyprus we finally got everybody to cyprus and i think on the twenty first of august all of the cypriot people i think there were thirty of us were now going to meet the fourteen people that were on board the boat those boats came around the corner of cyprus and we thought they were the most beautiful boats we had ever seen we didn't even look at the peeling paint and the fact that there was no place to put in the storage we were only taking hearing aid we paid no attention we had lots and lots of water that was one thing that we did had a press conference and on the morning of the twenty second we're leaving we're all going so off goes the free gaza now those boats were only qualified to carry eleven people each including crew we had twenty six on the free gaza and i think we had nineteen on the liberty something like that and the cypriots allowed that to happen because you have to remember that suit cyprus was then in e u country so to leave the e u and go to gaza you had to get your passport stamped so they knew that we were put in twice the number in case of free gaza three times the number on board these crazy boat it's a good thing nothing happened to us because they just turned a blind eye and just signed everything off and just let us go off we go already and the liberty breaks offend we only have one engine in each boat so we had to wait and wait and wait until they fix the fan belt we took off we're all excited we're being escorted out of cyprus and we're on our way the problem that happened to us is it was one of the very few times that the mediterranean had a mistrial do you know what a mistrial is and it was one of those big wind storms that comes in from morocco and stirs up the mediterranean well how many of you in here think the mediterranean is nice and calm wrong it's only nice and calm in greece we're out in the middle of nowhere the boats are getting slapped back and forth we're on the i'm on the one that's got the mast on it so the mast is going like this and it's coming back up and it's going over that way and of course everybody is sick my dearest friend mary who has been with me for the entire time through this sits in the zodiac there's only act as the little rubber boat that all boats have i don't know what good they are because you could only put two people in them but it somehow made us feel better she's in the zodiac and she's throwing up in rubber gloves but she's very neat she's british after all so she's very neat so she fills every one of the fingers on the club and thumb and then she ties it off at the top and hands it to me and says throw it overboard i was after the first hour i was no longer sick so i tried to stumble back to the back and i'm throwing these rubber rubber gloves and we said well we don't need that it was the best thing we did because whatever was going to eat those things was not going to die at about i would say when th when the sun went down israel cut off all of our communications everything was gone our channel sixteen which is the channel in case you get into trouble  p s was gone our satellite phones were gone everything was gone and it was gone all night cut off from the world and the world didn't know where we were in the world thought maybe we had been did what was the what were they saying over the airwaves they are lost we could hear the israelis saying they are lost they are lost they are lost they have they are gone so they were running a tapes for us on the channel too i guess intimidate us we never saw anybody we the two boats were being run on paper and compass and the only thing we had were walkie talkies and so we could talk back and forth to each other on the boat and that was it and everybody was sick pretty much everybody on board those boats were were sick some so sick that we thought maybe we were going to have to get a helicopter week i kept thinking oh my god we've been working on this for two and a half three years and if we have to call the israelis and tell them to rescue us i'd rather drive home you know was burping all over the story and it was i wasn't as ti as mary was you know nobel bill the doctor dr bill was barfing almost everybody i'd have to say almost everybody was when the sun came up we realized that we were probably about thirty miles off the coast gaza it's about two hundred fifty nautical miles which doesn't sound like very much some of you probably drove two hundred fifty miles i mean you don't think about it unless you're in a boat being hit by waves wondering who the hell is going to kill you and our boats only traveled seven nautical miles per hour so this took forever thirty three hours of stomach churning amusement park ride excitement just imagine keep your eyes on the horizon watch it rock to and fro and take lots of naps and just pretend your own amusement park and trying to have a good time and of course a lot and a lot of times they said we'll go down below because then you won't see you know close your eyes go down below and rest the trouble was that down below reeked of fish so you didn't want to go down below i mean the last place that you wanted to go when the sun came up we realized that there were no israeli ships anywhere we  didn't know where they were so one one al jazeera guy on board had never all turned on his satellite phone i don't know how we had enough sense to know that we should have kept one off because we didn't know squat nothing but we said we said oh gosh maybe we should keep one off so we on the free gaza we said turn on the phone call your office in gaza tell them we're safe and he got it scrolled on the bottom did you ever see the scar on the bottom of al jazeera words said they are safe they are safe they are safe they are safe i want to wrap this up by telling you that when we arrived in gaza we had forty thousand people as we came in yet this a little bunch of kids on a fishing boat they had forty thousand people waiting for us israel decided that they would not attack us after all as though somehow we had to ask for permission for them to attack us i think they thought we were a bunch of old hippies and so if they let is go we would go way over they were just so wrong but i think that's why they did it i it was one of the most glorious days both of us will say that a our lara lives in fact when i told my son about this he said well mom wasn't that when you had i said no i want to read the last thing before you do let me tell you this is really too cool there was forty thousand people on the shore it was the first time any boats had entered gaza waters in forty one years since israel occupied in one thousand nine hundred sixty seven and not only were there forty thousand on the shore we were throwing balloons out in the water the kids were jumping in the water and they were swimming up to the boats and they were climbing aboard and dignitaries were climbing aboard and the boat was getting overloaded with too many people and we were two hundred yards from docking and we thought we were going to sink right after three hundred whatever nautical miles we thought were going to sink two hundred yards from the shore but then the hamas police detail restored order and it was glorious pandemonium glorious glorious pandemonium it was probably one of the most remarkable days certainly in my life in that you would probably that would probably be true for all forty four passengers that went i want to end this because i want you to remember that this is not about the insane internationals it came in on a boat to gaza this is about keeping gaza on the map and making sure that gaza was not forgotten so we had one man on his name is musharraf and he's from gaza and i want to leave this with what he wrote because this is the reason that we went and this was the reason that we continue to go share was born in in the gaza strip his family still lives there he has a doctor mona far as his sister and her other sister also has a prominent pediatrician what he wrote was this as gaza started to appear on the horizon i felt ecstatic i just could not believe it i never expected it after all the threats i thought we'd end up in an israeli prison i could not stop crying at last i will be able to visit my mother later his grave later i had always said to the people around her even when she was in good health if i die please tell me that the last words on my lips were his name yet i couldn't be at her bedside when she was dying at the hospital where i was born i couldn't get in i couldn't go back i couldn't go back because of the inhuman illegitimate see and my tears continued i was actually seeing my homeland i was coming in by se the morning that the that the boats were ready to leave i went with my colleague to my mother's grave i woke up early and went it was the first time i had visited the grave we had been so busy for the few days that we were there i spontaneously found myself talking to my mother mom i'm here i'm visiting you despite this siege i used to joke with my mother do not die when i cannot be with you and she would laugh and say don't worry i will not if you promise to place me in the grave with your own hands i promise to stay alive but she was unable to it was a great feeling a feeling of freedom i had never experienced it was the first time in my life that i had come home without the humiliation of being questioned or interrogated by the israelis without being threatened without having my papers thrown around without being told that i might not ever come back i could not believe that feeling and that sense of freedom and this is what i hope for all palestinians what rahm's asked me is to give him some background on the tauriel origami how many of you know who he is to some of you do he was the most amazing italian he really was he was the most amazing man and he was on the free gaza and i'll tell you a little story about him he was beautiful he had tattoos all over him and he had these wonderful muscles and every afternoon he would go to the front of the boat and he would dump water over his head we got one pail of water every day and all of the women on the free gaza lined up in the back next to the wheel house to watch a tauriel take his shirt off so he was definitely our entertainment he was truly a beautiful man that not only the way he looked but also the way he really was and he had been in gaza off and on for just years and years and he had come back with us on the free gaza and then he stayed you stayed with the international solidarity movement he did a lot of work with the fisherman he also did a lot of reporting for an italian newspaper and he would end everything everything he wrote he would end it by saying stay human and if you don't know who he is you might have seen that we made we made shirts at one time that said stay human he was said that that would be what he would have preferred what he would have wished but he was in his early forty's and he was one of the very few people i've ever met that was full of joy he would make you laugh he would make you smile we didn't have a time i didn't understand a word he said but it didn't make any difference he was just a big and amazing man who believed in freedom for the palestinians and he gave his life for that he did survive operation cast lead where he was there during that onslaught and he wrote a book in a tie in and in english gaza stay human and so that if you want to hear his direct accounts of what happened from the on the ground in cast lead please look up that book gaza state human masjid arrest i think they killed two people and i think they arrested i think the other two and they were from some splinter group that nobody had ever heard of and one of the people that killed himself was a jordanian who came through the tunnels who of course you know the middle east is rife with rumors on top of rumors but i think that's probably correct they said he worked for jordanian intelligence oregon he was a sorn in the side of berlusconi who was then the head of italy whatever happened whatever happened behind the scenes i think that the tauriel was a sacrificial lamb i think that also whoever designed this thought that if that happened to  so high profile nobody would come it's like rachel corrie if you kill her no one will come most of us came to work with the i asked them because of rachel corrie it's a stupid idea to think that if you kill one or two people you're going to threaten people like us who are hard headed and stubborn and stupid sometimes it's just going to do exactly the opposite well the question basically goes back to the you know whether the dog wags the tail or the tail wags the dog is israel in fact the at the core of all that is happening is israel struggle that has been imposed in the middle east by capitalism so what what is it well you know i was just going to say what you just said is that this is the western dog wagging the israeli tailors at the israeli tail wagging the western dog well there's all different kinds of interests to promote war eisenhower talked about the military industrial complex that's part of it we hear about the neo cons we certainly hear about the israeli lobby so there's different shades but there is an alliance between people who profit from war who prior for profit from imperialism who profit from the domination of western powers or over native people in the middle east so i think the answer is all the above ok so basically there are two questions here when is what happened after the liberty and a few gaza sailed to gaza in august of two thousand and eight that was not so obviously the in that was the beginning of a whole person and to both of those because i was pretty much involved in every and every voyage except for one there's actually been twelve voyages total by now maybe thirteen a detent pens on how you want to count them certainly  free gaza ran the first five voyages and all five of those voyages got in all five did and that's what people don't realize you kind of know about the first one and then you know about the one where the mavi marmara w everybody was murdered but we got in five times what happened when we came back after that first trip is that the palestinian stepped up rightfully so they were pretty cynical about these crazy people who were crazy enough to get on a boat i think ramsey believed in as maybe three or four other palestinians did we had two palestinians on board but most of the times they went yeah well ok prove it when we got back after that first trip a group of palestinians in london bought us that boat called the dignity it was a yacht and i remember going to look for a boat and a couple of our founders gone saying to me you know i just don't think we can buy a yacht i really i just don't think we can buy a yacht i mean we made a symbolic gesture with these two to crap in boats and you know we were just activists we can't buy a two hundred fifty thousand euro yacht and most of our barghouti you all know who he is was standing with us at that time and he said why not why can't the people of gaza have a yacht come and visit them why don't they have the right to open their port and that's what we did we started taking in members of parliament in europe we started taking in high profile people it was no longer ironically it was no longer a an initiative that was done by just common people because we had bade three promises to the palestinians when we left one is that we would take palestinians out and we took twenty eight total out of those trips to was that we would publicize it around the world as much as we could and three was that we would return and we did all of that but we also knew that in order to stay protected the higher profile that we got the better off it was we had people like marie maguire for example who's a nobel peace prize winner she was onboard and so that worked very successfully until cast lead when our boat cynthia mckinney was on that boat in there but was rammed i do but by the way love to hear the israeli point of view because they said we ram them three times sideways so we backed it up and we ran into three times that way yeah that's impossible  tunisian is the one who knew ha ha ha ha from turkey he was the one that told the turks in with the mavi marmara the turks by the way did not own that boat it was owned by the  coroner so when they say it was a turkish boat it was but it was flying by the cormorants islands in part they had thought that maybe if something happened we would be able to take them to the criminal court because the comoros islands belongs to were married he was thompson and our rene boyer and paula rudy and me and sharon locke were three americans and two australians we were the original one we started to put it together huwaida was working on her master's degree i think and she said contact me if you ever go she didn't believe we'd go either about a week before we went mary called her and said we need you we really need you we need to be part of this your post in your article that we need to have you come and she did so she became a freak us a spokesperson for two or three years she's articulate she speaks hebrew she speaks arabic obviously she speaks english and she's young and she's attractive and she was the spokes person that we would send out pretty much around the world she's now you do know she's now  pregnant if you don't know who wait is she's pregnant she's due in five weeks and she's in the israeli village where she comes from because she wants her son to be born and get there is really citizenship and the israeli government just kicked adam shapiro who is her husband they just kicked him out yesterday they said he couldn't stay so she's staying in hell yeah i would expect that you know i mean she wants to make sure the next generation is going to be able to have the citizenship up here on the screen there's something that says work with gaza's ark and that's an initiative that's been done by many of the same people we've gotten larger and larger we you know we've got a swedish group now we've got a french group and they've gone off many have gone off to do all kinds of different things i don't know if you remember the french group they all got on board a plane and they all flew to tel aviv none of those things would have happened had it not been for free gaza where free gaza working on right now is gaza's art and that's taking a boat out of g into europe and we encourage you to please go on their website as god's arc dot org look at what they're doing buy some products what we're going to try to do is load it with things like the employee that i have on and then get contracts especially in europe because europe has an agreement with the palestinians and force israel's hand and other gaza related projects grettir and i are not profiting in any way from this book nor our twenty five coauthors how they're only going to divide that twenty five ways anyway so it is going to help the people of gaza please buy our book and thank you for