Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: guarda un po' cosa scrive il NYT

(E dunque, a bordo della nave c'era gente votata alla distruzione di
Israele. E ben pagata)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/world/middleeast/02activists.html
Turkish Funds Helped Group Test Blockade of Gaza
By SABRINA TAVERNISE and MICHAEL SLACKMAN
ISTANBUL — Since 2007, a small group of hard-core activists has
repeatedly tried to sail cargo-laden ships into Gaza in an effort to
thwart Israel’s blockade. But when the Free Gaza Movement teamed up with
a much wealthier Turkish organization to assemble a flotilla, it became
more than a nuisance, supercharged by the group’s money, manpower and
symbolic resonance into what Israel sees as a serious and growing threat.
After a botched raid that killed nine activists, an international uproar
is intensifying pressure on Israel’s blockade. And the movement has hit
on a strategy that, even when it fails in its aims, succeeds in tactical
terms: The world sees Israel use military force against civilians.
On Tuesday in a bustling neighborhood in Istanbul, the Turkish
organization was celebrating a strange success. “We became famous,” said
Omar Faruk, a board member of the group, Insani Yardim Vakfi, known by
its Turkish initials, I.H.H. “We are very thankful to the Israeli
authorities.”
The group brought large boats and millions of dollars in donations to a
cause that had struggled to gain attention and aid the Palestinians.
Particularly galling to Israel is the fact that the group comes from
Turkey, an ally, but one whose relations with Israel have become
increasingly strained.
Israeli authorities say I.H.H. bolsters Hamas, which runs Gaza and which
they see as doctrinally committed to destroy the state of Israel. It
also charges that the group has links to Al Qaeda and has bought
weapons, charges the group denies.
The organization is funded entirely on donations, its members said,
money that comes from Turkey’s religious merchant class, an affluent
section of Turkish society that has brought the party of Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power. Inside the group’s tidy three-story
office building in central Istanbul Tuesday, women in colorful scarves
brought money and were given receipts.
The group bought three boats, including the Mavi Marmara, the one that
was raided, from a company owned by the Istanbul city government for
$1.8 million. The boats carried aid that included building materials —
cement, tiles and steel, which Israel bans because it says they could be
put to military means — worth about $10 million, members said.
Mr. Faruk argues his organization was crucial in helping to project Free
Gaza’s cause. “We changed the balance,” he said.
The Turkish group is a charity, members said, but the Israel Project, a
private nonprofit advocacy group, sent an Internet link to journalists
with references to what it described as the group’s “radical Islamic,
anti-Western orientation.” The link alleges that the group supports
Hamas, in part through a branch it opened in the Gaza Strip, the charity
it sends them, and in meetings and speeches by Bulent Yildirim, its
leader, and Hamas officials.
Israeli authorities said the group had been raided in 1997 by Turkish
authorities, who turned up weapons in one of their offices. Ali
Adakoglu, another board member, said there had been a raid on the house
of a member in 1997, but he argued that it was politically motivated,
since that was the year of a Turkish military crackdown on Islamist
groups. He denied that weapons had been found.
“This is an Islamist charity, quite fundamentalist, quite close to
Hamas,” said Henri J. Barkey, a professor of international relations at
Lehigh University. “They say they do charity work, but they’ve been
accused of gunrunning and other things, and their rhetoric has been
inflammatory against Israel and sometimes against Jews.”
The organization was founded in the early 1990s, first as a charity for
the poor in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, and later for Bosnian war
victims. It now runs charity and relief work in more than 100 countries,
including Haiti and nations in Africa, according to the deputy director,
Yavuz Dede.
The Free Gaza Movement was formed in September 2006 by a group of
passionate Palestinian supporters, most of whom had been barred from
ever returning to Israel. The group says it receives most of its money
in donations.
“We asked ourselves, what can we do to make a difference?” said Greta
Berlin, the group’s 69-year-old co-founder and spokeswoman. “We said,
‘Let’s sail a boat to Gaza.’ That was literally how it started.”
At first, no one seemed to care much. Five times the Free Gaza Movement
sailed from Cyprus, where they are based, to Gaza. Israel ultimately
came to believe that a threat was evolving, fearing that ships coming
into port could transport weapons. Israeli officials said they feared
the prospect of Hamas being as powerfully armed as Hezbollah in southern
Lebanon.
The Free Gaza Movement has its roots in the International Solidarity
Movement, another organization that sought to take direct action in
defense of Palestinians, using nonviolent strategies to impede Israeli
military actions in the occupied territories. Members would often act as
human shields.
In 2003, an Israeli Army bulldozer crushed to death an American woman,
Rachel Corrie, who had kneeled in the dirt to prevent it from destroying
a Palestinian home.
It took the members two years to raise money necessary to buy the first
two fishing boats, maintain and fuel them, Ms. Berlin said. But after
that first landing, she said, the group quickly received enough
donations to buy a small yacht, which they named Dignity. With the new
boat, four more times Israel let the group dock at Gaza.
On the sixth attempt to land in Gaza, Israel decided that was enough.
The shift came after Israel invaded Gaza in December 2008, saying it
needed to retaliate after thousands of rockets had been fired into
civilian neighborhoods.
They loaded the boat with activists and headed to Gaza. It was dark and
Ms. Berlin said that an Israeli ship rammed the boat three times, until
it retreated to Lebanon. That ship eventually sank when it returned to
port in Cyprus.
The group raised more money and managed to buy a small ferry that could
hold 30 passengers. This one they called The Spirit of Humanity. They
tried three more times, with no success. On their last try, in July
2009, she said, Israel boarded the boat and detained the passengers.
Israel never returned the ship, she said.
“We were pretty dismayed because we had no boats and no money,” Ms.
Berlin said.
She said that former Malaysia officials and the Perdana Global Peace
Organization, which describes itself on its Web site as opposed to war,
helped them raise enough to buy two yachts and a cargo ship. Then they
decided to team up with other groups to stage a multiship flotilla. The
movement has grown into a diverse coalition of organizations and
activists, often with little in common apart from opposition to the
Israeli blockade of Gaza, making it difficult to generalize about its
funding, views or radical connections, according to several analysts.
Evan F. Kohlmann, a veteran terrorism analyst with Flashpoint Global
Partners in New York, said American diplomats and politicians, Holocaust
survivors and leftist writers all have offered their names, time or
money to the cause, ignoring or oblivious to the role of others with
more militant connections, he said.
Ms. Berlin, the outspoken co-founder, is originally from Los Angeles.
She was married for 14 years to a Palestinian, with whom she had two
children, and for 14 years to an American Jew. She likes to joke and
says that makes her the most qualified “anti-Semite.”
But when she is not joking she says that her detractors in Israel are
right, that she does not accept Israel as a Jewish state, though she
contends that is part of a larger philosophy which opposes all national
borders.
“You decide in your life what you are passionate about,” she said. “I
happen to be passionate about the Palestinians who have had no rights
since 1948.”

 Israele. E ben pagata)
ricordiamo che la proprietà del NYT è sionista, come sionisti (e
addirittura con figli dell'IDF) i due giornalisti specialisti dell'area