Taking Issue with Dr. Pipes

Submitted by Bill Narvey (Canada), Jun 3, 2010 at 19:40

You are premature to conclude that Israel could have better anticipated violent resistance and adjusted their tactics accordingly to avoid armed confrontation with the lead flotilla ship. Without Israel declaring their own findings after their investigation, if such findings are ever revealed, all you can do is surmise. Your surmise is not helpful.

Raising questions of course is and I expect Israel will be seeking answers to those kinds of questions.

Secondly, you state to Robertson, that Israel should not have intercepted the flotilla and instead recognized the battlefield was not in the water, but in the court of public opinion and thus focused attention there.

Here again, I disagree, but only in part.

Israel had every right at law and every reason based on logic and common sense to intercept the flotilla and take whatever stand was necessary to prevent those ships from docking in Gaza.

I therefore say there are two fields of battle Israel must engage in.

The traditional tangible battlefields of the ground, air and sea and the battlefield of ideas and perspectives, which is the war of words and ideas to capture hearts and minds. It is the latter battlefield you have alluded to.

Israel had considerable time to engage in that war of words and ideas as the flotilla set sail from Turkey.

They either failed to do so or failed to get their positions aired by the media. In either case it is a failure.

Had they done so and been successful, before the flotilla ever came close to the intercept point, world opinion (save for much of the Muslim world) would have been conditioned and shaped by facts to view the flotilla as a publicity stunt, the leaders, radical Jew/Israel hating publicity hounds, if not potential terrorists and the rest of the 600 or so passengers as either supporters of these radicals or gullible nut bars used by the radical leaders.

The world would have seen in advance of the confrontation a flotilla flying not under the false flag of humanitarianism, but of pure anti-Israel politics and worse.

There was time as well to have unmasked Turkey's role in facilitating the flotilla and casting Turkey in the role of the evil provocateur that had chosen radical Islam over its relationship with Israel and indeed with America and the West.

Since Oslo, it seems Israel has failed to fight on the battlefield of words and ideas nearly as vigorously as it should.

Hopefully this incident will open Israel's eyes to the need to fight aggressively on both battlefields.

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