1.
The Guardian here makes great play of the fact that the autopsies carried out on those killed on the Mavi Marmara show that five of them received gunshot wounds to the head and one was shot between the eyes. The piece quotes a pro-Palestinian activist in the UK as accusing the Israeli commandos having had a “shoot-to-kill” policy.
2.
I can understand reasoned opposition to the blockade of Gaza, the decision to use deadly force to take the Mavi Marmara and anger over the resulting deaths of nine people. However, the attention being given in the Guardian story, and many other media, to the fact that five of the nine died from shots to the head seems to me to reveal more of an obsession with the supposedly uncanny marksmanship and marked bloodlust of Israeli soldiers than anything else. What of those who died from wounds to other parts of their bodies? Do their deaths fall into a separate moral category from those of their comrades?
3.
The Guradian story says,
The new information about the manner and intensity of the killings undermines Israel’s insistence that its soldiers opened fire only in self defence and in response to attacks by the activists.
Note here the use of the word “intensity”. It’s not clear to me how someone can be killed with intensity. This fragment and the article as a whole seem predicated on the notion that there is some sort of kind, decent and fair way to kill people with gunfire and that the Israelis chose some other, more vicious and treacherous, way.
4.
Some will say that the wounds suffered by the dead can provide us with a more accurate picture of what happened on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara in the early hours of Monday morning. That would be true in the context of an impartial investigation but we are not going to have one of those; Israel controls the scene where the men died and those who killed them and it handed over their bodies to the Turks without doing an autopsy of its own. Furthermore, in the context of an impartial inquiry all the wounds suffered by the dead would be significant, as would a host of other factors.
5.
Britain, the United States, Canada and a number of European countries are currently engaged in a war in Afghanistan. Their armed forces regularly shoot Afghans dead. While there is considerable opposition to the war in some of the countries with expeditionary forces I can’t recall a single instance of opponents of that war drawing attention to the particular kinds of gunshot wounds suffered by Afghans and speculating about what those wounds might reveal about the morality or truthfulness of the force that did the killing.
6.
Seán Savage, Danny McCann and Mairéad Farrell were members of the Provisional IRA. On March 6th, 1988 they were shot dead by British Special Forces in Gibraltar. McCann was shot five times, Farrell eight times, and Savage between 16 and 18 times. At the time of their deaths they were unarmed, presented no danger to their attackers and were shot without being given a chance to surrender.
7.
There is no nice, restrained and decent way to kill someone with a firearm. It may seem like an exercise in redundancy to say so but once the decision to use deadly force is taken then the force used is likely to prove deadly and, from the point of view of those using it, had better be deadly. Nonsensical talk about a “shoot to kill” policy on the Mavi Marmara - as if there could be any other reason for soldiers to shoot someone with live ammunition - combined with an excessive focus on certain kinds of wounds says more about those responsible for them than it contributes to a reasoned critique of Israel’s policy and actions.
While I agree with you for the most part, sometimes soldiers or police are given orders to shoot at parts of the body where a wound would not necessarily be fatal (for example, the lower legs).
True, but even in that case there is still a considerable risk to life, something that ought to be kept in mind by anyone who issues or acts on such an order.
Of course. And people can certainly make mistakes in what part of the body they target. If I were to attack armed soldiers or police, I certainly would expect to be attacked in turn with live fire.
They may very well have been shot in the chest in addition to being shot in the head, based on the ceramic body armor the “peace activists” were using which was subsequently recovered by the IDF. Strange (albeit predictable) obsession on the Guardian’s part nonetheless.
These are elite forces not the keystone cops . Two to the head one to the chest is standard training . Thirty bullets, nine dead is pretty is not to be unexpected as events panned out . The Turks were on a Shaheed mission which in this case meant few or no firearms .The object was to take as many commandos down by other means in order to allow the flotilla a propoganda scoop and the moral highground. Its likely that most of the European activists would have been unaware of this little finesse prior to the rumble in order to avoid the handwringing amongst the few dedicated pacifists on board.
In the Times today ,one of the activists speaks of injured soldiers carried downstairs having had their guns taken from them . They were stripped to their underwear . It is patently obvious from this that the idea was to some sort of trade off in order to reach Gaza . Of course once they had docked there would have been no trade off ,only 3 more Gilad Shalits .
The commandos adapted well to the unexpectedly hostile terrain and recovered well after the initial surprise . People will believe what they want to hear . The truth is with the commandos and the IDF and will stay that way.
My condemnation is reserved for the so called peace activists whose hatred for Israel is so all consuming that it allows them to maintain their farrago of lies and subterfuge in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
i don’t think any human should be shot for any kind of reason. it was wrong for israil to attack a charity aid ship in the first place. also shooting innocent people & unarmed is out of order & completely wrong. if the unarmed people on the ship attacked against the soldiers that will be called self defence.
israil will have to watch out now & will pay for the cause of death & the operation that was set up in the begining. what comes around goes around ISRAIL so bare that in mind…….
Gazza,
the ship was not attacked, it was boarded by the Israelis as it intended to run it’s blockade and under international maritime law Israel was well within it’s rights to do so.
However, if you were to acknowledge this fact that would of course totally undermine your position, which of course is why the angry left ignores reality when it comes to Israel.
Secondly, none of the dead would be dead today if they hadn’t attempted to murder the boarding party.
Regards
mailman
An analogy to policing can be made.
If an assailant is stabbing someone and you have two police officers, the they can probably restrain the assailant without resort to fire arms.
If an assailant is stabbing someone and you have one police officer, he will probably attempt to non-fatally shoot the assailant.
If you have a mob of violent assailants and one police officer (or a larger mob and a few police officers), the police officer will likely fatally shoot one of the assailants so that they all back off.
This is the situation that happened here. If only a couple of the activists had been violent, the soldiers probably would have restrained them without resort to fire arms. If the situation was that there were only a few activists that the soldiers could shoot-to-injure all of them, that is probably what would have happened. However, there was a mass violent mob and as responsible police officers would do, they had to shoot to kill.