Netanjahu erklärt Videoaufnahmen des israelischen Überfalls

Die Huffington Post, eines der führenden amerikanischen Newsblogs, berichtet exklusiv über eine aktuelle Stellungnahme des israelischen Ministerpräsidenten Bejamin Netanjahu, was den Überfall auf die Gaza-Hilfsflotte und die dabei entstandenen Videoaufnahmen angeht:

In an oped (http://www.culturesofresistance.org/op-ed) published by the San Francisco Chronicle on June 5, Ms. Lee claims that the Mavi Marmara had no guns or weapons of any kind, as confirmed by Turkish customs agents before it sailed; that the ship carried "hundreds of civilian passengers" bent on aiding Palestinians who have been suffering "under an illegal siege" maintained by Israel in what Amnesty International calls "a flagrant violation of international law"; and that Israeli "commandoes and navy soldiers shot and killed at least nine civilians and seriously injured dozens more." In view of these tendentious allegations and the video itself, which appears to confirm them, I asked my good friend Benjamin Netanyahu for his comments on both. He replied as follows:

First of all, let me make one thing clear. Whenever it is attacked, Israel will defend itself, and that is exactly what it has done in this case. Many people in this world - including those who consider themselves good friends of Israel - can be deplorably naïve about what constitutes an "attack." They think an attack requires things like guns, rockets, and stinger missiles. And if they don't see any of those things on a ship, they fail to see how the ship can be "attacking" Israel. They don't realize that even a digital video camera can be a weapon just as deadly as a gun or missile - especially when the camera is deliberately aimed at an Israeli helicopter that is merely doing its job, shooting away in the middle of the night to defend the state of Israel against all those who would provoke it under the specious cover of "international law."

The video itself is an attack on Israel, a gross invasion of our privacy. To protect that privacy, we arrested everyone we found on board the Mavi Marmara, confiscated all of their video equipment, hard drives with video footage, cell phones, and notebooks. That Ms. Lee could smuggle her video out of Israel even as we generously released her is bad enough; that she posts it online for all to see is a flagrant affront to our dignity as well as our privacy.

But let us look closely at the video itself. What many people do not realize is that no unedited video can speak for itself - especially not this one. To an untrained eye, the video seems to show a shipful of unarmed civilians being gunned down by Israeli commandoes. But to a trained Israeli eye, the video shows something quite different.

Hier geht es weiter.