Home | Friday 11th November 2011 | Issue 796
HIGH SIEZE
Considering it’s rooted in ancient folklore, the Israel-Palestine conflict has been pretty high-tech this last week.
Two boats, the Canadian Tahrir and the Irish Saoirse, were illegally captured in international waters by Israeli commandos. The ships, part of the civilian Freedom Flotilla movement, were headed to Gaza with a cargo of people and medicine, aiming, as previous flotillas have, to break Israel’s murderous siege of the Gaza Strip. Unlike the last flotilla, which was prevented from leaving port, this one got 35 nautical miles from Gaza before the Israeli military boarded and kidnapped its crew and passengers. They were taken to Israel and then charged with ‘illegally entering Israel’ (a country they had no intention of visiting). Several of them are still in Israeli jails.
In revenge, Anonymous, the high-tech hacker cyberpunks from a dystopian present, shut down the websites of the Israeli Defence Forces as well as the sites of spy agencies Shin Bet and Mossad.
On their statement on Youtube they said “Justifying war, murder, illegal interception, and pirate-like activities under an illegal cover of defence will not go unnoticed by us or the people of the world...If you continue blocking humanitarian vessels to Gaza or repeat the dreadful actions of 31 May 2010 against any Gaza freedom flotillas then you will leave us no choice but to strike back. Again and again, until you stop.” Nice one.
Meanwhile, on the other side, pro-Israeli hackers shut down the website of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, an international People’s Tribunal of former heads of state, Nobel Prize laureates, a former UN secretary general, and other assorted liberal elites that have gathered in South Africa to deal with the ongoing occupation of Palestinian territories and unrelenting violation of human rights Israel exercises on Palestinian citizens.
