Last year, when Israel launched a deadly commando raid on a flotilla of ships challenging its naval blockade of Gaza, many outraged opponents of that action demanded to know why the Israeli Navy had not taken some sort of less confrontational action. Like, for instance, disabling the propellers of the ships.
This week, as a new flotilla struggles to get under way, Irish activists claimed that damage to a propeller shaft on their boat, which forced them to withdraw it from the effort, must have been caused by underwater divers.
As my colleague Scott Sayare reports, the Irish activists in Turkey said on Thursday “that the damage was discovered on a trial run, but that otherwise the vessel might have sunk at sea, endangering the passengers and crew. Activists discovered nearly identical damage to a Greek-Swedish-Norwegian passenger boat earlier this week.”
After they discovered the problem with their ship, the Irish activists produced two YouTube videos to explain the damage and complain about what they presumed was an effort by Israel’s government to keep them from making it to Gaza.
In one clip, an activist named Fintan Lane said the damage could have endangered the lives of the passengers on the ship and described it as an act of “international terrorism” by Israel.
Appearing just a week after a YouTube clip was posted online by an Israeli actor who pretended to be an activist disillusioned with the flotilla, these clips, with their somewhat shaky images and poor sound, also serve to remind viewers that video shot by activists tends not to look like a slickly-produced commercial.
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