Posted on 06/01/2010 11:52:03 AM PDT by markomalley
Jennifer Loewenstein, a professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, says Israel's deadly attack on the Freedom Flotilla was a "very carefully planned action" subsidized by the United States.
The Gaza Freedom Flotilla, which was carrying food and medical supplies to Gaza, came under fire early Monday morning by Israeli navy forces in international waters more than 150km off the coast of Gaza.
Twenty international activists are reported to have been killed and 50 others injured in the incident.
The following is the transcript of Press TV's interview with Jennifer Loewenstein:
Press TV: The first question that comes to mind is that this incident happened in international waters and not exclusive territory. How can Israel justify that?
Loewenstein: Well, it can't. It will go out of its way to twist the story and talk of how it was attacked…it sticks to whatever it can lie about and whatever people can buy. But the fact is that legally they have absolutely no defense. They violated international laws by attacking a non-violent humanitarian aid convoy to the Gaza Strip in international waters.
If either party had the right to confront the other, it was the Flotilla that would have had the right to confront the Israelis for doing this act of aggression against them.
People do not seem to be aware of the actual circumstances here in the United States and it is very frustrating because the amount of news coverage that we get on these stories is so limited and so twisted.
Press TV: How likely do you think that this incident was pre-planned? The attack being a sort of iron-fist policy to prevent future aid convoys from even thinking to set sail for Gaza?
Loewenstein: My own belief, which I can't prove, is that this was very carefully planned. Not only were the Israeli soldiers instructed to go aboard these ships, as we heard in advance, I believe they were probably also told to kill anyone they felt symbolized a threat such as Sheikh Raed Salah. I do not know what his current condition is because of the Israeli-imposed media blackout from the ships and every other detail about this issue.
We cannot confirm anything but my belief is that we will find that this was in fact a very carefully planned action. It was done deliberately to get the activists off the backs of Israelis. They [Israelis] are obviously intimidated by the fact that they are bringing international attention to the blockade.
I do not agree with one of the commentators who said earlier that the sole purpose of the Flotilla was to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. I think it was very clear that the activists had another purpose -- which was a very necessary and good purpose -- and that was to call attention yet again to collective punishment of 1.5 million Gazans, who have been living under blockade for three years now… And when I say three years I kind of cringe because the condition in Gaza has been ongoing and terrible for over a decade.
Press TV: The United Nations has only condemned the incident. How would the UN have responded if the attack was carried out by any perpetrator other than Israel?
Loewenstein: I can imagine how the UN would respond. My feeling is that here the important party is not the UN, it is the US. I think most people understand that the UN is basically powerless as long as the US imposes what it wants. The US determines who is going to become secretary general more or less, and that somebody it does not approve of, will never become secretary general. And so you have a situation such as we did a year and a half ago when the Cast Lead Operation was taking place and Ban Ki-Moon gives Israel a slap on the wrist. This was what the Americans wanted and this was what we see today. This was what they have helped engineer. I don't know how this is going to be played out in the long run. Meanwhile, the role of Turkey could have very dire implications for the US strategic policy in the Middle East. I hope it has implications in terms of forcing the US to stop its total subsidization of Israel.
ASH/CS/MMN
Though Jewish, Loewenstein harbors a caustic hatred for Israel, a nation she views as an illegitimate entity with no right to exist. At the same time, she sees Palestinians as innocents, relentlessly oppressed and brutalized by violent, sadistic Jews. Both themes feature in an article that Loewenstein wrote on January 2, entitled “If Hamas Did Not Exist.” In it, she wrote that “[t]he state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground [by Israel] against the Gaza Strip…has nothing to do with Hamas…nothing to do with ‘Terror’…or the long-term ‘security’ of the Jewish State.” Rather it is a manifestation of Israel’s quest to achieve “the wholesale enslavement” of Palestinians who “dare” to claim their “sovereign rights” and seek to free themselves from the Jewish “Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on [their] cherished land.” In her view, Israel’s latest military campaign is rooted entirely in a “naked desire” for “hegemony,” “power over the weak,” and “dominion over the world’s wealth.” In the final analysis, she concluded, “Israel has no intention of allowing a viable, sovereign Palestinian state on its borders.”
On other occasions, Loewenstein has characterized the Israelis as “masters in the art of destruction” who seek to “devastate” and “decimate” Palestinian society with “record-breaking violations of international law and basic human morality”; who conduct ruthless campaigns of “state-sponsored terror” marked by “killing,” “maiming,” “atrocities,” and “bloody and sadistic torture”; and who, “under a hideous veneer of ‘security needs,’” are waging “a greedy imperial war” that inflicts “on-going brutality and barbarism” upon Palestinian civilians. Lamenting that “Gazans have not yet attained the status of human” in Israeli eyes, Loewenstein declares that Israel “and its US Master” now reside in “the lowest circle of Hell for betraying the name of humanity.”
Loewenstein characterizes Israel’s current war against Hamas, not as a battle for national survival, but “another excuse to destroy Palestine.” She wonders, with seeming bewilderment, “why Hamas, which won power in free, fair and transparent democratic elections has been deemed a criminal terrorist organization” by Israel. She suggests that Israeli officials are privately “grateful” whenever any of their countrymen die as a result of a Hamas-launched Qassam rocket (thousands of which have rained down upon southern Israel in recent years), because such casualties supposedly furnish Israel with a pretext for reigniting its “angry flames of intolerance” and assembling a “racially pure dreamland” devoid of Arabs. Moreover, Loewenstein contends, the Qassams themselves are outgrowths of the “systematic national torture and evisceration” which the Palestinians allegedly have long endured at the hands of Israel. Noting that Hamas stands as “the most popular of the opposition groups in Palestine today,” Loewenstein says that any effort to destroy the organization would be immoral and counterproductive, causing “the further erosion of democratic civil society in Palestine and elsewhere.”
“Though Jewish, Loewenstein harbors a caustic hatred for Israel, a nation she views as an illegitimate entity with no right to exist. “
Just another self-hating westerner, taught by her professors and politically correct culture that the meanest, vilest third world piece of two legged filth is the moral equivalent of westerners.
Ms. Lowenstein would re-appraise her appraisal of Islam were she to conver to Islam,marry one of these freaks, and locate to Turkey, Iran, etc.
Ahahahahah...and what would a guy hiding in the womb of a classroom know about it?? Sorry, most of us aren’t 18 year kids so easily awed by your “glorious intellect”.
The Jews over the centuries have been oppressed for good reason. They’re a race of beady eyed thieves!
-Eric Cartman (who sounds like a lib to me)
She is a Jew who is with J-Street and has forgoten history and the term NEVER AGAIN! Funny how she is so enlightend that will be one of the first ones led to the new death camp thinking it was a trip to the liberal nudist colony.
I often wonder how some of these traitors will react if they do successfully enable a second Holocaust. My guess is that they will be in denial and claim the Israelis brough it on themselves.
I should also add that (as I get older), it seems more and more white people from various religious persuations are traitors to their people. This phenomenon is not just native to Jews, but (due to their small numbers) Jews are more vulnerable than most.
I’d like to see how a similarly organized “aid flotilla” aimed at Turkey, not to mention Iran, would fare . . .
Q.E.D.
I wonder if she voted for 0bama?
It WAS a “carefully planned action” - by Hamas.
And it WAS subsidized by a government - the Turkish government.
Jennifer (Sarin) Loewenstein is a Madison, Wisconsin, political activist and a faculty associate in the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, an administrative, not an academic, appointment.
The wikipedia article this is taken from is not unbiased (against) the "professor":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Loewenstein
Of course, for Iran TV News, the fact that she is not a real professor and that her "facts" are wrong are just unimportant minor details.
“A professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison” . . . I stopped reading right there.”
Don’t you want to know what type of anti-American leftist was hired by a large university and is teaching impressionable yoots? Ever wonder why there are so many more leftists voting today than there was 20 or 30 years ago? In 1984 the antiwar leftist George McGovern was lucky to win 1 state in a race against Reagan. Compare that with the dead even split between Bush vs lunatic Gore, Bush vs traitor Kerry, and McCain vs commie-bama.
Jennifer, you have simply proved once again that leftist American Jews are leftists FIRST, Jews only if convenient or profitable.
A professor of what?
Undoubtedly some no criteria, no intellect “studies” or sociology faculty?
I hereby soundly reject my past title of professor - since it, and the title of PhD, have been cheapened to the point of being given to virtually anyone who can breathe.
Well, Jews excel at everything including hating Jews. Just like Barry, it takes an American to really hate Americans. Jennifer should move to Gaza to be among those she loves.
Well, I would hope that a military mission against a military threat organized by a group with ties to terrorist organizations would be well-planned. From the shots fired at the Israelis and the shouts “Gaza or Martyrdom” it looks like the trip was carefully planned by someone in Turkey as well.
“Well, I would hope that a military mission against a military threat organized by a group with ties to terrorist organizations would be well-planned.”
It was a dumb-azz play. Overly militaristic, no hope of surprise, no intimidation. Why not just search the ship using more conventional tactics? The IDF isnt what it used to be.
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