Ship of Fools

Another alleged aid boat was impounded by the Israeli Navy. Ha’aretz carries the details.

The Israel Navy boarded a freighter trying to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip on Thursday and escorted it into the port of Ashdod, Israeli officials said.

The Israel Defense Forces said that troops found about 150 bottles of mineral water and a few dozen kilograms of food and medicine on board, despite earlier claims that it was carrying dozens of tons of humanitarian aid. Israel has decided to redirect the ship and its passengers back to Lebanon on Friday with the help of international organizations.

Israel has decided to redirect the ship and its passengers back to Lebanon on Friday with the help of international organizations. The Tali, a cargo vessel flying the flag of the West African state of Togo, was sent by the Palestinian National Committee Against the Siege in cooperation with the U.S.-based Free Gaza Movement. Its cargo was claimed to have included about 60 tons of medicine, food and toys, plus 10,000 units of human blood plasma which requires constant refrigeration.

Maybe someone should ask Hamas where all the aid went? Anyway, the other truly remarkable thing besides a lack of ‘aid’ cargo was a ‘passenger’. The former Greek-Catholic Archbishop of Jerusalem, Monsignor Hilarion Capucci. There is much I could say about a PLO gun smuggling priest but I have always preferred how La Passionata summed him up in an opinion piece in Corriere della Sera, December 2, 2002

I find it shameful that the Catholic Church should permit a bishop, one with lodgings in the Vatican no less, a saintly man who was found in Jerusalem with an arsenal of arms and explosives hidden in the secret compartments of his sacred Mercedes, to participate in that procession and plant himself in front of a microphone to thank in the name of God the suicide bombers who massacre the Jews in pizzerias and supermarkets. To call them "martyrs who go to their deaths as to a party."

Indeed.