While the likes of Ari Fleischer and Michele Bachmann are screaming for Helen Thomas to be fired because she answered a reporter who asked for her opinion on the Israeli-aid flotilla horror show by saying that Israel “should get the hell out of Palestine” and then added, when the reporter asked her where Jews should go, that they should go back to Germany and Poland (by which she obviously meant post-liberation Germany and Poland), all kinds of breaking news reports are revealing that most if not all of Israel’s claims about what went down on the Mavi Marmara are lies and disinformation.

Here is a rundown of what the right-wing bloggers and the so-called liberal media are ignoring while they run panting after Helen Thomas:

• The IDF has come up with a transparently invented cock-and-bull story to explain why they doctored a video to create a totally fraudulent comment ostensibly made by an aid activist from the Mavi Marmara to the Israeli navy personnel on the helicopter to the effect that they should “shut up and go back to Auschwitz.” Not only did this activist not say anything of the kind; she wasn’t even on the Mavi Marmara.
• The (UK) Guardian is reporting that autopsy results (copy obtained by the Guardian) on the nine men who were killed by the Israelis on the Mavi Marmara reveal that they were shot a total of 30 times, much of the firing at close range, and five of the men died as the result of point-blank range gunshots to the head. Reuters picked up the Guardian report and a few bloggers on the left — notably Steve Clemons of The Washington Note and Juan Cole at Informed Comment — have written about it, but as far as I can see none of the people on the right who have been so loudly defending Israel’s actions have found it possible to spare a few minutes from transforming an ill-considered response to a reporter’s question into an endorsement of the Holocaust in order to ask how the IDF’s narrative of self-defense in response to a vicious lynching party squares with nine men being shot 30 times in total, at close range, with five dying from direct gunshots to the head.
• An article by Yousef Munayyer, published in Foreign Policy, has examined the facts about Israel’s blockade of Gaza and its consequences for Palestinians in Gaza and has concluded that the claims made by Israel and its more adoring supporters that there is “no humanitarian crisis” is bunk. And Matthew Yglesias links to a chart at that hotbed of terrorist anti-Israel activity, The Economist, which shows just how insane Israel’s criteria for deciding what qualifies as humanitarian aid really is.

Now tell me one more time: Who has the messed-up ideas about truth, fairness, and fact-based reporting? And what exactly, again, is the provenance of all that hypocrisy and all those double standards and that stuff about defending the indefensible that I’ve been hearing so much about?

Kathy Kattenburg

PAST CONTRIBUTOR.