EU/Palestinian Distortions

"If survivors' reports are confirmed, this will be the worst shipwreck of migrants in years, not an accidental tragedy, but the apparent deliberate drowning of migrants by criminal gangs who extort money for their desperate journeys. Their actions are as callous as they are evil." 
"[The scale of the Malta boat killing merits an] "international judicial enquiry."
"In the context of this disaster … there has to be an international reaction. It can’t be the case that 500 people are sent to their doom and there is no international legal response."
Leonard Doyle, spokesman, International Organization for Migration (IOM) 

"After they hit our boat they waited to make sure that it had sunk completely before leaving. They were laughing.".
"When the boat was first struck, one of the passengers killed himself in despair by hanging."
Palestinian witness

 More than 100,000 migrants have reached Italy via boat this year; thousands of others have died trying.Twitter/Italian Navy

Earlier this week the horrible news that a boatload of migrants had drowned last week as a result of their boat capsizing in the Mediterranean en route to Europe, 300 miles southeast of Malta, to escape the carnage in the Middle East and North Africa, shocked the public. Now, details of the tragedy have been published. Two of the migrants who had survived the ordeal at sea, rescued by a freighter after two days of losing hope while hanging on to flotsam in the water, spoke to the International Organization for Migration of what they had witnessed.

The two Palestinians informed IOM investigators that Palestinian and Egyptian traffickers had turned against the migrants whom they wanted to switch to a smaller, presumably unseaworthy vessel on the way to to Europe. This switching en route appears common procedure with these smuggling adventures. The people aboard this ship had already been forced to switch boats in their several day's journal on a number of occasions. The ten smugglers, faced by the migrants' reluctance to board the smaller vessel, threatened to return them all to their port of origin, in Egypt.

When the smugglers realized that the refugees would not allow themselves to switch to another boat, something they had already tolerated on previous occasions since leaving the port of Damietta days earlier, the traffickers rammed their boat into the refugee-packed vessel, causing hundreds of the people aboard to drown. Their journey that began with hope and ended in tragedy began in Gaza where a "travel" office had informed them they would cross to Egypt, then embark for Italy at a cost of $2000 each passenger.

The two Palestinians speaking to the IOM investigators said there were on board up to 500 Syrians, Palestinians, Egyptians and Sudanese. Among them one hundred children. Two other surviving Palestinians who arrived in Crete spoke to the Palestinian embassy in Greece, and they told a story through their interlocutor from the EUobserver, felt to be convincingly suitable for a story. Said Ahmed Suhail, diplomatic Palestinian in Greece "according to the information we got, around 250 or 300 of them were Palestinians from Gaza."

"The whole Gaza Strip is talking about it. It's such a painful story, as if it's not enough what happened in the last war and now another blow comes", said the Gaza-based NGO, Halil Abu Shamala in the EUobserver piece. "We are thinking: It's better to try and to drown in the sea than to stay at home and be killed by Israeli bombs", purportedly stated another Gaza resident who gave his name as Belal, planning a similar trip in the next few weeks. These interpretations are swallowed whole, unquestioned by the EUobserver to be served up to the European Union readership.

But the newspaper helpfully also published this in the story to help give it added context:
"The Israeli offensive - Operation Protective Edge - in July and August killed more than 2,000 people, mostly civilians, injured over 10,000, and caused 440,000 to flee their homes.
It also destroyed houses and harmed electricity and water sanitation facilities in a place which was already on the brink of a humanitarian disaster due to Israel’s seven-year blockade."


No mention that the conflict was a reluctant self-defence move on the part of Israel, finally responding to the thousands of rockets shot across the border into Israel by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, nor the abduction and murder of teen-age Israelis and IDF personnel, and tunnels dug from Gaza toward Israel kibbutzum just to prove how good a neighbour the Hamas-led Gazans are to Israel, innocently going about their business, oblivious to the threat their neighbour lives under. And repeating the canard of mostly Palestinian civilians killed, a claim that has been debunked.

Nor any accusations levelled against Palestinians and Egyptians who have such a corrupt view of honour and obligation that they would deliberately place peoples' lives in peril on the high seas, laughing as they commit such a crime against innocent people fleeing in fear for their lives, only to find themselves consigned to death by their own co-religionists and ethnic groups. But escaping "Israeli bombs" is the focal point of their willingly facing death by drowning, a courtesy brought to them by their own.

This interpretation fits snugly indeed into the general European atmosphere of smug anti-Semitism.