Amnesty seizes on Palmer's criticism of Israel, ignores rest of report

To its credit, the Netanyahu government has not accepted the advice of the Left and has refused to apologize to Turkey or pay compensation to the families of those killed aboard the Marmara. Moreover, the government has wisely used Turkey's behavior as a means of building strong bilateral ties with other victims of Turkish aggression. Over the past two years, Israel has strongly upgraded is strategic ties with Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria and Romania. Israel should add to these accomplishments by strengthening its ties to Armenia and to the Kurds of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Amnesty International has come out with their comments on the Palmer Report. Curiously, they are only on video. What is not surprising is:

They seize on the one relatively small part of the report critical of Israel and completely ignore the other parts of the report - including those critical of Turkey and the flotilla organizers.

They do not address, at all, the parts of the report that completely contradict Amnesty's own legal reasonings.

They continue to call the Turkel report a "whitewash" even though the Palmer report was much closer to the Turkel report in most important matters, and Turkel himself recommended that the testimony of soldiers be made public - the exact opposite of a "whitewash."

They never responded to Turkel's not Palmer's, extensive legal arguments.

Truth does not seem to be what Amnesty is interested in. - EOZ

I'm sure you are tired of me pointing this out again... but I don't understand why anyone would call the behavior of the IDF excessive when they showed up on the ship with paint guns and only switched to bullets when there was serious violence on the ship. One of the IDF soldiers had his ear cut off. What was excessive at that juncture? defending your life is excessive? One thing the Palmer Report pointed out was that the blockade was legal... (of course that was just ignored by Amnesty above), but if the blockade was really found to be legal then why didn't anyone in the world flinch when Turkey announced that their Navy would give a military escort to the next flotilla? If the blockade is legal then the threat of a military escort is an act of war. Instead of this game of smoke and mirrors, Amnesty is going to have to owe up to some reality sooner or later because there are unbiased third parties and they will lose the ear of these people. The photos and video from the flotilla are hard to obscure. There is a limit to how much spin you can put on the event. You would think that Israel's enemies would be well advised to move on to the next event, because logic leads to proof of Israel's righteousness on the flotilla issue. Turkey thinks the blockade's legality is an opinion, but sea law just doesn't work that way. What does sound opinionated is when soldiers show up on a hostile ship with paint guns and are attacked by people out of Quentin Tarentino film with actions like cutting an IDF soldier's ear off... and then Amnesty and the UN call the IDF's response excessive. I sometimes think this is all just designed to piss us off for the sake of controversy... and possibly if we ignore it... it will just go away, because the claims are so hypocritical that one might think it is all jesting.