Israeli "The Unit" Lies
Using Netflix my wife and I just finished looking at the entire four-year run of a recent miniseries, "The Unit," which I believe was originally aired by one of the Fox groups but was taken off the air because 9,000,000 was judged to be too small a slice of the viewing pie.
"The Unit" follows a group of four U.S. Army special forces soldiers as they perform a long series of derring-do deeds that sometimes have a "Mission Impossible" ring, except with not nearly the relaxed and somewhat tongue-in-cheek air of that justly celebrated series of the 1970's or so. Instead "the Unit" greatly exceeds "Mission" in sheer viciousness, and that includes a huge amount of lying to cover their tracks. In fact, the members of the Unit and their superiors find it absolutely necessary to deceive the general public and even their own superiors at just about every turn.
The news right now is especially painful because the most vivid recent happening is a blatant act of piracy that the Israeli Navy perpetrated on the high seas against a flotilla of six ships that was bringing relief materials to the people of Gaza who are being tightly blockaded by Israel, with that nation's justification being their view that everybody in Gaza, men, women, and children, is a terrorist, and so they allow very insufficient amounts of highly needed food, medicines, building materials, and other necessities to get into Gaza. And note meanwhile that the Palestinians, in Gaza or on the West Bank, are not blockading Israel or doing anything comparable to that at the moment.
The attack by the Israeli commandos bears a strong resemblance to the hundreds of acts of piracy that have been committed by Somali seafarers against shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. But again, just as "Mission Impossible" is heavily benign when compared to "The Unit," so the number of deaths caused by the Somali attacks in their totality over the years still do not, to the best of my knowledge, add up to the number murdered by the commandos when they boarded that relief flotilla, which at first was reported as being ten but now has been downsized to nine.
The statements put out by the Israel media furthermore justify the acts of their Navy by blaming the victims, who, it is claimed, resisted, by means of showing handguns and metal poles and in some instances swinging the poles at the commandos, though the latter were armed with somewhat more than guns. The Israeli authorities bleat that these aid workers had to be dealt with severely, including confiscating all six ships in the flotilla, and slamming hundreds of the occupants in prisons, because the aid deliverers responded to being boarded as if they were at war. And, as if that was not enough, that Navy further vowed that if any more flotillas come, they will be hit even harder, meaning more and more killing. Yet what is a blockade or boarding ships that don't belong to their nation and killing many of the people aboard -- without, by the way, any of the commandos suffering a fatality -- other than acts of war?
But in fact, everything that the Israeli authorities is saying on this matter sounds exactly like what the members of "the Unit" and their leaders would say, word for word and with absolutely no relationship to what actually happened and the motives thereof.
It all makes you wonder about the essential worth and stability of a society or a nation when its underpinning has to consist of little more than a huge bed of high-handed acts mortared together with lies.
"The Unit" follows a group of four U.S. Army special forces soldiers as they perform a long series of derring-do deeds that sometimes have a "Mission Impossible" ring, except with not nearly the relaxed and somewhat tongue-in-cheek air of that justly celebrated series of the 1970's or so. Instead "the Unit" greatly exceeds "Mission" in sheer viciousness, and that includes a huge amount of lying to cover their tracks. In fact, the members of the Unit and their superiors find it absolutely necessary to deceive the general public and even their own superiors at just about every turn.
The news right now is especially painful because the most vivid recent happening is a blatant act of piracy that the Israeli Navy perpetrated on the high seas against a flotilla of six ships that was bringing relief materials to the people of Gaza who are being tightly blockaded by Israel, with that nation's justification being their view that everybody in Gaza, men, women, and children, is a terrorist, and so they allow very insufficient amounts of highly needed food, medicines, building materials, and other necessities to get into Gaza. And note meanwhile that the Palestinians, in Gaza or on the West Bank, are not blockading Israel or doing anything comparable to that at the moment.
The attack by the Israeli commandos bears a strong resemblance to the hundreds of acts of piracy that have been committed by Somali seafarers against shipping in the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. But again, just as "Mission Impossible" is heavily benign when compared to "The Unit," so the number of deaths caused by the Somali attacks in their totality over the years still do not, to the best of my knowledge, add up to the number murdered by the commandos when they boarded that relief flotilla, which at first was reported as being ten but now has been downsized to nine.
The statements put out by the Israel media furthermore justify the acts of their Navy by blaming the victims, who, it is claimed, resisted, by means of showing handguns and metal poles and in some instances swinging the poles at the commandos, though the latter were armed with somewhat more than guns. The Israeli authorities bleat that these aid workers had to be dealt with severely, including confiscating all six ships in the flotilla, and slamming hundreds of the occupants in prisons, because the aid deliverers responded to being boarded as if they were at war. And, as if that was not enough, that Navy further vowed that if any more flotillas come, they will be hit even harder, meaning more and more killing. Yet what is a blockade or boarding ships that don't belong to their nation and killing many of the people aboard -- without, by the way, any of the commandos suffering a fatality -- other than acts of war?
But in fact, everything that the Israeli authorities is saying on this matter sounds exactly like what the members of "the Unit" and their leaders would say, word for word and with absolutely no relationship to what actually happened and the motives thereof.
It all makes you wonder about the essential worth and stability of a society or a nation when its underpinning has to consist of little more than a huge bed of high-handed acts mortared together with lies.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 9:10 AM
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