As I mentioned to K-Lo in part one of our interview this week, one of the things I’ve been surprised by since The Grand Jihad was released is the number of times I’ve been asked if I really believe Leftists and Islamists would actually work together. This question is odd because it is undeniable that the two camps do work together and have at several junctures in their histories. This is not to trivialize their differences, which are real. But I’m not hypothesizing that they might work together; I’m observing that they do work together and analyzing why it happens.
In any event, as if more proof were needed, Ken Timmerman provides at Newsmax [and thanks to Ken and Cliff for bringing to my attention]:
Left-Wing Lobbyists Orchestrate Gaza Campaign
An American communications firm best known for shaping the liberal Moveon.org into a national movement has tackled a new project: orchestrating an international anti-Israel campaign aimed at breaking the blockade of the Gaza strip.
Fenton Communications, which has offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and San Francisco, signed two contracts last year with Qatar to develop “a communications action plan for an 18-month campaign” aimed at delegitimizing Israel and generating international support for the Hamas-run Gaza strip, documents filed with the Department of Justice show. The campaign, known as the “Al Fakhoora Project,” has a very visible Web presence that boasts of rallying 10,000 activists “against the blockade on Gaza.”
Fenton signed the contracts, worth more than $390,000, with the Office of Her Highness Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al-Missned, the wife of the Qatari ruler, and a separate foundation she chairs. The contracts are ongoing, according to Fenton’s Foreign Agent registration forms. U.S. diplomats in the region view the elegant sheikha as a “progressive” force in Qatar, who has partnered in the past with U.S. AID and other U.S. government agencies on projects involving education, women’s rights, and the arts.
Well, of course she has. Qatar, the home of al-Jezeera and among the Arab world’s chief underwriters of suicide terrorists, has long been regarded by the State Department as a key American ally in the war on terror — maybe not as key as Saudi Arabia, but you get the idea.
Her Highness the Sheikha got the lefties at Fenton to set up a website which, Ken explains, “features a YouTube interview with the Al Fakhoora director, explaining why the group took part in the aid flotilla that attacked Israeli special forces” … along with a “sidebar boasting that the San Francisco Board of Supervisors [who else!] is mulling a resolution ‘to condemn Israeli Defense Forces’ military attack on the Freedom Flotilla.’” The director, Farooq Burney, helpfully explains that “the purpose of us to join this trip was number one, to allow support, or to enable us to interact with students in Gaza. Our intention was to go there and lend our support to students in Gaza and let them know that people care for them, and people are advocating for them to have access to quality education.” That’s why “there was a lot of excitement” among the participants, with “a festive mood” on board the ships. “Unfortunately,” Burney went on, “we were attacked by the Israeli navy. People were killed. People were injured. It was very saddening to see that, to have somebody die in front of you . . . We talk about humanitarian work, we talk about activism. I don’t know how much more peaceful this could have been.”
Reviewing the video and other evidence, Ken suggests it could perhaps have been a tad more peaceful:
Video footage taken by shipboard cameras and released by the Israel Defense Forces shows activists suiting up in bulletproof vests and assaulting Israeli commandos with metal bars and clubs as they tried to board the Mavi Marmara, the Turkish “aid” ship Burney describes in his YouTube interview. Other footage, taken from Israeli helicopters, shows the “activists” assaulting an Israeli commando as he is rappelling down to the ship and tossing him off the deck of the ship. The primary weapon the Israeli commandos used during the boarding operation was a Tippman 98 Custom — a paintball gun.
Testimony one of the commandos released later described how the “activists” shot this commanding officer in the leg and stabbed him in the stomach before tossing him off the deck. Other “activists” on the lower deck then dragged the officer inside, taking a knife to expand the wound in his stomach. “They cut his ab muscles horizontally and by hand spilled his guts out,” the soldier said. “When they finished, they raised him up and walked him on the deck outside. He was conscious the whole time. If you are asking yourself why they did all that here comes the reason. They wanted to show the soldiers their commanders’ body so they will be demoralized and scared,” the soldier said. “Luckily, when they walked him on the deck, a soldier saw him and managed to shoot the activist that was walking him down the outside corridor. He shot him with a special non lethal bullet that didn’t kill him. My commander managed to jump from the deck to the water and swim to an army rescue boat (his guts still out of his body and now in salty sea water). That was how he was saved. The activists that did this to him are alive and now in Turkey and treated as heroes.”
Ah yes, our NATO allies, the Turks. If you subscribed to NR Digital, and you know you should, you’d find an essay from me in the new edition about Turkey’s return to the Islamist fold and how it marks, finally, the victory of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna over the bane of his existence, Ataturk.