#Flotilla2: Self Described "Human Rights Activists" Specializing In Condescension

In one breath she [Alice Walker] talks about the “cruel and inhuman” treatment meted out to Palestinians, who are “frazzled and suffering everyday”. And in the next she talks about chickens that are “raised under horrible, torturous conditions”, and the fact that people who tuck into chicken dinners don’t realise that they are eating “something precious, beautiful, rare”.
Brendan O'Neill

While Israel protests that Flotilla2 does not understand the international law that is the basis of the blockade of Gaza, a case can be made that these activists don't understand the Palestinians either.

Brendan O'Neill finds Alice Walker's comparison of Palestinians with the inhumane raising of chickens somewhat telling:

She might sound barking, but actually Ms Walker’s lumping together of Palestinians and chickens reveals much about the cocktail of pity and paternalism that drives influential Westerners’ pro-Palestinian lobbying today. They increasingly see Palestinians, not as a group of people capable of exercising the same democratic and political rights as the rest of us, but as wide-eyed and pathetic victims who must be saved from Evil Israel by the better-minded, better-educated activists of the West. Palestinians have been turned into the playthings of Western do-gooders, loveable victims deserving of pity and sad, tear-stained letters from Alice Walker and friends. In short, they’ve been reduced to the level of chickens: sad little creatures whom caring Westerners can coo over and stroke and maybe take home and put in the garden for their friends to marvel over. This is not solidarity – it is a public display of pity, designed primarily to advertise the superior moral sensitivities of anti-Israel Westerners than to do anything practical to assist Palestinians.

You know, if I were a Palestinian in Gaza, I wouldn’t only throw stones across the border at Israeli troops. I’d also hurl them at “The Audacity of Hope” flotilla when it turns up next week, with its cargo of insulting letters from achingly right-on Americans who have moved on from crying over baby seals to crying over poor Palestinians.

There is more than just a grain of truth to this--how else to explain how these people differentiate between Hamas which is firing rockets at civilian targets (not that these people seriously condemn it) and the people of Gaza. They praise how Hamas is democratically elected, yet overlook the fact that it is the Gazans who knowingly elected the group that openly dedicates itself to the destruction of Israel.

Come to think of it, I wonder if Alice Walker knows that Palestinians raise chickens: Gaza poultry farmers refuse to cull possibly infected birds

Technorati Tag: Alice Walker and Gaza and Gaza Flotilla.