Vittorio Arrigoni has been murdered in Gaza.
Max Ajl, a Jewish blogger who has written for CiF and the New Statesman, and who is a supporter of Chavez and Ahmadinejad, knows why he was killed:
Vik my brother and comrade was killed this evening. He is dead, hanged. He died because was in Gaza resisting the occupation. I will miss him.
That explanation is, I suppose, literally true. However, it misses an important element, which his murderers have not forgotten:
In a YouTube clip posted by his abductors, he was shown blindfolded with blood around his right eye and a hand can be seen pulling his head up by his hair to face the camera.
The accompanying Arabic text said: “The Italian hostage entered our land only to spread corruption.” It described Italy as “the infidel state”.
The Guardian describes Mr Arrigoni as a “peace activist“. However, I can find no evidence that Mr Arrigoni engaged in activism against Hamas or any other armed terrorist group, or worked for dialogue and normalisation of relations between Arabs and Jews. The International Solidarity Movement, with which he was active, describes him more accurately as an “activist”.
Ironically, only a couple of months before his own abduction, the late Mr Arrigoni objected to political efforts to free Gilad Shalit:
During a press conference in Israel yesterday Michele Alliot-Marie, the French foreign minister, expressed her solidarity with the soldier Gilad Shalit, the only Israeli prisoner in the hands of the Palestinians.
Even though the French minister knows very well that Shalit was taken prisoner during an Israeli attack on the Gaza border, it seems she spoke yesterday about a “war crime” attributable to the Palestinians of the Strip. While staying silent about the clear and real Israeli crimes every day in Gaza.
The post continues with a somewhat infantile “Rage Against the Machine” video, followed by some pictures of Palestinian Arabs attacking the French Foreign Minister’s car, and signs off with the tag line:
Stay Human and angry!
In a similar manner, the murdered Jewish actor, Mer-Khamis was also erroneously described as a “peace activist” by the Guardian despite his own close association with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, his desire to replace Israel with “a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea“, and his belief that “armed struggle is legitimate as long as it’s against an occupier and is done on occupied land”.
He was still killed, as a Jew.
UPDATE
Just Journalism reports:
A recent tweet from ISM reads:
‘While we mourn #Vittorio, let’s remember that he died resisting the #Israel #Occupation. It continues…’
Astonishing.
