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From: hfavr@mtuxo.UUCP (a.reed)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: The "Patria" incident
Message-ID: <1372@mtuxo.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Mar-86 22:58:27 EST
Article-I.D.: mtuxo.1372
Posted: Tue Mar  4 22:58:27 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 6-Mar-86 19:22:44 EST
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Farzin Mokhtarian writes:
> One of the ways of refining terrorism into an instrument of policy was the
> demonstration that jewish as well as Arab civilians could become victims of
> zionist terrorism if it served a political purpose. 
> A good example is the blowing up of S.S. Patria in the Haifa harbor on
> November 25, 1940, killing 276 illegal Jewish immigrants. The decision was
> made by the Haganah (the official arm of the Jewish Agency) General Staff
> and was intended to make the British "understand that Jews could not be
> driven from their own country". The story was told ten years later by
> David Flinker, Israeli correspondent of the Jewish Morning Journal (the
> largest Yiddish daily).

This is getting to be interesting. The "Patria" was prevented from
landing, and the British were about to force it to sail back to
Nazi-occupied Europe, where its passengers would face certain death.
The Hagana tried to save their lives by blowing a small hole in the hull
of the ship, thus preventing their de facto murder by deportation. The
hope was that the British, who were still pretending to be civilized,
would permit the passengers to land once the ship began to sink. What
seems to have happened is that the sapper miscalculated, and the ship
sank too quickly. To the mind of any civilized person there is a world
of difference between a failed attempt to save lives, as by the Haganah
in the "Patria" incident, and the deliberate killing of civilians as
practiced by terrorists. We may learn something about the defenders of
terrorism from the fact that they ignore this difference.

					Adam Reed (ihnp4!npois!adam)