A couple of blog entries ago I noted a quote from Brigitte Gabriel published on the Christian Right website OneNewsNow. Gabriel claimed that the boat Dignity, which was intercepted by Israel’s navy on the way to Gaza just before New Year, had been flying the Hezbollah flag. There is no reference to this detail in any news reports or comment pieces that I have seen (including in hostile accounts), and despite looking at numerous pictures of the boat on YouTube, Flickr, and other sites, I have been unable to find any pictures of the Dignity with a such a flag. There are, however, plenty of pictures which show the boat with other flags, such as the Rainbow “Peace” flag and the Palestinian flag (but not the Hamas flag, I should add). It is also very unlikely that Gabriel’s knowledge of the boat extends beyond the general media reports.
I have now received a comment from someone involved with the Free Gaza Movement, who writes that:
Of course we were not flying the Hezbolla flag, or the Hamas flag or any other political flag…
Unless there is something I have missed, the weight of evidence suggests that Gabriel and OneNewsNow have spread a falsehood about a group of people they disagree with. Former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, who was on the boat, may be a person of questionable political judgement, and it is dispiriting to read that after the incident “Representatives from Hezbollah and Amal movement also welcomed the Dignity boat in Tyre”, but that hardly means that pulling a fairly significant fact out of thin air is any less damaging to the credibility of the person doing it.
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Cynthia McKinney may be a person of “questionable political judgement”, but she is, by all reasonable standards, a very decent person.