Was the Mavi Marmara Incident a Hoax?

The Mavi Marmara was a ship that led the 2010 attempt to break the Israeli blockage/stranglehold on Gaza. The ship was raided by Israeli commandos who were attacked by the passengers. Several passengers were shot, some died. Here is the Wikipedia page on the raid.

We are led to believe all these events are real. However the Israelis say their commandos were attacked and were defending themselves. The protesters say they were brutally attacked by the commandos after offering no resistance. But what if the event never happened?

There was an ‘official’ video of the raid released by the IDF, which showed the commandos being attacked as soon as they descended from their helicopters. This video was propaganda released by the Israeli government to show its people and the world that the supposedly peaceful, moderate demonstrators were “actually” vicious Islamist murderers. (That’s the official line.)

But this video is fake, as I will demonstrate by comparing of the official IDF video of the raid to an hour of video that was “smuggled out” by activists. (Just to be clear, I don’t assume that either of these are real footage from the event, and I will return to that issue at the end.)

Above is an official video that summarizes the IDF’s version of events, according to which all 15 soldiers slide down in the first minute, and then ‘in the first few minutes’ they were attacked:

That is not the key video in my analysis. But one thing to note about this video is that here there are two ropes coming down from the helicopter for the soldiers’ descent (the technique is called fast-roping). The official IDF video explanations say that the soldiers in the helicopter threw down a stun grenade to clear the area, then lowered down the first rope, which the activists tied to the ship. Then they lowered a second rope.

Here we should begin to ask logical questions about the narrative: Why would they just leave the helicopter tethered to the ship like that? It sounds kind of dangerous. Why didn’t they detach the rope from the helicopter? If you look on youtube for fast roping helicopter you can see examples where they can easily and within seconds detach the rope from the helicopter. Also, if the activists were able to tie the first rope to the ship – why would the commandos lower a second one? Also, the video says that there were 15 soldiers in the first helicopter and that all of them slid down within a minute and each of them was attacked as soon as they landed. If you were like, say, the 11th guy and saw everyone before you getting attacked, don’t you think you might reassess your tactics at that point? I mean these guys are supposed to the IDF’s elite commandos. The best and the brightest. It’s already sounding absurd and we haven’t even gotten to the footage yet.

So putting those absurdities aside, we turn to the real meat: the official IDF video of the raid:

Here we indeed see one rope tied to the ship and another rope suspended from above (note that at no time in this video do we actually see the Blackhawk). So in this video, all the troops descend on the same rope.

Here is the time line:

11 seconds (just at the end of 11, so we can call it 12), first soldier enters the top of the frame

17 seconds, first soldier lands

21 seconds: second solider enters top of frame. (So there is a 9-10 second difference in time to first appearance until second soldier lands. Also note that the first soldier has landed and is already being beaten by the time the second soldier enters the frame.)

26 seconds: a third soldier enters the top of the frame, just after the second has landed. That’s a 5 second difference between 2nd and 3rd .

29 seconds: just after 3rd soldier lands, we can actually see a 4th soldier just before there is a jump cut to a video of another soldier coming down.

So in the course of 17 seconds (29-12), we see 4 soldiers descend from a single rope. I’ll stop the count there due to the cut, because it’s impossible to know how much time passes after that.

OK, now we move to another video supposedly filmed from the perspective of the activists. Starting at 41:25:

It’s hard to see due to the spotlight shining at the camera, but here is the timeline as far as I can discern.

41:27: we can see the helicopter deploying two ropes, one on either side:

It takes about 5 seconds for both ropes to deploy.

This is consistent with the information at this page, which describes the standard procedure for Israeli special forces is indeed to deploy two ropes, one from each side of the helicopter. Ropes are deployed more or less simultaneously.

41:34: we can see the first soldier coming down the rope on the far side of the helicopter (the side furthest from the camera, which is the right side of the helicopter from the perspective of the pilot).

41:37: we can see a 2nd soldier coming down the rope on the near side of the helicopter, followed almost immediately by a 3rd soldier down the rope on the far side and appear to descend more or less at the same time.

41:41: we see a 4th soldier coming down the near rope.

41:44: we see a 5th solider coming down the far rope.

41:48: we see the emergence of a 6th soldier, apparently from the far side

41:49, we see a 7th soldier, apparently descending on the near side. The 6th and 7th soldiers descend more or less in tandem

So in the course of 15 seconds (41:49-41:34), we’ve seen 6 soldiers descend on two ropes. Compare that to the other video, where only 4 soldiers came down one rope in the space of 17 seconds.

41:54, another soldier descends.

So we can already note two major discrepancies between this and the IDF footage: 1) There are 2 ropes they’re descending down, not just 2) The second descent comes only about 3 seconds after the first, not 7-10 seconds.

These two videos are completely at odds with each other. Though note in the activist video they are armed with metal rods and firing slingshots at the helicopter.

Another anomaly: Here’s more IDF footage showing one of their soldiers being thrown from the top deck at 1:13.

In the top-down view, you can see that the soldier is being thrown to the port side (left side if you are on the ship facing forward) of the ship. You can tell it’s port, because of the big tower to the left of the screen, which is aft of the landing area.

Then at 1:33 in the same video, they show footage from the side. Here, they are filming on the starboard side of the ship. You can tell it’s the starboard side, because as the camera pans to the right, you can see the smaller communications tower (or whatever it’s called), which is towards the bow of the ship relative to the landing pad. If this were being filmed from the port side of the ship, then panning to the right would show the much larger tower that is aft of the landing area.

So in one view, they are throwing the soldier over the port side of the ship, and in the other video they are throwing him over the starboard side.

Also, later in the video they show an activist throwing a firebomb. But wouldn’t a firebomb explode heat everywhere and be captured by the thermal FLIR camera? I don’t see anything after the fire bomb allegedly explodes, other than people running away.

And another thing about the same footage: notice that the soldier being attacked (at 2:33) is wearing really big, bulky white gloves. If you look on youtube for fast rope exercises, you’ll see people using these in training situations. But it doesn’t make any sense that they’d be using them in a real world situation. They’re too bulky. They would make it nearly impossible for you to handle your weapon properly. If you had to wear them, you’d need to take them off really quickly. But you don’t have to wear them. There are plenty of gloves that are not as bulky and still good for fast roping. Here is a video review of some made by Oakley:

. I’m sure the Israeli military would supply their elite commando units with something better than those big bulky white gloves for fast roping. Unless… it was a training exercise?

It is noted on the Wikipedia page on the Gaza flotilla raid that the IDF trained for a month in preparation for the raid. Hm… interesting. So I surmise that the the ‘official’ IDF footage comes from the drills. In fact, it turns out that the Mavi Marmara has a sister ship, which is very similar. It was originally called the Karadeniz, later sold and renamed to Dream, whose registered owner appears to have been Loral as in the Defense Contractor.

But it might not be the Marmara sister ship we see in the IDF video, since there do seem to be some major discrepancies between the sister ship and the boat in the IDF footage, for example with the communications tower at the front. They look very different. In particular, the one in the IDF video has like a big swooshing triangle pointing to the back. But pictures of the Mavi’s sister ship do not have that (nor does the Mavi), so it might be a different ship altogether. But it is clearly not the Mavi.

So we can rule out the IDF footage. It’s fake. Either CGI or taken from a training exercise. In fact it was likely choreographed from the beginning with the plan to substitute it with the made-up official story. Or they pulled it out from training footage after the fact to use it as excuse for why they murdered 9 activists. Interestingly, the IDF has been forced to admit that they doctored the audio that they released with the video.

But what about the rest of the footage that was was allegedly smuggled out by activists? The story here is basically that the IDF confiscated everyone’s cameras and video cards, but one woman, Iara Lee, managed to smuggle out an hour’s worth of footage (technically 1:02:13). I haven’t really looked into this woman’s story, but here is one link.

It’s not clear to me why it was only this bit of footage. My assumption is that it was on a video card that she managed to hide from the IDF. Does that make sense? That this selection and length of footage would be salvaged? I don’t know. She was interviewed on Democracy Now — it would be interesting to listen to that interview now that we know something is fishy with Amy Goodman. Did she ask any questions about how only this footage managed to be smuggled out?

Ah, but then it turns out this was NOT the only footage ‘smuggled out.’ There is this other documentary, which was made by a Spanish filmmaker (Laura Arau) revisiting the events of the Marmara raid.

She splices footage from the raid with the people involved re-enacting what happened. Like the Lee video, it sure seems real. At least more real than the IDF footage. The emotion appears raw and unmanufactured. And yet, there is footage from the raid here that doesn’t appear in the Lee footage. But if the Lee footage was the only footage that made it off the ship, then where does this additional footage come from? Did the IDF release the video footage they had taken from the activists? Something smells might fishy.

And I think you will also find additional footage and perhaps some other anomalies in this video (both parts 1 and 2):

Add to that all photos that we see on the web from onboard the boat. Did the IDF go through the pictures the activists’ took and release some of them selectively? That could a plausible explanation for some of the pictures that make the activists look bad. But is it true for the pictures that make the IDF look bad?

It’s beginning to seem like ALL of this footage, from both sides, was faked. After all, we know how important it is for them to maintain these manufactured events as real, even as they present alternative, “conspiratorial” views on the event. I’ve looked through it, and the scenes of people injured and being helped honestly seem real to me. At least much better production values than the shitty hoaxes and crisis actors we’ve been getting the past few years. But there are just too many red flags and inconsistencies.

Another reason I have my doubts is that Ken O’Keefe was involved in this. He is a fraud. So if he’s involved in it, then I have to wonder if the whole thing is a fraud. (Why do I think he’s a fraud? His bio is BS. Here I’ll just point you to this comment of mine on a Reddit thread.

Also, I have my suspicions about Haneen Zoabi, and she was also on board and can be seen in the very first shot at the beginning of Lee’s video. She is sold to us as a firebrand Israeli Palestinian politician, but she comes from a prominent Palestinian family whose members have all been collaborating with the Zionists since before statehood. Maybe she turned over a new leaf, but my suspicion is that she’s a plant. Or in other words, controlled opposition.

My guiding assumption is that the opposition is controlled; and the likelihood of this being true is directly proportional to the exposure they get and the (apparent) influence they have. So I think the whole BDS thing is likely another psyop, though I am not clear yet on what its goals are beyond controlling the opposition. Let me know what you think in the comments.