Gaza flotilla activists from Turkey wanted to be martyrs

Got what they wanted I guess. As I understand it, these activists have been praying to Allah asking for themselves to by martyred for years. We’ve even got a video interview with one of the activists hoping the third time is the charm. No word if it worked out for him.

If you keep hitting someone over and over and over again, eventually they are going to punch back. Don’t be surprised if the punch hurts a bit more than you expect. From the Straights Times in Singapore.

ANKARA – THREE of the four Turks killed in an Israeli raid on aid ships bound for the Gaza Strip were devout Muslims who wanted to be ‘martyrs,’ relatives and friends were quoted as saying on Wednesday.

The names of the victims have not been officially released, but the media identified them on Wednesday as four men, all involved in Islamic movements or charities.

One of them, Ali Haydar Bengi was described as a 39-year-old father of four who studied at Egypt’s Al-Azhar University, a prominent centre of Islamic learning, and ran a telephone repair shop in Diyarbakir, in Turkey’s mainly Kurdish south-east. Bengi ‘was helping the poor and the oppressed. For years, he wanted to go to Palestine. And he constantly prayed to become a martyr,’ Bengi’s wife, Saniye, told the Vatan daily. ‘Before embarking on the journey, he said he desired to become a martyr. He wanted to be a martyr very much,’ Bengi’s friend, Sabir Ceylan, told the Milliyet newspaper.

Read the full article for more on three other Turks involved.

Let’s make one thing perfectly clear, the activists staged this event with the hope of someone getting killed when Israel was doing what they are legally obligated to do. All the activist needed to do was allow the cargo to be completely inspected, and none of this would have happened. But delivering supplies to Gaza was not and is not the current intent. More from a Washington Times opinion piece today…

Friends and relatives of three of the four Turks killed aboard the ship told Turkish media the men had been open about their intention to die in the course of waging war on behalf of Islam. In this case, that war happened to have taken the noble form of loading useless supplies onto a ship and, armed with the subterfuge of wanting to bring aid to an already-aid-saturated area, run a blockade instituted by a country that had the temerity to want to keep its citizens from being murdered. Really, were there ever three individuals more deserving of eternal Paradise and 72 dark-eyed virgins apiece than these guys?

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSAxAj2KIdU