I am outraged at Israel’s latest criminal act.  I mourn with my fellow Free Gaza travelers, the lives that have been lost by Israel’s needless, senseless act against unarmed humanitarian activists.  But I’m even more outraged that once again, Israel’s actions have been aided and abetted by a U.S. political class that has become corrupted beyond belief due to its reliance on Zionist campaign finance and penetration by Zionist zealots for whom no U.S. weapons system is too much for the Israeli war machine, and the silence of the world’s onlookers whose hearts have grown cold with indifference.

I recently visited the offices of IHH, the Turkish humanitarian organization that sponsored one of the Freedom Flotilla boats, and that was targeted by the Israelis for its murderous rampage.  Reports are still coming in as to the full extent of the senseless Israeli violence.  Of course, I expect Israel’s apologists in the press and in the United States government to shift into high gear to support Israel’s lying machine.  Take note of their names.  The 12,000 internet squatters/written word grenade throwers, hired by the Israeli Foreign Ministry to defend Israel and attack peace activists online, are already busy spreading their orchestrated disinformation in cyberspace.  Be very careful what you read and believe from special interest press and the internet.  You could be reading one of Israel’s hired hacks.  As a news diversion from what Israel has just done, I suspect that we can also expect to see a lot of historical footage of war’s atrocities on television:  today is Memorial Day in the United States, a day long ago set aside to remember the sacrifices of U.S. war dead.

I encouraged and supported U.S.S. Liberty veteran Joe Meadors’s participation in the Freedom Flotilla.  Unfortunately, the fate of the U.S.S. Liberty innocents on the high seas, while in international waters, has now been visited upon the participants in the Freedom Flotilla, in large measure because of the Congressional- and Presidential-level cover-up of the 1967 Israeli attack on that U.S. surveillance ship.  Combined with the failure of just about every other effort to hold Israel accountable for its crimes against humanity, war crimes, genocide, and crimes against the peace.  Belgium and Spain changed their domestic laws of universal jurisdiction after Israeli appeals to do so.  The entire musical chairs gang of rotating Israeli leadership are war criminals.  During my imprisonment in Israel for attempting to take crayons to the children of Gaza, I called Israel a failed state.  If Israel is threatened by unarmed, humanitarian activists to the point of massacring them, then Israel is a failed state.  Israel is a failed nuclear state.

Obama’s most recent granting of an additional $205 million for Israeli “missile defense” is unconscionable, when in the same week, reports revealed for the first time, Israel’s offer of nuclear weapons to apartheid South Africa.  Just last week, a paper bearing the signature of former Israeli Prime Minister, Shimon Peres, was released by South Africa, revealing that in 1975, Israel could offer South Africa nuclear weapons “in three sizes.”  South Africa’s then-Minister of Defense, P.W. Botha, was South Africa’s signatory to the letter.  This information would make the entire Obama Administration look sadly farcical as it points an accusing finger at Iran, except that U.S. obeisance to the Israeli bloodthirst is deadly serious.  With deadly outcomes.

Earlier this month, Israel was granted admission to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a direct affront to ongoing Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) efforts across the world.  Once again, Israel has thumbed its nose at the global community–with bloody results–because it can.

I am proud to serve on the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Palestine.  Its next sitting will be in London, where we will examine corporate complicity in Israel’s crimes against Palestine.  The Tribunal will sit from November 5 – 7.  Please put this on your calendar.  We all must do what we can, where we are to end wars against the people at home and wars against human rights abroad.

Finally, a friend just sent a message to me saying that the Israelis had lost their minds.  Sadly, based on the past, the Israelis could very well conclude that they can do anything–imprison me for trying to take love to the children of Gaza and kill humanitarian activists trying to do the same–because they know, in the end, they’ll get away with it.  Instead, I would suggest that we are the ones who have lost our minds, our souls, our spirits, and our human dignity if we allow the Israelis to get away with murder–again–and we do nothing.

I am calling on the people of the United States – and of the world –  to change course now.

On this Memorial Day 2010, I am stunned and outraged beyond belief while mourning the dead of the Freedom Flotilla to Gaza.

Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is a former United States Representative and the 2008 Green Party nominee for President of the United States. McKinney served as a Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2003 and 2005 to 2007, first representing Georgia’s 11th Congressional District and then Georgia’s 4th Congressional District. She is the first African-American woman to have represented Georgia in the House.