Calling it an apple doesn't make it one

[Zahava weighs in with a guest post]

So the news..... Argh!....  is not good. (Is it ever?!)

For the past week, as the "peace flotilla" made their preparations and neared our shores, the foreign politicians and media have been doing their best to ensure that no matter what happened when Israel intercepted the flotilla, there would be a receptive audience of sharks gathered when the blood hit the water.

I don't think anyone who keeps up with the news is particularly shocked by the way things turned out or how they have been reported. On the contrary, I think that to some degree most people have been waiting -- some with no small amount of dread -- for these exact events to unfold.

What is, however, truly amazing to me -- is the insistence that the passengers aboard the flotilla were peace activists and that we are meant to accept/believe that they were simply exercising their rights to civil disobedience in a public place, and that we should be outraged by the use of force against them.

There exists a well-documented history of civil disobedience in world history. I am by no means a scholar of history, but it seems to me that Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would both be horrified by the hijacking of the terminology to describe their non-violent methodologies to affect social and political change to describe a well-planned-and-executed operation which culminated in the protesters bearing arms.

When I was a student, my teachers taught us that what precisely was so powerful about both Gandhi and Dr. King was that even in the face of violence being employed against their followers, the violence was not returned. The public quickly grew sick from seeing peaceful, unarmed participants -- many of whom were youths -- being indiscriminately beaten without there having been violent provocation toward their attackers. It was the resolute maintenance of non-violence on the part of the protesters which caused the public to become involved in the issues and to democratically institute change.

Peace activists BY DEFINITION do NOT bear arms and utilize them against others. FULL STOP.

Civil disobedience only deserves the name when violence is not employed by the individuals engaging in the protest/demonstration.

“Peace activists” aboard a ship who attack military personnel as they are boarding a blockade runner are not engaged in peaceful protest — they are engaged in offensive combat. 

If we -- and by "we" I mean any person capable of distinguishing between "black" and "white" regardless of our political affinities -- tolerate such misuse of language to describe the passengers of this flotilla, then we make it impossible to have meaningful discussion because we will have stripped important -- and formerly potent -- words of their meaning.

If we allow it to persist, the asymmetrical application of language will lead us to anarchy. If we allow the definition of a peace activist to change from "one who refrains from violence" to "one who refrains from violence except when...", then we create a situation with limitless opportunities to continually modify language to suit the needs and political sympathies of the speaker, and we simultaneously erode the possibility of achieving understanding and agreement.

Our society has evolved to the point that we expect and demand a certain amount of honesty from the entities which sell us things; we call it 'truth in advertising'. While it is true that this has resulted in the shifting of some of the responsibility of representing truth to those in the business of marketing it, it doesn't completely absolve us of the responsibility to question the validity of the claims we are hearing and reading.

Let's not collectively surrender our ability to call things by their correct name.  You can't very well compare apples to apples unless everyone can agree on what an apple is... and is not.