Ex-Marine Ken O’Keefe of the Mavi Marmara

Few people actually qualify for the label “bat shit crazy”, but Ken Nichols O’Keefe truly does qualify. He claims that he was a Marine in Desert Storm and that even then he railed against his superiors;

As a Marine I spoke out openly about abuse of power by my “superiors” and as a consequence I paid a heavy price. I realised that honour and integrity were virtues which are often punished rather then rewarded and the Marines supplied me with my first serious taste of injustice.

I guess injustice tastes like MREs. So anyway, after he left the Marines, he rescued sea turtles and became a member of the “Lawful Hawaiian Government” – apparently it’s a group of Hawaiians who couldn’t get elected legally so they founded their own government which makes laws they can’t enforce. More Leftist mental masturbation.

He helped form Saddam’s human shields which did such a bang-up job protecting Saddam’s palaces in the first days of the invasion of Saddam’s Iraq. By that time, O’Keefe had renounced his US citizenship and took up Hawaiian and Irish citizenship. I guess Hawaiian citizenship is different somehow from US citizenship.

According to Israel, O’Keefe has been busted twice trying to sneak into Gaza before the Mavi Maramar incident. From The Irish Times;

In 2004, O’Keefe was arrested for attempting to enter Gaza. He claims that he intended to meet with Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials in Gaza, in an effort to bring 10,000 international observers to Palestine.

“I told [the Israelis] during interrogation that I had met with people they deem terrorists. I spent 20 days in jail before they deported me as a security threat and barred me for 10 years,” he said.

O’Keefe admits that he met Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and other senior figures two years ago, when he took part in the Free Gaza Movements first attempt to break the Naval blockade.

However O’Keefe insists those meetings were to “make an introduction for the government of Hawaii (where Mr O’Keefe’s mother lives) and discuss a dialogue initiative”.

Yeah, a bunch of toothless birds in Hawaii are reaching out to Hamas, but O’Keefe doesn’t see how that makes him a threat to Israel.

The IDF also claimed that O’Keefe had previously attempted to enter Gaza “in order to form and train a commando unit” for Hamas.

I wonder how they’d get that impression. Well, he got scooped up off the deck of the ill-fated Mavi Marmara, spent a few days in an Israeli prison and went to Turkey (Honolulu Star Bulletin);

“I just got a phone call from him,” said Pat Johnson, who started the Haleiwa dive shop Deep Ecology with her son in 1998. “He was in an ambulance in Istanbul being taken to a hospital to get checked out. He sounded OK, other than sounding really hoarse from nearly getting strangled to death in the airport.”

O’Keefe reportedly was injured during a scuffle at Ben Gurion International Airport near Tel Aviv on Tuesday, when Israel began deporting most of the nearly 700 activists who participated in the flotilla.

So not only did he get imprisoned for invading Israel and Gaza, he started a fight in the airport when the Israelis were trying to rid themselves of the turd. He doesn’t learn life lessons too well, I suppose.

All the while, despite the fact that he hates the Marines, his service are the first words out of his mouth. Just like all of them – hiding behind the corpses of heroes.

Thanks to Mike for the heads up on this guy.

Category: Antiwar crowd, General Whackos