The latest Gaza flotilla, the Canadian Boat to Gaza, transported a group of Canadian poseurs to meet their fate as martyrs manqué at the hands of the IDF.
According to an initial report:
“There is one Canadian, from London, Ont., who was harshly beaten,” said Dylan Penner, an Ottawa-based spokesman for the group Canadian Boat to Gaza.
A subsequent report softened the harsh beating to being roughed up:
However, Penner said he had been told some activists — including David Heap, a Canadian from London, Ont. — were “roughed up” when they refused to leave their vessel. Two other Canadians — Montrealer Ehab Lotayef and Torontonian Karen DeVito — were also aboard the Tahrir, but organizers haven’t been able to reach any of the activists directly so far.
Now, it’s apparent that the twerp, David Heap, is tweeting from an air-conditioned Israeli jail equipped with free Internet access, having fully recovered from possibly being jostled as he was removed from the boat:
Foremost among these is David Heap, a University of Western Ontario faculty member who claims to have been “tasered” and “bruised” as Israeli soldiers hauled his unco-operative self from the high seas. From the title of the article he wrote for the left-wing site Rabble.ca — “I write from cell 9 in the Apartheid State of Israel” — you would think he was Martin Luther King with a Twitter account, penning manifestos from a Birmingham jail. But even by his own morally self-aggrandizing account, he is “basically ok” after his high-seas experience.
[…..]
Heap and his friends set their compass for a confrontation with the Israeli Defense Forces, the most humane and professional military in the Middle East. And their only real punishment for trying to bring material goods to a terrorist-controlled regime in Gaza is to spend a few days in climate-controlled, Internet-equipped Israeli jails complaining about their ordeal to journalist pals back home.
Mr. Heap’s whining campaign isn’t nearly as dangerous as the tactics used by other activists, but it certainly is far more annoying.
David Heap is employed by the University of Western Ontario to teach French Studies, not, presumably, from a flotilla boat as this UWO graduate notes:
As a UWO graduate, and an Ontario tax payer, I would like to find out if Dr. Heap is currently drawing a salary supported by the tax payer, while undertaking non-academic activities of dubious nature, which have been denounced by our Foreign Minister John Baird in the past. I would also like to find out if students that registered at the faculty to be instructed in French by Dr. Heap are receiving an equivalent level of instruction, given the potential for Dr. Heap to be absent for quite some time?