More disgusting apologia from Bowen. Pursuing a previous analogy with the IRA, imagine if he'd written the following:

There was a previous incident in December 1983 when a bomb was exploded outside Harrods.

Back then the Provisional IRA were very heavy handed, they killed three police officers and three civilians, injured 90 people and cost Harrods £1 million.

Clearly the IRA have learned a bit from that and they’re saying that they 'regret the civilian casualties' and that they 'have taken immediate steps to ensure that there will be no repetition of this type of operation again' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Harrods_bombing)

It would be instantly career-ending.

In fact the analogy is unfair to the IRA, because at least they weren't killing people & damaging property in order to protect their ability to enact a genocide on 2 million civilians.

Oh, and if the ship carried aid, which it did, then it wasn't 'symbolic', was it? It was an actual attempt to deliver aid. This is their endorsement of the 'selfie ship' dismissal by the israeli spokesmaniac.

jeers,
I