Just a US Citizen, No Big Deal: Obama Doesn’t Demand Israeli Apology for Killing of an American Youth

By Dave Lindorff

The American media is full of praise for President Obama for “brokering” a detente between Israel and Turkey, two former allies who have been at loggerheads since May 31, 2010 when heavily armed Israeli Defense Force fighters boarded the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish-flagged vessel seeking to break Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza with non-military supplies, and killed nine unarmed peace flotilla activists.

In the deal arranged by the American president, Israel’s hot-head prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had ordered the raid, apologized “to the Turkish people” for “any mistakes that might have led to the loss of life or injury.”

It was a lame excuse for murder, but it appears that Turkey’s government was ready to bury the hatchet and, as a client state of the US, was also under some pressure from this country too.

It is interesting and indicative of the continuing power of the pro-Israel lobby in the US, that President Obama did not, as part of this brokered deal, bother to demand that Netanyahu include an apology, weak or otherwise, to the American people for the killing of an American national. For one of the nine people slaughtered by the IDF in that raid, a 19-year-old young man named Furkan Dogan, was an American citizen, a son of Turkish parents, but born and raised to adulthood in the U.S.

Dogan’s death has never even been protested or even questioned by the US government -- an astonishing abrogation of this government’s oft-repeated promise to protect American lives. Indeed, in his first debate in the series of three presidential campaign debates with Republican Mitt Romney last fall, President Obama said, in his first answer to a question from the moderator, that his number on responsibility was to protect Americans. 

Not young Furkan Dogan, though. 

As we reported here in ThisCantBeHappening!, the unarmed Dogan, who was filming the IDF boarding of the Mavi Marmara, was beaten and kicked viciously on the deck by two IDF thugs, who then fired at him with their shotguns at point blank range...

For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1639