Does Anyone Care About Furkan Dogan?

There is a dead 19-year-old American with 4 bullet holes in his head; those bullet holes were put there as he tried to deliver humanitarian aid to a country which is being punished by an illegal siege.

Are there any other circumstances under which the US would not be outraged?

Where one would not expect the American President and Vice President to be united in condemning the death of one of their citizen's in such circumstances?

Glenn Greenwald, as always, does a fine job of crystallising the arguments.

How could anyone with the slightest intellectual honesty claim that Israel and its Navy were the victims of a boat which Jon Stewart said last night looked like "P Diddy's St. Bart's vacation yacht"; or that armed Israeli commandos were the victims of unarmed civilian passengers; or, more generally, that a nuclear-armed Israel with the most powerful military by far in the Middle East and the world's greatest superpower acting as Protector is the persecuted victim of a wretched, deprived, imprisoned, stateless population devastated by 40 years of brutal Israeli occupation and, just a year ago, an unbelievably destructive invasion and bombing campaign? The casting of "victim" and "aggressor" is blatantly reversed with such claims -- which is exactly the central premise that has been driving, and continues to drive, U.S. foreign policy as well. In Imperial Ambitions, Noam Chomsky -- talking about America's post-9/11 policies -- described the central mental deception that is at the heart of all nations which dominate others with force (and if you're one of those people who hear "Noam Chomsky" and shut your mind, pretend that this comes from "John Smith"):

In one of his many speeches, to U.S. troops in Vietnam, [Lyndon] Johnson said plaintively, "There are three billion people in the world and we have only two hundred million of them. We are outnumbered fifteen to one. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want." That is a constant refrain of imperialism. You have your jackboot on someone's neck and they're about to destroy you.

The same is true with any form of oppression. And it's psychologically understandable. If you're crushing and destroying someone, you have to have a reason for it, and it can't be, "I'm a murderous monster." It has to be self-defense. "I'm protecting myself against them. Look what they're doing to me." Oppression gets psychologically inverted; the oppressor is the victim who is defending himself.

Thus, nuclear-armed Israel is bullied and victimized by starving Gazans with stones.

Imagine if Furkan Dogan had been killed by the Iranians. Do you really think we wouldn't know his name as well as we know the name of Gilad Shalit?

But, according to the current US narrative, he is now on the side of the aggressors. And nuclear armed Israel is the victim of peace activists who were really nothing of the kind.

The narrative which claims that Israel must always be viewed as the victim seems almost central to US foreign policy. And, now it appears to apply, even when Israel kills one of it's own citizens. In circumstances which have outraged the rest of the world, but, not it appears, the Obama administration.

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Tags: Furkan Dogan, Israel, Palestine, Obama, Biden