Furkan Dogan - the Turkish American victim of the IDF killing
One of those killed on-board the Gaza Freedom Flotilla was a 19-year old Furkan Dogan, a Turkish American. He was born in Troy, N.Y., and spent his first two years there. Then he moved to Turkey with his family. After the humanitarian aid for the stranded in Gaza, for the first time Furkan was planning to return to the U.S. this summer. But that wish never realized. He was killed by the IDF.
Roger Cohen has recently written an excellent article on the Israeli killing of Furkan in his latest op/ed column in the New York Times. So far no FBI investigation has been initiated to learn the particular set of events that led to his death by the IDF on Turkish flotilla that tried to break the blockade of Gaza. He writes, "I also have little doubt that if the incident had been different — say a 19-year-old American student called Michael Sandler killed by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank when caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis — we would have been deluged in stories about him... This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”
The inaction from the FBI to probe the Israeli brutality is simply unacceptable. Having lived in America, Professor Dogan, the father of the victim, said, “I know what people do there when a cat gets stuck in a tree.” Mr. Cohen rightly surmised, "It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire."
Will America ever treat all its innocent victims the same way?
Roger Cohen has recently written an excellent article on the Israeli killing of Furkan in his latest op/ed column in the New York Times. So far no FBI investigation has been initiated to learn the particular set of events that led to his death by the IDF on Turkish flotilla that tried to break the blockade of Gaza. He writes, "I also have little doubt that if the incident had been different — say a 19-year-old American student called Michael Sandler killed by a Palestinian gunman in the West Bank when caught in a cross-fire between Palestinians and Israelis — we would have been deluged in stories about him... This chill is a bad thing. Let’s do whatever it takes to find out how Dogan died — and the eight other victims. The Middle East requires more open debate and the dropping of taboos. It needs the leading institutions of American Jewry to encourage broad discussion rather than, as Peter Beinart put it in an important recent essay in The New York Review of Books, checking “their liberalism at Zionism’s door.”
The inaction from the FBI to probe the Israeli brutality is simply unacceptable. Having lived in America, Professor Dogan, the father of the victim, said, “I know what people do there when a cat gets stuck in a tree.” Mr. Cohen rightly surmised, "It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire."
Will America ever treat all its innocent victims the same way?
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