PR problem for Israel or a refection of how Israelis view all Palestinians.
Images from http://electronicintifada.net/
Obama ignores or is dismissive of any legal inquiry into the murder or execution of an American citizen by Israel's IDF . 19 year old Furkan Doğan was killed during the IDF raid aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara as part of the Free Gaza Flotilla. Did Obama help the Israelis to keep the truth hidden from the American media and public.
“The documents related to Furkan reveal that the U.S. has an unquestioning deference to the government of Israel, even when the life of an American teenager is at stake,” Jessica Lee, a lawyer working with the CCR on the aftermath of the flotilla, told Mondoweiss. “Despite this barbaric murder...the U.S. declined to investigate and deferred to Israel.” Though Ahmet Dogan repeatedly demanded a U.S. investigation into his son’s killing--and at one point wondered whether the U.S. didn’t care about Furkan because he was a Muslim--the U.S. has refused to do so.
...the United Nations Human Rights Council report on the flotilla raid which said that Furkan Dogan was killed in a “summary execution.” The report states:
Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range.
Quoted passage from : Revealed: Documents Show How Obama Administration Turned Its Back On American Citizen 'Executed' By Israel's IDF on board the Mavi Marmara ship trying to break the Gaza blockade.by Alex Kane at Mondoweiss via AlterNet.org,by Feb. 25, 2013
Hebrew University professor Moshe Zimmerman, a historian specializing in anti-Semitism in Europe and the role of the Holocaust in Israel and postwar Germany, warned some 20 years ago about the growing issue of racism among Israeli youth.
“What is happening now is just a demonstration of what has already been going on for a long time. There is a feeling that Jews are superior to others, and there is a lot of hate to[ward] ‘the other.’ All the racism that we know from European and American history is also found in the Israeli society,” said Zimmerman in a phone interview with Al-Monitor.
Zimmerman attributes the culture of racism to a process of socialization in formal and informal education, which is also reflected among young Israeli soldiers. “The military is the outcome. You educate the Israeli youth to believe in a racist ideology, and the first place where they can practice this is in the army when being confronted by Palestinians in the Palestinian territories,” said Zimmerman.
Instagram Scandal Highlights Racism Among Israeli Youth By: Lena Odgaard for Al-Monitor Israel Pulse. Posted on March 1.2013
President Obama falls in line like former US presidents to defend Israel first rather than Palestinians or even American citizens who dare to protest over Israel's policies and actions.
Anyone questioning Israeli policies and actions in regards to the Palestinians and the Occupied Teritories is treated as an enemy of Israel and therefore of the USA . Such dissenters can be and often are investigated by US intelligence which passes on its information to the Israelis.
One of the patterns we see in this case and others such atrocities or wrongful deaths and colateral damage cause by the US military is left completely up to the US military to investigate or not as they please .
Obama has also shown a reluctance to insist on investigations into the conduct of local police forces in America and their brutal crack down on the Occupy Movement or hundreds of other cases of police harassment , over-reaction, use of excessive force including the using of unnecessary use of deadly force.
Obama believes that all such incidents should be left to local police chiefs to deal with as we have said before Obama would have supported the various sheriff's in the deep South who refused to investigate the deaths or disappearance of Black Americans or white activists in the South.
In this regard Obama has adopted a libertarian view that the the US government does not have the duty or right to defend the rights of American citizens unless they are members of the Wall Street Elite and the super-rich.
President Obama is going to Israel to prove he supports Israel unconditionally . Obama's faux liberal faux progressive followers we can only assume will from now on do even more to show support for Israel and Obama and repeat the hollow hypocritical Obama/Israel mantra that Israel is the victim and wants peace but it is the Palestinians who refuse to live in peace with the Israelis .
Under Obama the US has fought the United Nations and all human rights organizations who dare question Israel's motives or its actions in regards to Palestinians . Their Apartheid style state Israel claims is necessary since the Palestinians and all Arabs and Muslims are out to destroy Israel as their number one task .
Once again Obama can re-enforce the message carried by the liberal media and the conservative media in the USA that anyone who questions the motives or actions of the Israeli government and its military is without any doubt to be characterized and slandered as being an anti-Semite determined to destroy Israel and kill all Israeli Jews.
So it is logical to conclude that the activists taking part in the Free Gaza Flotilla whether American citizens or not were considered by the Whitehouse and the Israeli government as being enemies of the USA and Israel and were by definition traitors giving aid and comfort to Israel' enemies which are ipso facto America's enemies by extension and so whatever happen to them as they tried to break the blockade would be their own responsibility. It is this sort of twisted view by which President Obama defines his notion of The Rule Of Law.
So what Obama should ask the government of Israel about is the execution style killing of an American citizen.
Revealed: Documents Show How Obama Administration Turned Its Back On American Citizen 'Executed' By Israel's IDF on board the Mavi Marmara ship trying to break the Gaza blockade.by Alex Kane at Mondoweiss via AlterNet.org,by Feb. 25, 2013
In May 2010, 18-year-old American citizen Furkan Dogan was shot at point-blank range by Israeli naval commandos as he was standing on the deck of a ship and filming the violent raid on the flotilla to Gaza. It took three days for the U.S. to contact his family--and that was after the U.S. made repeated inquiries to the government of Israel for information about his death.
That information was recently revealed by the Center for Constitutional Rights after obtaining documents that have now been published as a result of Freedom of Information Act requests to the U.S. government. The documents reveal new details on the U.S. government’s actions in the aftermath of the flotilla.
...The e-mails are a telling snapshot of the larger story of how the U.S. government abandoned one of its own citizens who was killed by the Israeli military and deferred to Israel. And just as the U.S. failed to pressure Israel over the death of Furkan Dogan, they failed to pressure Israel over the returning of property, like electronic equipment, to American citizens who had also taken part in the flotilla. While this narrative is by now well-known, the documents show conclusively how the U.S. treats its citizens who challenge the Israeli government’s rule over Palestinians.
The e-mails from Appleton and other U.S. government documents were published by the CCR, which has been working with the Dogan family and other American citizens to try and obtain accountability for Israeli human rights violations committed in the course of the takeover of the Mavi Marmara. Other revelations include the fact that Federal Bureau of Investigation counter-terrorism squads had conducted research on 561 individuals involved with the flotilla, though the details of the FBI investigation are largely redacted.
“The documents related to Furkan reveal that the U.S. has an unquestioning deference to the government of Israel, even when the life of an American teenager is at stake,” Jessica Lee, a lawyer working with the CCR on the aftermath of the flotilla, told Mondoweiss. “Despite this barbaric murder...the U.S. declined to investigate and deferred to Israel.” Though Ahmet Dogan repeatedly demanded a U.S. investigation into his son’s killing--and at one point wondered whether the U.S. didn’t care about Furkan because he was a Muslim--the U.S. has refused to do so.
...the United Nations Human Rights Council report on the flotilla raid which said that Furkan Dogan was killed in a “summary execution.” The report states:
Furkan Doğan, a 19-year-old with dual Turkish and United States citizenship, was on the central area of the top deck filming with a small video camera when he was first hit with live fire. It appears that he was lying on the deck in a conscious, or semi-conscious, state for some time. In total Furkan received five bullet wounds, to the face, head, back thorax, left leg and foot. All of the entry wounds were on the back of his body, except for the face wound which entered to the right of his nose. According to forensic analysis, tattooing around the wound in his face indicates that the shot was delivered at point blank range.
The Turkish government’s investigation told a similar story. The UN HRC report also said that, while activists involved with the Turkish organization IHH prepared to defend the ship from a takeover by Israeli forces and did so with makeshift weapons, the commandos had fired from helicopters before landing on the Mavi Marmara. The report concludes that “much of the force used by the Israeli soldiers on board the Mavi Marmara and from the helicopters was unnecessary, disproportionate, excessive and inappropriate and resulted in the wholly avoidable killing and maiming of a large number of civilian passengers.”
But Pettit dismissed the UN report as “rushed.”
Still, no U.S. investigation was launched even after the UN Secretary General-backed Palmer Report stated that “Furkan Doğan, was shot at extremely close range. Mr. Doğan sustained wounds to the face, back of the skull, back and left leg. That suggests he may already have been lying wounded when the fatal shot was delivered, as suggested by witness accounts to that effect.”
...the U.S. government’s insistence that the Israeli government was up to the task of the investigation came despite past U.S. disapproval of how the investigation into Rachel Corrie’s death was carried out. Corrie, an American, was run over by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza as she was trying to protect a Palestinian home from being demolished. In 2004, a year after Corrie’s death, “Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, wrote that Israel had not fulfilled its promises of a thorough, credible and transparent investigation,” according to the Washington Post.
...U.S. government documents show that the day after the flotilla raid, a consular official named Eve Zuckerman trained in the identification of remains visited the morgue in Israel where the victims were taken.
A CCR analysis of the flotilla documents states that “instead of viewing the bodies of the deceased passengers, she was shown what she was told were photos of nine men killed during the attack, which were frontal photos from the shoulders up. None of photos of the deceased showed evidence of bullet wounds, damage, or distortion, except for bruises and hematomas.” After returning to the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, Zuckerman was shown a photo of Furkan Dogan, but said that she did not see anybody that looked like him at the morgue in Israel.
“It seems that Israel was hiding the fact that he was killed,” said Lee.
Lee insists that the U.S. could have done more to demand adequate Israeli action on Furkan’s death, even if the U.S. did not want to launch its own investigation. “We don’t see a lot of high-level pressure to ensure that this [Israeli] investigation was carried out in an appropriate and non-biased manner,” said Lee.
Part I of the Israeli investigation into the flotilla concluded that the Israeli naval forces had the right under international law to raid the ship and that Israeli forces used appropriate force and that the activists on board the ship had engaged in violence against the Israeli commandos. But Human Rights Watch, and other human rights organizations, cast doubt on the credibility of the internal Israeli investigation. Amnesty International said that the report “certainly appears like a 'whitewash', with the Israeli authorities exonerated of wrongdoing although their actions left nine people dead.”
In addition to documents relating to Furkan Dogan’s death, the CCR published additional documents related to the electronic equipment taken from American passengers on the flotilla. While U.S. officials repeatedly inquired about the status of the electronic property and expressed frustration at the Israeli response, there was no high-level pressure to ensure that it was returned.
The electronic property held by Israel included the video camera Furkan Dogan was holding on the ship, which may contain evidence as to what transpired on the Mavi Marmara. A CCR analysis concludes: “As of February 2013, property belonging to the U.S. passengers aboard the 2010 Gaza flotilla remains missing, presumably within Israeli custody.”
Lee said: “It’s very troubling that the United States wasn’t able to get this property back.”
also see:
Noam Chomsky: The Soul-Crushing Cruelties Perpetrated by America's Number 1 Ally The Israeli political leadership is committed to crushing Palestinian hopes for a decent future. by Noam Chomsky at Alternet,Nov. 8, 2012
Even a single night in jail is enough to give a taste of what it means to be under the total control of some external force.
And it hardly takes more than a day in Gaza to appreciate what it must be like to try to survive in the world’s largest open-air prison, where some 1.5 million people on a roughly 140-square-mile strip of land are subject to random terror and arbitrary punishment, with no purpose other than to humiliate and degrade.
Such cruelty is to ensure that Palestinian hopes for a decent future will be crushed, and that the overwhelming global support for a diplomatic settlement granting basic human rights will be nullified. The Israeli political leadership has dramatically illustrated this commitment in the past few days, warning that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given even limited recognition by the U.N.
This threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”) – that is, launch a tough response – is deeply rooted, stretching back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: If crossed, we will bring down the Temple walls around us.
Thirty years ago, Israeli political leaders, including some noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Menachem Begin a shocking report on how settlers on the West Bank regularly committed “terrorist acts” against Arabs there, with total impunity.
Disgusted, the prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote that the Israeli army’s task, it seemed, was not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (a harsh racial epithet) living in territories that God promised to us.”
Gazans have been singled out for particularly cruel punishment. Thirty years ago, in his memoir “The Third Way,” Raja Shehadeh, a lawyer, described the hopeless task of trying to protect fundamental human rights within a legal system designed to ensure failure, and his personal experience as a Samid, “a steadfast one,” who watched his home turned into a prison by brutal occupiers and could do nothing but somehow “endure.”
Since then, the situation has become much worse. The Oslo Accords, celebrated with much pomp in 1993, determined that Gaza and the West Bank are a single territorial entity. By that time, the U.S. and Israel had already initiated their program to separate Gaza and the West Bank, so as to block a diplomatic settlement and punish the Araboushim in both territories.
Punishment of Gazans became still more severe in January 2006, when they committed a major crime: They voted the “wrong way” in the first free election in the Arab world, electing Hamas.
Displaying their “yearning for democracy,” the U.S. and Israel, backed by the timid European Union, immediately imposed a brutal siege, along with military attacks. The U.S. turned at once to its standard operating procedure when a disobedient population elects the wrong government: Prepare a military coup to restore order.
Gazans committed a still greater crime a year later by blocking the coup attempt, leading to a sharp escalation of the siege and attacks. These culminated in winter 2008-09, with Operation Cast Lead, one of the most cowardly and vicious exercises of military force in recent memory: A defenseless civilian population, trapped, was subjected to relentless attack by one of the world’s most advanced military systems, reliant on U.S. arms and protected by U.S. diplomacy
(Meanwhile Israel and the USA collude in committing more war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza by undermining necessities such as water, sewage treatment, power grid, desalination facility or allowing Gaza fisherment to fish or farmers to be free to grow food )
The Gaza Strip could have become a prosperous Mediterranean region, with rich agriculture and a flourishing fishing industry, marvelous beaches and, as discovered a decade ago, good prospects for extensive natural gas supplies within its territorial waters. By coincidence or not, that’s when Israel intensified its naval blockade. The favorable prospects were aborted in 1948, when the Strip had to absorb a flood of Palestinian refugees who fled in terror or were forcefully expelled from what became Israel – in some cases months after the formal cease-fire Israel’s 1967 conquests and their aftermath administered further blows, with terrible crimes continuing to the present day.
The signs are easy to see, even on a brief visit. Sitting in a hotel near the shore, one can hear the machine-gun fire of Israeli gunboats driving fishermen out of Gaza’s territorial waters and toward land, forcing them to fish in waters that are heavily polluted because of U.S.-Israeli refusal to allow reconstruction of the sewage and power systems they destroyed.
The Oslo Accords laid plans for two desalination plants, a necessity in this arid region. One, an advanced facility, was built: in Israel. The second one is in Khan Yunis, in the south of Gaza. The engineer in charge at Khan Yunis explained that this plant was designed so that it can’t use seawater, but must rely on underground water, a cheaper process that further degrades the meager aquifer, guaranteeing severe problems in the future.
The water supply is still severely limited. The U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which cares for refugees but not other Gazans, recently released a report warning that damage to the aquifer may soon become “irreversible,” and that without quick remedial action, Gaza may cease to be a “livable place” by 2020.
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and Israel is imposing collective punishment on people of Gaza by various means including putting the population on a severe subsistence level diet
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Recently, after several years of effort, the Israeli human rights organization Gisha succeeded in obtaining a court order for the government to release its records detailing plans for the “diet.” Jonathan Cook, a journalist based in Israel, summarizes them: “Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day ... an average of only 67 trucks – much less than half of the minimum requirement – entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.”
The result of imposing the diet, Middle East scholar Juan Cole observes, is that “about 10 percent of Palestinian children in Gaza under age 5 have had their growth stunted by malnutrition. ... In addition, anemia is widespread, affecting over two-thirds of infants, 58.6 percent of schoolchildren, and over a third of pregnant mothers.”
Sourani, the human-rights advocate, observes that “what has to be kept in mind is that the occupation and the absolute closure is an ongoing attack on the human dignity of the people in Gaza in particular and all Palestinians generally. It is systematic degradation, humiliation, isolation and fragmentation of the Palestinian people.”
This conclusion has been confirmed by many other sources. In The Lancet, a leading medical journal, Rajaie Batniji, a visiting Stanford physician, describes Gaza as “something of a laboratory for observing an absence of dignity,” a condition that has “devastating” effects on physical, mental and social well-being.
“The constant surveillance from the sky, collective punishment through blockade and isolation, the intrusion into homes and communications, and restrictions on those trying to travel, or marry, or work make it difficult to live a dignified life in Gaza,” Batniji writes. The Araboushim must be taught not to raise their heads.
American and Israeli have a common worldview on egalitarianism which implies that not all the peoples of the world are equal and not all deserving it seems of equal rights to paraphrase George Orwell in Animal Farm Some people are more equal than others.
Instagram Scandal Highlights Racism Among Israeli Youth By: Lena Odgaard for Al-Monitor Israel Pulse. Posted on March 1.2013
An image of a Palestinian child in the crosshairs of a gun posted on an Israeli soldier’s Instagram account went viral in February after being published by the Electronic Intifada, the US-based blog on Palestinian issues, attracting widespread negative attention in international media. Israeli authorities were quick to assure that this was not a typical case and that the photo did not accurately portray the Israeli military. A few days later, more disturbing pictures of soldiers, including Rambo-like posing and hailing the killing of Arabs, went viral.
According to Rebecca Stein, a professor at Duke University, the use of social media by the soldier on the ground to capture his or her everyday life is nothing new. In a phone interview with Al-Monitor, Stein explained that what makes the Instagram images interesting is the way of aestheticizing the military and thereby normalizing warfare and the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
"It becomes clear the extent to which the occupation as a reigning paradigm in Israel is now so banal that it can be rendered in an aestheticized form and circulated like a souvenir,” said Stein.
Yehuda Shaul is a former Israeli soldier and cofounder of Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organization that gathers testimonies of veteran combatants to reveal the reality of everyday life as soldiers in the occupied territories. He was not surprised to see the Instagram photo, which he said was almost identical to an image from the second intifada.
"It’s just a fact that in 2013 there is Instagram. It’s not like the disrespect for Palestinian life wasn’t there before Facebook, for instance. It just gives another window into the mindset of what it means being a soldier and how you see Palestinians when you serve in the Palestinian territories — and the answer to that is, not as equal human beings to you,” said Shaul in a phone interview with Al-Monitor. ”[As a soldier] you stand at your post for eight hours, bored to death, and you look for ways to pass some time. Taking pictures through your scope is just something you do.”
...Racism is nothing new
The message of racism and targeting of Palestinians expressed in Israeli soldiers’ Instagram images is apparently not confined to social media. In recent weeks, Israeli media have featured cases of young Israeli Jews who attacked Arab Israelis. During the Jewish holiday of Purim, 40-year-old Hassan Ausruf was severely beaten in Tel Aviv by a group of Israeli youths who, according to Ausruf, shouted racist incitements. On Feb. 26 in Jerusalem, an eyewitness took pictures of an alleged hate crime in which a Jewish woman attacked a Muslim woman, tearing off her head scarf, at a light rail stop.
Hebrew University professor Moshe Zimmerman, a historian specializing in anti-Semitism in Europe and the role of the Holocaust in Israel and postwar Germany, warned some 20 years ago about the growing issue of racism among Israeli youth.
“What is happening now is just a demonstration of what has already been going on for a long time. There is a feeling that Jews are superior to others, and there is a lot of hate to[ward] ‘the other.’ All the racism that we know from European and American history is also found in the Israeli society,” said Zimmerman in a phone interview with Al-Monitor.
Zimmerman attributes the culture of racism to a process of socialization in formal and informal education, which is also reflected among young Israeli soldiers. “The military is the outcome. You educate the Israeli youth to believe in a racist ideology, and the first place where they can practice this is in the army when being confronted by Palestinians in the Palestinian territories,” said Zimmerman.
According to Zimmerman, there is little being done to tackle the issue of racism. He would like to see a bigger effort, especially in the education system, to confront this racist trend.
and so it goes,
GORD.
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