The Buie Knife

Why Won't The Israelis 'Express Regret' Over Loss of Civilian Life?

@ Yahoo! Video

Ahmet Dogan, a professor at Erciyes University here in Kayseri, Turkey and an acquaintance of mine, posted this video to Facebook, noting that his son Furkan was one of the bystanders in the last scene. Furkan Dogan was an American citizen shot five times at close range by Israeli soldiers aboard a flotilla headed for Gaza last May. The video was broadcast on Al Jazeera before Israelis commandeered the ship, and gives a pretty good idea what conditions were like aboard the crowded boat.

Journalist Jamal El-shayyal, a British citizen reporting for Al Jazeera, managed to broadcast live from the ship shortly after the Israelis boarded the ship, until his transmission was cut. He was imprisoned for days by Israelis, and later spoke about his experiences here. (Text and NYT analysis here.)  His eyewitness account contradicts the official Israeli version. He states emphatically that the Israelis used live bullets from their helicopter(s) to shoot unarmed Turkish activists before commandos boarded the ship to kill, in total, nine people. 

Two months later, after the ship was finally returned to Turkey from Israel, El-shayyal broadcast again and recalled what happened as an eyewitness. It's worth watching.

Why Won't the Israelis Acknowledge Error?

The large Israeli daily newspaper, Haaretz, asserting that Turkish-Israeli relations are too important to be derailed, has called on Israel to "express regret" at the loss of civilian life on the flotilla and to offer symbolic compensation to the families of victims.  

Americans also wonder why Israel won't apologize.

U.S. Passengers on Gaza Flotilla Assert State Department's Negligence in Not Advocating for Americans

"Why is the US Government Deaf to What Has Been Done to My Son?" asks Ahmet Dogan, father of American citizen Furkan Dogan, who was shot five times at close range by Israeli soldiers. He and 13 U.S. passengers from the Gaza Freedom Flotilla have written an open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressing their anger "at the lack of any visible, active effort on the part of any agency in our government to conduct and release an independent investigation of the killing of one and assaults on other Americans by a foreign military force, the Israeli commandos."

In their letter, the U.S. passengers assert that "the State Department has allied itself with Israel, ignoring its responsibilities to its own citizens." The letter stated that they "are appalled at the lack of any visible, active effort on the part of any agency in our government to conduct and release an independent investigation of the killing of one and assaults on other Americans by a foreign military force, the Israeli commandos."

Vincent Warren, Executive Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, writes that his organization is seeking to answer some of the American citizens' questions through Freedom of Information Act requests.

 A report by the International Bureau of Humanitarian NGOs (IBH) and the Friends of Charities Association (FOCA) found that several of the videos the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Defense Force released to support their version of events were digitally enhanced, computer-manufactured or fraudulent.

Related:

• US Media Ignore Israeli Flotilla Executions: "What would the consequences be if an American teenager was executed by Iranian commandos? The Times Union, and the rest of the American media, would be filled with cries of outrage. There would be demands for bombing Tehran, demands that might well be met. Because Dogan was murdered by an American ally, the response has been nothing but the silence of complicity." 

• Furkan Dogan's 19th Birthday.
• Visiting Furkan's Grave
• Former US Marines condemn murder of Furkan Dogan: "Snipers secure in the aircraft indiscriminately killed activists with a scope. It was a real, profound act of cowardice. Like Ken, I am a former U.S. Marine. Honorable military groups do not attack unarmed civilians, at least by accepted policy, but Israel does."

Previous:

• Disillusioned by Israel's Lack of Interest in Peace

 

Disillusioned by Israel's Lack of Interest in Peace

So Israel provokes both the Palestinians and the US by resuming settlements in the West Bank, and seems absolutely uninterested in any kind of realistic peace plan. As someone who has been a lifelong supporter of Israel, I have to say that the belligerence of the current Israeli government is causing me to reassess my position. I still support Israel's right to exist as a nation, but the admiration -- even awe -- I once had for it as a heroic, principled democracy has dissipated. Andrew Sullivan summed up my own disillusionment, and that of many other Americans in his piece, "Self-destructive Israel has killed this love affair. Tel Aviv's belligerence has led to a crucial shift in support in the U.S." 

For me, the clinchers have been a) Israel's excessive force in attacking a flotilla of Turkish humanitarians headed for Gaza, as documented in this United Nations report, and Israel's refusal to admit it did anything wrong in killing nine activists, including one American who was shot five times at close range; b) The Failures of the American Jewish Establishment, by Peter Beinart, former editor of the staunchly Zionist New Republic, writing in the New York Review of Books. He documents how Israeli policy has become more rigid, more extreme and more self-destructive.  

Related:

•  Clearcut Path to Peace in the Middle East

Clearcut Path to Peace in the Middle East

Middle East peace talks stall once again, as Israel refuses to halt illegal settlements on the West Bank, and Israeli extremists torch a mosque, burn Korans, and West Bank settlers attack civilians. Without Israeli acquiescence, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, an American educated economist who has gotten very favorable coverage by Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, plans to declare a Palestinian state by August 2011. With viable business, governance and security plans, the Palestinians just might create a state in the West Bank, and maybe eventually in Gaza.

This will create opportunities, and political dangers, for the Obama administration.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Reset: Iran, Turkey and America's Future, says the ingredients for peace are obvious, but neither Israelis nor Arabs have the political strength to pull it off, based on domestic political considerations. At the appropriate time -- probably by 2013 -- the United States (along, perhaps, with the United Nations), should take the risk of imposing a peace plan, he says, similar to one outlined in 2000 and promoted by the Clinton administration: create a Palestinian state out of the West Bank and Gaza; compensate Palestinians for land and homes they lost in what is now Israel; and end Israeli settlements on the West Bank. That plan was endorsed by the Arab League, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, former Israeli Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert. Sadly, Bill Clinton left office in 2000, and George Bush did not pursue it after it was rejected by Hamas and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The US could use powerful leverage -- billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel, Egypt and other Middle East countries, as well as weapon sales -- to create incentives to accept a peace plan.

But like Middle East politicians, US pols are inhibited from imposing Middle East peace by domestic considerations, Kinzer says -- a passionate lobby of West Bank settlers (basically Jewish fundamentalists); Americans who support the Israeli government unconditionally; Arabs who don't want US influence in the Middle East and need to keep repeating a "death to Israel" mantra to unify disparate domestic constituencies that otherwise would just fight each other.  It will take political courage -- and risk -- to pursue Mideast peace.  

Elusive Justice for Turkish-American Furkan Dogan, Shot 5 Times at Close Range By Israelis

Finding out what really happened on the Turkish flotilla headed for Gaza and to Turkish-American Furkan Dogan of Kayseri last May 31 has been painfully slow. The BBC has produced a documentary, "Death on the Med," (on Youtube.com here and here), but it seems mostly reported from an Israeli military point of view. It's disturbing that the BBC producers showed no curiosity about Furkan's character as revealed in video interviews Matt Porter and I conducted with Dogan's brother and with one of the flotilla participants, which were published by Global Post. 

Some of the criticisms of the documentary by Gilad Atzmon and Ken O'Keefe seem to be quite credible. Journalists and activists aboard the flotilla assert that their cameras, footage, and laptops, which some say prove that the Israelis shot first, were confiscated by the Israelis and have not been returned. Israel has returned the Mavi Marmara ship on which the violence occurred -- freshly painted, reporters noted, clearly intended to hide evidence of bullet holes and blood stains.

Israel, Turkey, and the United Nations continue to investigate the flotilla incident, and Dogan's father is seeking legal action on his son's behalf in the US. To illustrate the continuing importance of the case to Turkey, Prime Minister Recip Erdogan paid his respects at the Dogan home in Kayseri.

Meanwhile, a group of Americans, invoking Martin Luther King and comparing the cause of the Palestinians to that of African Americans during segregation, are seeking to sail their own ship to Gaza, and have raised more than $150,000 to do so. Pamela Olson reports. A native of Oklahoma and Stanford alum, she's the author of a book, "Fast Times in Palestine" about her two years in the Palestinian territories. "I wrote (the book) because so many Americans still don’t have even a basic grasp of the realities in the Holy Land despite (or perhaps because of) watching hours of mainstream media coverage," she writes.

Among the speakers at a fundraiser for the American flotilla to Gaza was advocacy journalist Chris Hedges, a foreign correspondent most noted for quitting The New York Times in 2003 because he was far more skeptical of the impending war in Iraq than Times editors.  He said, "As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice, and that arc is descending with a righteous fury that is thundering down upon the Israeli government..."

Previous:

• Israel Still Offers No Accounting for Death of American Shot 5 Times At Close Range
• Turkish-American Killed By Israel Becomes Symbol and Martyr
• Facts on the Flotilla That Gives Reasonable People Pause

Related:

•  Despite Raid, Mostly Business As Usual for Israel and Turkey

Israel Still Offers No Accounting for Death of American Shot 5 Times At Close Range

More than a month after the deaths of eight Turks and one American aboard a flotilla headed for Gaza, officially there has been no accounting for the circumstances surrounding their deaths. Without providing evidence, the Israeli Ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, has dismissed them all as "hired thugs from a radical Islamic organization." Israel has promised an investigation but so far the government will not allow Israeli soldiers to give evidence or to be cross-examined, nor will it allow any examination of the Israeli's government's preparations before the incident. The judge appointed to head the investigation has threatened to quit unless his commission "is given some teeth." (Follow flotilla investigation developments in Google News.)

Global Post has published a report Matt Porter and I did that includes interviews with the father, brother, and friend of Furkan Dugan, the 19-year-old American from Kayseri, Turkey who was shot five times at close range aboard the flotilla. Nothing his family and friend told us gave any indication this young man was a hired gun for a radical Islamic organization or the least bit political. Instead, they described him as an aspiring doctor who volunteered to go on a humanitarian mission. Read our report here (video included).

Meanwhile, the Israeli website Ynetnews quotes official forensic documents noting that the nine activists were shot a total of 31 times. "The findings make it clear the Israeli forces shot to kill the activists and not to overpower them," said Yasin Divrak, a lawyer for the families.

Dr. John Daly of the International Relations and Security Network conducted another interview with Furkan's father, and writes, "American Teenager Killed on Gaza Flotilla for Holding a Camera." 

There are two incontrovertible elements in the event. First, the flotilla was stopped, according to the Israeli navy, 75 miles west of Gaza. The boarding occurred at Latitude 32.64113 N Longitude 33.56727 E in international waters, well outside Israel’s self-proclaimed 20-mile exclusion zone, where it has blocked ships from entering Gazan waters since December 2008.

The second point is that the Israeli Shayetet 13 Naval Special Forces commandos killed eight Turks during the takeover of the Mavi Marmaris, not nine. The ninth victim was an American teenager, 19-year-old Furkan Dogan. Dogan has usually been described in the media as either a Turk or a dual Turkish-American citizen, but in fact carried only an American passport with a Turkish residency stamp. Furkan’s father, Professor Ahmet Dogan, believes that the press is portraying his son as either a dual national or a Turkish citizen in an effort to “cover up” the reality of his son’s death.

He concludes:

Maritime law, which began to be codified in the early 17th century, is the oldest corpus of international law in the world. To abandon it to justify an armed attack on an unarmed vessel in international waters is to invite the law of the jungle to replace it, where might makes right.

As America prides itself as pre-eminently a nation of laws, Washington must realize the future consequences of ignoring such a blatant violation of international law to be whitewashed by a commission composed of perpetrators supporting the attack. Israel’s government has already announced that its commission will not be able to interview members of the Shayetet 13 Naval Special Forces.

If Israel is sincere about getting to the bottom of what happened on 31 May, it can begin by returning the video equipment, cameras and computers aboard the Mavi Marmaris, as well as returning the flotilla vessels.

Given the visual evidence and testimonies of other Americans aboard the Mavi Marmaris, it would seem that the US government’s fundamental responsibility should extend to supporting Turkey’s and other nations’ calls for an international investigation into Israel’s attack on the Gaza flotilla, to include a complete accounting of the circumstances of the death of American teenager Furkan Dogan, shot five times by Israeli commandos on a civilian ship on the high seas for the crime of holding a camera.

The friends of Furkan Dogan have created a Facebook page in his honor, and a news video has been posted of an interview with Furkan's father recalling the kind of son his boy was. It's in Turkish.

Previous:

• Turkish-American Killed By Israel Becomes Symbol and Martyr
• Facts on the Flotilla That Gives Reasonable People Pause

Related:

• Despite Raid, Mostly Business As Usual for Israel and Turkey

Evocative Music Video on Israel's War in Gaza

We will not go down! Michael Hearts - Turkish (Türkçe) Added by ShaLgam from ShaLgam on Vimeo.

A Turkish friend send me this video, with song by Michael Heart. Here's a profile of him: http://www.michaelheart.com/news/MichaelHeart_VIVA_article_pdf.pdf

"I think the average American doesn’t have a clue about what’s really going on in Gaza. They just flat out don’t know," he says.

The casualties from the 3-week Israeli war in Gaza, 2008-09 were 1,400 Palestinians dead, half of them women and children, and 13 Israelis dead. Fair fight?

I'm pleased that Israel has finally partially lifted the blockade on Gaza. Israel does have legitimate concerns about its security from Hamas forces that have not agreed to stop the rocket attacks. To fully lift the blockade, Hamas should pledge to stop the attacks on Israel and should release Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, held hostage since 2006. 

In other ways, the current Israeli government continues to be an aggressor and obstacle to peace. Twenty-two Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem are scheduled to be bulldozed to create an Israeli tourist center. (East Jerusalem is the proposed home of a Palestinian state.) Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak criticizes the municipality's plan as "lacking in common sense." The Israeli government is still expanding settlements on the West Bank, now more than 300,000 strong, alongside some 2.5 million Palestinian settlements.

Will Turkey's new involvement in the Middle East have a moderating influence on Islamists there?

Anyway, the song is called "We will not go down in Gaza tonight." Here are the lyrics.

Is Israel Actually 'Surrounded by Genocidal Enemies'? NOT

A correspondent emails that Israel is "surrounded by genocidal enemies who have a stated goal of the destruction of the state of Israel and the eradication of the Jews that live there." This, he seems to say, justifies any and all aggressive and violent action by the current government of Israel towards its neighbors, eager to demonstrate over and over that it is the toughest kid in the neighborhood.

Let's look at the facts: Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Oman, UAE, Iraq and Kuwait are no longer foes of Israel. Thanks to US power, aid and influence, they've foresworn war with Israel. Most Arab nations at a summit in 2002 joined in a common statement offering peace with Israel in compliance with United Nations Security Council resolutions.

There is considerable evidence that the US went to war in Iraq in part to neutralize that country as a foe of Israel. Bush advisor Philip Zelikow has said a prime motive for the invasion of Iraq was to eliminate Iraq as a threat to Israel. Eight countries down, four to go -- Syria, Lebanon, Iran and Yemen. Given the way the region has shifted allegiances, one might be able to understand defensiveness and paranoia in those four countries.

Yes, Israel has legitimate concern about hostilities with these nations, especially Iran, but they do not represent an imminent threat of "genocide" to the Israeli people. The military weakness of these countries combined with the military strength of Israel, backed up by US support of Israel pretty well checkmates any efforts they might make to drive Israel into the sea. As for the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah, they can damage Israel and certainly contribute to a state-of-siege mentality, but they do not really threaten Israel's existence. If Israel chooses to negotiate peace with its neighbors, it would come to the negotiating table from a position of strength, not weakness.

Analyst George Friedman, STRATFOR, writes that Israel's adversaries are hopelessly divided. "Israel’s regional enemies are so profoundly divided among themselves and have such divergent relations with Israel that an effective coalition against Israel does not exist — and is unlikely to arise in the near future... Israel’s Arab neighbors are incapable of forming even a partial coalition against Israel... the Arab countries no longer have a military force that can challenge the Israelis, nor the will nor interest to acquire one....(Terrorist threats and bombings) are real, but...do not threaten the survival of Israel." 

I asked my correspondent if there should be ANY LIMITS on Israel's ability to bomb, invade, occupy, or annex any country in its "struggle to survive," to create completely secure borders? At what point does Israel betrays its own purported values as a democracy, freedom and a respecter of human rights of minorities? By my correspondent's argument, Israel can quash all dissent because it is "just struggling to survive."

I have more faith in Israel's ability to survive, built on the foundations of democracy, free enterprise and entrepreneurship than does my correspondent. See George Gilder's analysis of how Israel will make peace and thrive as an economic powerhouse in the Mideast.

Dissent from a Policy, Not a People

An American friend who watched my video of Furkan Dogan's funeral asked me if I was afraid while attending it. Not at all, I said. Perhaps if I hadn't lived here for nine months and everything was unfamiliar, I might be. But we -- Turks and Americans -- were all mourning the death of a Turkish-American citizen, so it was something we shared in common. Several friendly strangers asked me where I was from, I said "America." They said, "Thank you for coming." One man hugged me. A policeman I stood next to helped translate for me. I saw many of my students in the crowd.  In the exceptionally gracious manner of the Turks that I still find astonishing, Furkan Dogan's father Ahmet, in the funeral procession, offered two American journalists he barely knew a ride to the place where the service was being held, and invited us to his home afterwards on the day he was burying his 19-year-old son. At the home, I met Turks who had studied in Tennessee, Iowa, and New York. Their understanding, affection, and appreciation for the American people, if not U.S. policy backing Israel's stance toward Gaza and the Palestinians, remains strong. As I wrote in Today's Zaman, I consider Turks to be some of the most hospitable and generous people on earth. 

My Turkish friends frequently remind me of one of their sayings: "There is the country, there is geopolitics, and there is the individual person. We know the difference." This applies to Turks, Israelis, Americans and every other nationality. Some Turks I've talked to were also quick to note that many American Jews and many Israeli citizens do not support the policies of the current İsraeli government.

We can all pray together for peace in Turkey and for peace in the Middle East!

Related:

• Why It's Difficult to Imagine 'Terrorists' Coming from Kayseri, Turkey
• Jews Found Freedom in Turkey

Jews Found Freedom in Turkey

Sign seen at the funeral service for Furkan Dugan, written in English: "Remember, we saved you in 1492 from Spain." It was a reminder to Jews eager to see antisemitism in Turkey's anger toward Israel that Turks have a long history of religious tolerance toward Jews. While the Christians in Spain were sending Jews to the Inquisition or forcing them to convert to Christianity, the Ottoman Turks offered them a home in Turkey.    

Related:

• Jews Often Thrived In Muslim Societies, While They Were Persecuted in Christian Countries...
• History of the Jews in Turkey (Google Search)