Opinion What a difference a name makes
An American was gunned down in international waters. Why isnt there an outcry at home?
Furkan Dogan was proud of his American passport and dreamt of coming back to the US after completing medical school. Five Israeli bullets at least two of them to the head ended that dream on May 31. Dogan was 19. The young American,who had just completed high school with excellent grades in the central Turkish town of Kayseri,had seen an online advertisement for volunteers to deliver aid to Gaza. The ad,from a Turkish charity called the Humanitarian Relief Foundation,or IHH,said the goal of the trip was to show that Israels embargo/ blockade can be legally broken.
Little interested in politics,but with an aspiring doctors concern for Palestinian suffering,Dogan won a lottery to go. How he was killed is disputed as is just about everything concerning the Israeli naval takeover of the six-boat Gaza-bound flotilla but his father suspects a video camera carried by his son may have provoked Israeli commandos.
Thats the start of the story you havent read about the short life of Furkan Dogan,an American killed by Israeli forces in international waters on the Turkish-flagged Mavi Marmara. I do find the effacement of Dogan since his death almost two months ago at once offensive and instructive.
I have little doubt that if the American killed on those ships had been Hedy Epstein,a St Louis-based Holocaust survivor,or Edward Peck,a former US ambassador to Mauritania,we would have heard a lot more. We would have read the kind of tick-tock reconstructions that the deaths of Americans abroad in violent and disputed circumstances tend to provoke. (Epstein had planned to be aboard the flotilla and Peck was.)
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.
But a chill descends when you have the combination of Israeli commandos doing the firing,an American with a foreign-sounding Muslim name,and the frenzied pre-emptive arguments of Israel and those among its US supporters who will brook no criticism of the Jewish state.
This chill is a bad thing. Lets 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. Lets face it,without the flotilla outcry that allowed the Obama administration to question Israels self-defeating suffocation of Gaza,Israel would still be imposing the blockade that handed Hamas control of whatever was left of the Gaza economy. Now that blockade has been eased.
I contacted the office of Congressman Paul Tonko,who represents the Troy area,to ask about Dogan. A spokesman,Beau Duffy,wrote that Tonko had no comment. Hardly a surprise: Nobody in Congress has had anything to say about this American death. I called the State Department,where an official said the US ambassador in Turkey has offered the Dogan family assistance.
Professor Dogan,who teaches at Kayseri University,told the Wall Street Journals Marc Champion that hes been wondering what the US response would have been if his son had been a Christian living stateside. Having lived in America,he said,I know what people do there when a cat gets stuck in a tree.
Its different,however,when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire.
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