From: Riza Sihbudi <[email protected]>
Date: Sunday, June 6, 2010, 11:35 AM
This Says It All
Israelis kill American – Joe Biden says:
"What's
the big deal?"
by Justin Raimondo,
June 04, 2010
What is US foreign policy in the Middle
East all about – and for
whose benefit is it being conducted? In two short paragraphs, this news
story says it all:
"The U.S. confirmed that an American citizen, identified as
19-year-old Furkan Dogan, was killed by multiple gunshots during the
Israeli raid on a flotilla carrying activists attempting to run a
blockade of the Gaza Strip. "State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said
the U.S. has
made no decision on a response to Dogan’s death."
Apparently official Washington is torn between issuing a mild
protest, and thanking them.
"Protecting the welfare of American citizens is a fundamental
repsponsibility of our government," Hillary
Clinton assured the media, "and one that we take very seriously" –
but not seriously enough to issue an official protest. "We are in
constant contact with the Israeli government attempting to obtain more
information about our citizens." Do they want to know how many holes the
IDF put in Furkan Dogan’s head before they make a decision on a
response?
In reality, the US already made a response in the form of Vice
President Joe "Loose Cannon" Biden, who, when asked about the attack on
the flotilla, said:
"So what’s the big deal here?"
At the time he said it, the odds were fair that an American citizen
– out
of nine with the flotilla — was among the dead. Now that it’s been
confirmed, I wonder if it’s dawned on our dim-witted Vice President that
it is indeed a very big deal.
In a brazen act of international piracy,
the Israelis boarded a ship in international waters and killed an
American citizen – so what is the American government going to do about
it?
The answer is: nothing, zero, nada, zilch. Israel refuses to
let an international investigation look into the matter, and Biden is
cool with that, as he told Charlie
Rose:
"Biden: We passed a resolution in the UN saying we need a
transparent and open investigation of what happened. It looks like
things are…
"Rose: International investigation?
"Biden: Well, an investigation run by the Israelis, but we’re
open to international participation. "
That’s certainly impartial, fair, and transparent – let the Israelis
investigate themselves! No, Biden isn’t stupid: he’s smart enough to
know the Israelis will never be held accountable by our government, and
that any attempt to do so would be aborted before it ever became
known.
The reason for this peculiar passivity is because, contra Hillary,
protecting the welfare of American citizens is not considered a
fundamental responsibility of our government insofar as it means
protecting their welfare against the government of Israel. In any
conflict between American and Israeli interests, Washington’s instinctive
response is to uphold the latter and ignore the former. Under the
Bush administration, such a conflict of interests was considered impossible:
the very idea that there could be daylight between Washington and Tel
Aviv on any given issue was considered heretical. Even
under the Bushies, however, there was still some vague
stirrings of American independence, especially toward the end of
the second term. And they never had to face a situation like this, in
which an American citizen in transit was murdered by our faithful
"allies." That kind of thing hasn’t happened since the sinking of the USS
Liberty –
and it may be a sign of what’s to come that a survivor of that heinous
assault was traveling with the flotilla, too.
In the
case of the USS Liberty, the whole thing was covered up in a
shameful act of official suppression: against the testimony of the
sailors on that ship, 34 of whom were killed, the US government ruled
that the savage Israeli assault was a tragic "accident." Yet US
government officials knew the truth. As then secretary of state Dean
Rusk later put it:
"I was never satisfied with the Israeli explanation. Their
sustained attack to disable and sink Liberty precluded an assault by
accident or some trigger-happy local commander. Through diplomatic
channels we refused to accept their explanations. I didn’t believe them
then, and I don’t believe them to this day. The attack was outrageous."
So is this attack outrageous, but if the US government can whitewash
the Israeli murder of 34 American sailors, it can overlook the murder of
a single American in nearly identical circumstances.
Of course, this is not 1967: the news of an American’s death at the
hands of the IDF is being transmitted around
the world, even as I write this, and all the details are coming
out: the pitilessness of the Israelis, young Furkan’s idealism, and the
horrific circumstances of his death.
What is being transmitted, above all, is the braying arrogance of the
Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his
media shills, as they deride the dead as "terrorists looking for
trouble." Bizarrely, the Vice President of the United States is joining
right in, declaring that Israel had a "right" to board the ships
and detain the passengers because it has a "right" to ensure its own
"security" – yet the ships were inspected by
the Turkish government in Cyprus before they left, and found to contain
only items such as building material and children’s toys. The Israelis,
as part of their serio-comic propaganda
offensive, are triumphantly showing off a cache of
"weapons" found on the ship – which looks like nothing more than a
collection of old kitchen knives and a couple of metal poles.
An American is killed as heavily armed soldiers of a foreign nation
board a ship in international waters, firing live ammunition at the
passengers as they rappel onto the deck. Among those passengers: a former
US ambassador, a former
US colonel and Pentagon official, several
members of the European parliament, a
member of the Israeli Knesset, and members of parliament from
several Arab countries.
Imagine if Iran had done this. Washington would have reverberated
with the sound of thunder emanating from the White House, and the attack
fleet would already be steaming toward the Gulf, taking up position.
That the culprit was Israel, however, puts a whole different face on the
matter, at least as far as our government is concerned: they’re content
to let the Israelis "investigate, " and let the matter drop.
For years, some of
us have been saying that the government of Israel and its partisans
in this country exercise a decisive – and unhealthy – influence on the
making and execution of US foreign policy. We’ve been accused of
everything from anti-Semitism to pushing "conspiracy theories," and yet
the Mediterranean Massacre – and our government’s non-response –
underscores that, if anything, we’ve been underestimating the extent to
which the US takes its orders directly from Tel Aviv.
The
Israel Lobby controls official Washington: Congress is, as Pat
Buchanan trenchantly observed, "Israeli-occupied territory." Yet one
would think that, in spite of these circumtances, the wanton murder of
an American on the high seas by Israeli commandos would provoke an angry
response from Washington. Unfortunately, one would be wrong.
Instead, what we have is the grotesque spectacle of our Vice
President commending the Israelis, and the US and Israel
scrambling to come up with a "joint
response." What more proof do we need that the US government is the
political equivalent of occupied Palestine, where truth and justice are
under blockade?
For years,
they’ve been spying on
us, collaborating with
our enemies, stealing our
secrets, manipulating our
politicians, and now they’ve gone so far as to murder one of our
citizens on neutral ground – and still our government cannot manage even
a peep of protest. A more disgusting display of cowardice would be hard
to imagine.
We attacked Iraq in large part due
to the influence of
the Lobby, and we are gearing
up for an armed conflict with Iran in response to the same sort of pressure:
will we now countenance the execution of one
of our own citizens in order to appease Tel Aviv?
This was no "accident." The Israeli government knew
precisely what it was doing, it knew there were Americans on those
ships, and chose to go in guns blazing: it was the equivalent of
spitting in Uncle Sam’s face.
After all, how dare those Americans try to freeze the building of
settlements in what is "Greater Israel"?
How dare Obama tell us what we can and cannot do?! We’ll show them!
Let’s kill a few. Don’t worry – they won’t retaliate. We own them: and
they know it.
In view of the Obama administration’s shameful crawling, one can
hardly disagree. Which raises a question: how many American lives are to
be sacrificed on the altar of the "special relationship" ? It’s a
question to which one doesn’t really want to know the answer.
http://original. antiwar.com/ justin/2010/ 06/03/this- says-it-all/
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