By Dave Lindorff
The US media are in high dudgeon over the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi living in the US in self-imposed exile who among other things had been writing articles critical of the current Saudi royal leadership, and especially Saudi Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
Certainly outrage is justified. It seems clear from the evidence that Khashoggi was deliberately lured to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, to be killed by a team of government assassins who were flown in from Saudi Arabia complete with a coroner carrying his bone saw. Since Khashoggi was captured on a video surveillance camera entering the consulate, but never came out, while the team of assassins were seen leaving and then departed the country only hours after their arrival, the suspicion is that after killing their victim, they dismembered his body and removed the evidence in their attache cases to be disposed of elsewhere. (As diplomatic passport-holders they would not have had to put their carry-on luggage through an X-ray machine.)
Although the Trump administration is soft-pedaling its concern, with Trump comparing the accusations against the Saudi government to accusations of sexual abuse leveled against his latest Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and even suggesting “rogue killers” outside the government might have been responsible, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying he has insisted the Saudis conduct a “transparent” investigation into the murder, it has been forced by public and media outrage to at least pretend to be troubled by Khashoggi’s slaying.
But looking back, we see a totally different response — or more properly, a total lack of response in either government or media — to the equally brutal murder back in 2010 of not just a US legal resident, but a US-born citizen: 19-year-old Furkan Dogan.
Dogan, born and raised in the US to Turkish immigrant parents, was brutally beaten, kicked and then shot in the back and head by several members of the so-called Israeli Defense Force who on May 31, 2010 boarded a Turkish-flagged vessel, the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. There is video of the attack on Furkan, who was unarmed with anything but a cell phone that he was using to video the IDF assault on the ship, the leading vessel of a “Peace Flotilla” delivering medicine, food and building supplies to Gaza, the fenced-in Palestinian ghetto controlled by Israel.
The Obama administration never raised the slightest protest over the killing of this young US citizen. Indeed, Secretary of State Clinton warned Americans not to participate in the flotilla, essentially saying they were asking for trouble if they did so.
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to www.thiscantbehappening.net