Being glass half-full, I say America is changing, that 9/11 and its horrifying sequels have opened informed Americans up at last to Muslims’ views of the world. What else can you say about the beautiful column that Roger Cohen penned for the Times today about Furkan Dogan, the 19-year-old American-Turkish youth slain on the Mavi Marmara in May, without a peep from our Congress? But register Cohen’s theme, which is a theme of this website: the stories of Americans of Muslim background are being censored from our press:
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 U.S. 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 U.S. supporters who will brook no criticism of the Jewish state…
Professor Dogan [the youth’s father, Ahmet], who teaches at Kayseri University [in Turkey], told the Wall Street Journal’s Marc Champion (who wrote the best piece on Dogan) that he’s been wondering what the U.S. 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.”
It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire.
