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.
A similar topic which also receives little U.S. attention is the plight of Americans detained and tortured by Israel. An article discussing this is here:
link to ameu.org
The zionists run the show in america. Who becomes a “legit” victim is their say. That’s what it comes down to. To change this, the zionists must be removed from the picture first.
Hail of Israeli gunfire? Has Cohen seen the autopsy report? Dogan was executed. Murdered.
Since there’s no little grey note at the bottom of Cohen’s column saying that it appeared in print on page such-and-such, I’m assuming that they ran it just on the website and not in the paper – is that correct?
How about the International Herald Tribune – anyone know if it was printed there?
“I’m assuming that they ran it just on the website and not in the paper – is that correct?”
That’s correct. I was going to make the same point. The best material on the I/P conflict that the NYT publishes usually appears online or maybe in its sister publication the IHT, but not in the dead tree version of the NYT. Kristof’s columns recently are about as good as the dead tree version gets, and we had some discussion about the flaws in those columns that I don’t have to repeat here.
Methinks Roger Cohen is selling Zionist Jewish Americans short.
It depends on who’s involved in the incident, who’s the victim and who’s the alleged perpetrator. If the perpetrator is believed to be a Muslim or an Arab then every Christian, Jew, Mormon, Hindu and Atheist will receive equal media coverage and attention. Fox news will suddenly feign sympathy for non-Caucasians and those heathen Atheists. Heck, they might suddenly discover their decent side and start treating homosexuals as equal citizens.
If the victims are Jewish Americans, and the perpetrators are believed to be Christian, then the Jewish victims will receive far more coverage — far more had the perpetrators been Jewish and the victims Christian.
If the victims are Muslims, and the perpetrators are Jews, there won’t be any coverage whatsoever. Mr. Dogan falls into this category.
If the victims are Muslims and the perpetrators are Christians, there might be some negligible coverage.
If the victims are Jews and the perpetrators are Muslims, then you, I and everyone from here to Timbuktu will never hear the end of it.
If the victims are non-Zionist American Jews, and the perpetrators are Zionist Jewish Americans, then the coverage will be spun so that the victims become the self-hating anti-Semite, terrorist-loving traitor Jews and the perpetrators will receive a slap on the wrist, some community service and probation.
That’s my view of the US media, lies, deception and propaganda. That’s not to say that the Israeli media is any better.
The following isn’t directly related to this article, but nontheless, it’s an interesting and informative indicator:
A global Press Freedom Index for 2009, puts the United States in the 22nd spot and Israel in the 93rd spot.
#1 Denmark
#2 Finland
#3 Ireland
#4 Norway
#5 Sweden
#6 Estonia
#7 Netherlands
#8 Switzerland
#9 Iceland
#10 Lithuania
#11 Belgium
# 12 Malta
#13 Austria
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#22 United States
#23 Jamiaca
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#27 Ghana
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#36 Namibia
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#60 Kuwait
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#61 Lebanon
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#87 United Arab Emirates
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#93 Israel – The Only Democracy in the Middle East™
link to en.rsf.org
Avi, not sure how they tabulate this survey, but the Israeli press certainly seems much more open than the US press. Our compliant, corporate owned MSM devotes oceans of ink to Lindsay Lohan’s jail time and Mel Gibson’s domestic issues, and dopes us up with the latest escapades of a B-list actress who wasn’t wearing panties in Vegas the previous night.
Meanwhile, it takes a Wikileaks to turn the narrative on its head, to embarrass the so-called investigative journalists who drink the Kool-Aid at the daily White House press briefing, stenographers who dutifully print propaganda that “the surge is working” and the Taliban is being contained.
I find Haaretz especially to be brutally honest and hard-hitting with criticism of Netanyahu, and the governments policies.
Reporters without borders is an american guv funded shill site, what comes from them is about as accurate as what comes from voice of america.
Reporters Without Borders
(excerpts)
Funding Sources
Robert Menard, the Secretary General of RSF, was forced to confess that RSF’s budget was primarily provided by “US organizations strictly linked with US foreign policy” (Thibodeau, La Presse).
* NED (US$39,900 paid 14 Jan 2005)
* Center for a Free Cuba (USAID and NED funded) $50,000 per year NED grant. Contract was signed by Otto Reich
* European Union (1.2m Euro) — currently contested in EU parliament
* Rights & Democracy in 2004 supported Reporters Without Borders-Canada [1]
“Grants from private foundations (Open Society Foundation, Center for a Free Cuba, Fondation de France, National Endowment for Democracy) were slightly up, due to the Africa project funded by the NED and payment by Center for a Free Cuba for a reprint of the banned magazine De Cuba.” [2]
Principal focus of RSF activities
* Cuba
* Venezuela
* Haiti
Otto Reich connection
“The man who links RSF to these activities is Otto Reich, who worked on the coups first as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs, and, after Nov. 2002, as a special envoy to Latin America on the National Security Council. Besides being a trustee of the government-funded Center for a Free Cuba, which gives RSF $50,000 a year, Reich has worked since the early 1980′s with the IRI.’s senior vice president, Georges Fauriol, another member of the Center for a Free Cuba. But it is Reich’s experience in propaganda that is especially relevant.” [4]
link to sourcewatch.org
The Lies of Reporters without Borders by Salim Lamrani*
French NGO Reporters without borders, dedicated to the defense of press freedom, is today at the center of a controversy. To some people, it is an efficient vector for freedom in the world, but to others – and we are among those – it has evolved into a transmission cable for the State Department, and it is instrumenting a cause to support the United States’ strategy. Salim Lamrani, researcher at the Sorbonne university, looks into the details of accusations and answers, before unveiling the extent of the deception.
9 September 2005
From Paris (France)
In a July 6, 2005 statement, the Reporters without Borders Organization (RSF) responded to accusations made against it with regards to its obsession with Cuba, its hidden ties with the American government and certain multinational companies, as well as its relations with organizations involved in shady activities and which maintain closed ties with international terrorism. [1]….
link to voltairenet.org
The deceit of Reporters Without Borders
by Salim Lamrani
November 7, 2007
(excerpts)
On October 16, 2007, the Paris based organization Reporters Without Borders (RSF) published its “Worldwide Press Freedoms Index 2007.” RSF claims to be neutral, objective and solely interested in press freedoms. But this claim does not hold up to scrutiny. In reality the 2007 index, laden with contradictions, is nothing more than a fraud and demonstrates, to the contrary, that the association directed by Robert Ménard since 1985 defends a very specific interest and political agenda. (1)
How is it that Eritrea, where only two journalists were murdered, ended up ranked below Iraq (157), Mexico (136), Somalia (159), Pakistan (152), Afghanistan (142) and Sri Lanka (156)? Perhaps because that nation is on Washington’s black list and RSF receives funding from the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy, NED? (7)
Likewise what is the explanation for Cuba ranking 165 when not one journalist has been killed there since 1959? Why is this nation ranked below Iraq, Mexico, Somalia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Brazil (84), China (163), United States (48), Haiti (75), Nepal (137), Paraguay (90), Peru (117), Democratic Republic of the Congo (133), Turkey (101) and Zimbabwe (149), where at least one journalist has been killed? RSF explains that Cuba’s poor ranking is due to journalists being imprisoned. Just supposing the organization is correct on this point –which is actually far from being the case-, wouldn’t killing journalists still be more serious than imprisoning them? (8)
link to globalresearch.ca
Reporters Without Borders seems to have a geopolitical agenda By F. William Engdahl
May 7, 2010, 00:22
(excerpts)
Who stands behind RWB?
The slick media image that RWB presents to the world, such as using the term “predators,” is no accident. It is the product of RWB’s ad agency. Announcing the list of 40 on May 3 on their website, RWB states, “The list of Predators of Press Freedom is released today, backed by a campaign ad produced by the Saatchi & Saatchi agency . . . There are 40 names on this year’s list of predators . . . that cannot stand the press, treat it as an enemy and directly attack journalists. They are powerful, dangerous, violent and above the law.” [3]
Saatchi & Saatchi is one of the world’s most influential “hidden persuaders” or PR firms. They are credited with the campaign that brought Margaret Thatcher to power and are the ad firm for Gordon Brown’s Labour Party. Clients have included Citigroup, Hewlett-Packard, DuPont, Proctor & Gamble. One might ask where RWB gets the finances to hire such elite advisors?
After years of trying to hide it, Robert Menard, Paris-based Secretary-General of Reporters Sans Frontieres or RWB, confessed that the RWB budget was primarily funded by “US organizations strictly linked to US foreign policy.” [6] Those US organizations behind RWB include the Open Society Foundation of billionaire speculator George Soros, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Congress’ National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Also included is the Center for Free Cuba, whose trustee, Otto Reich, was forced to resign from the George W. Bush administration after exposure of his role in a CIA-backed coup attempt against Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez. [7]
As one researcher found after months of trying to get a reply from NED about their funding of Reporters Without Borders, which included a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute. The IRI is one of four subsidiaries of NED. [8]
link to onlinejournal.com
The murder of Rachel Corrie received little but dismissal — or even contempt — until the play My Name is Rachel Corrie, first, proved to be excellent and moving, and, second, bigots in New York City and elsewhere tried to get the play effectively banned. Then some of the fence-sitting variety of bigots raised some concerns about censorship.
The treatment of — or indifference to — Furkan Dogan is a predictable consequence of the same ‘thinking’ that ‘justifies’ giving 10 times as much coverage to Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks as to Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks.
Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR ‘ombudsman’ (read, “Defender of the Faith”), exemplified American bigotry when he expressly defended NPR’s grossly skewed coverage on the grounds that Israeli deaths are “more newsworthy”. More astonishingly yet, he stated explicitly that he felt that NPR and American media treated Palestinians more favorably than Israelis. One was to be genuinely delusional to believe that US mainstream coverage is skewed in favor of the Palestinians. There is absolutely no measure on which that could be rationally concluded.
It is for reasons like this that Chomsky and others have noted that the US steadfastly refuses to offer a formal definition of “terrorism”. Any reasonable, plausible definition would undoubtedly sweep up Israeli and American crimes. That leaves glaringly unbalanced accounts like that of Michael Isikoff of Newsweek who offered an account on which American Christians and Jews, strictly as a matter of language, could not be terrorists.
Dogma must be circular. By its very nature it lacks sufficient rational or factual support. Thus it must rely on some internal framework to justify itself. And that framework must justify dismissal of inconvenient facts. From the delusional perspective of editors at CNN or The New York Times or NPR, it really is perfectly reasonable to ignore Furkan Dogan or Rachel Corrie or Emily Henochowicz or any of the other westerners injured or murdered by Israeli terrorists.
By the way, we’re seeing another instance of this play out with the mainstream response to Wikileaks’s publication of the American communications from Afghanistan.
You mean that the reasoning about why Wikileaks publication is terrible, terrible, terrible is “circular?” Thats an interesting point that dogma must be circular.
Re Afghanistan War – nothing makes sense. The November election will be interesting. All thats left for Democrats is partisanship and we’ll see how many are THAT partisan.
Still another example: The 40 years of silence on the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty — never investigated by Congress (in American history, the only failure ever by Congress to investigate an allied attack on a US vessel). There has been nearly no coverage ever of this. When there has been a little trickle, the ‘experts’ cited are invariably of the Michael Oren ilk, unqualified apologists for any and all Israeli atrocities.
I think the last courageous discussion of the fate of the USS Liberty and its survivors in the MSM was by the Chicago Tribune. Since then it’s been ignored despite the fact the Tribune raised many, many questions based in the latest information at that time.
I think Mr. Cohen is very disingenuous (and I recall his first writing on the murderous Israeli attack on the flotilla, when he called it “crass” and there were comments allowed and people took him on for it. “Crass.”) He wants to say Furkan Dogan’s death has been buried because of his Muslim name. No. Rachel Corrie’s death was buried, too. And Joe Meador of the USS Liberty was on the flotilla and the mainstream media ignored him and the US Congress would LOOOOVE to pass a law calling Meador a terrorist for being on that flotilla.
“It’s different, however, when an American Muslim male gets stuck in a hail of Israeli gunfire.” No, no, no. Israel gets off scot free with US media and politicians no matter what it does and no matter to whom. As Mr. Mearsheimer said in a speech earlier this month:
“If I went to the Middle East, and visited Israel, and I was killed, somebody shot me, do you think there would be any accountability? Seriously. If any of you went to the Middle East and were killed, do you think there would be accountability? There wouldn’t be. This is how outrageous this situation is.”
Exactly. The USS Liberty is the best of examples — perhaps the best of possible examples. Were that case emblazoned on front pages and lead stories in American media, Israel’s currency in the US would drop to zero instantaneously. Thus it has been very nearly erased from American history.
When it happened, the NY Times did not report it on the front page. A sustained air and sea attack on a US naval vessel killing 34 US sailors and wounding 170+ more was not front page worthy. I wonder what was on the NY Times front page that day? Its a big front page but no room to report the attack on the USS Liberty.
Cohen’s attempt here is to ascribe himself a status of liberal progressive one who’s willing to tackle such “controversial” (Isn’t that the euphemism the media loves to use?) topics.
But, Cohen’s agenda is actually no different from Jacob Wesberg’s agenda when he mentioned Meg Ryan’s cancellation of an appearance in Israel while neglecting to mention Dustin Hoffman’s. It’s a reverse form of lying by omission.
In Mr. Dogan’s case, Cohen would like to pretend that ONLY Muslims sympathize with the Palestinians, hence there is no mention of the late brave Rachel Corrie, or Tristan Anderson, or Emily who lost an eye to Israel’s brutal army thugs.
Thomas Freedman does the same. He often mentions the outrage across the Arab world when Israel commits an atrocity like the Gaza massacre, but pretends as though Europeans, Americans and others across the world are not outraged.
Bill O’reilly does the same, when he lies and claims that one group or another is “fringe of the fringe”, when in essence said group is quite popular.
I’m willing to give Cohen the benefit of the doubt and wait for a clarification. Perhaps he’s never heard of any non-Muslims who have joined the rest of humanity in calling for an end to the occupation and an end to the siege. Perhaps, Cohen has been living under a rock for decades. Who knows?!
Its now appeared in the New York Times, possibly due to the efforts of Phil, Adam, Richard Silverstein, others.
There was one comment by Cohen that I’m surprised no one has ranted about, (where are you Avi?).
That is:
“Let’s face it, without the flotilla outcry that allowed the Obama administration to question Israel’s 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.”
Do you think it is true, and with the meaning that Cohen presents, essentially that there is no strangulating blockade anymore. (The land crossings are still less than 1/4 of the pre-hudna period.)
Do you think that Cohen is essentially a pandering Israeli apologist for that?
However, PM David Cameron, speaking in Turkey today, referred to Gaza as a prison camp, and that it was a situation that must end. With considerable emphasis used.
Perhaps if Europe does start to step up, it’ll encourage the US to shuffle forward a little bit at least.
An interesting piece from WRH.
link to mycatbirdseat.com
Suggests that American Jews are not sufficiently patriotic to serve in the US forces, but also that those forces need to make service a bit less like an evangelist camp.
I wonder if we built a replica of the USS Liberty for the next Memorial Day Parade in Wahington and added a Wall Of Shame, with Lyndon Johnson and Levi Echol’s names above the names of the sailors killed and wounded, and George Bush’s name and his Israeli counterpart above the name of Rachel Corrie, and Barack Obama’s name and BiBi’s,above the name of Furkan Dogan, would:
1. The government allow it to be part of the Parade?
2. Would that get any press?
The people who determine who gets the Nobel “Peace” Prize seem to be under heavy neo-con and Zionist influence.
The unseemly haste to give this award to Obama despite his pledge to escalate the Afghan War was a disgrace to put it mildly.
Would not surprise me if the give the award to Netanyahu if he makes the slightest concession to the Palestinians despite his history of massacres and war mongering
This truly is 1984 in spades.