Roger Cohen wonders why the killing of American citizen Furkan Dogan by Israeli paratroopers has received so little attention and follow-up:
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.
I've noticed a very similar pattern with respect to US soldiers in Taliban captivity. I suspect it is because the US government now has no moral standing to complain about prisoner abuse and torture. And so we walk quickly on ...