When asked by Israeli-American journalist Joseph Dana — who is covering the flotilla for The Nation — whether that sentiment applies to the shooting of journalists on board the ships, this was the reply:

Condemnation of this outburst was pervasive but also easy: cheering for a foreign army to shoot unarmed protesters — one’s fellow citizens — is self-evidently warped; that this came from a right-wing war-cheerleader-from-a-safe-distance with endless pretenses to uber-patriotism just added a layer of irony (Dear Foreign Nation: go ahead and shoot and kill Americans).  

But over the weekend, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also gave her views on the flotilla, and while her rhetoric was somewhat more restrained than that quoted above, she also seemed to endorse possible violence by this foreign nation against her own country’s peacefully protesting citizens:

Well, we do not believe that the flotilla is a necessary or useful effort to try to assist the people of Gaza. Just this week, the Israeli Government approved a significant commitment to housing in Gaza. There will be construction materials entering Gaza and we think that it’s not helpful for there to be flotillas that try to provoke actions by entering into Israeli waters and creating a situation in which the Israelis have the right to defend themselves.

Though Clinton’s language was draped with the subtleties of diplomatese, there is little doubt that she, too, is justifying a potential attack by a foreign government on unarmed American protesters (ironically, Clinton’s remarks came at the same Press Conference where she impugned the patriotism of others — namely, critics of the Libya War — by branding them as “on Gadaffi’s side”). 

The perception that Clinton endorsed possible Israeli violence against Americans is bolstered by the conduct of the U.S. Government in the wake of Israel’s attack on the prior Gaza flotilla, when Israel killed 9 people, including the unarmed 19-year-old American citizen (and Turkish citizen) Furkan Dogan.  While most governments instinctively condemn the killing of their own unarmed citizens by foreign armies — Turkey was furious at Israel for months and world leaders in virtual consensus harshly condemned the Israeli aggression — the Obama administration almost immediately took Israel’s side, culminating with Joe Biden’s disgusting rhetorical question, posed before the American teenager was even buried: “what’s the big deal here”? 

Worse, the Clinton State Department is now explicitly threatening Americans who participate in the flotilla with criminal prosecution (h/t Jason Ditz):

The United States on Friday warned activists against plans to send a new aid flotilla to challenge Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, saying it would be irresponsible and dangerous. . . . “We underscore that delivering or attempting or conspiring to deliver material support or other resources to or for the benefit of a designated foreign terrorist organization, such as Hamas, could violate U.S. civil and criminal statutes and could lead to fines and incarceration,” [State Department Spokesperson Victoria] Nuland said.

In contrast to the Israel-must-always-be-defended mindset of U.S. political officials, compare how other governments view the possible shooting of their citizens by a foreign country:

As the second “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” gets ready to sail this week, Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore urged Israel to avoid any repeat of last year’s actions against the convoy, Irish media reported Sunday.

“Israel must exercise all possible restraint and avoid any use of military force if attempting to uphold their naval blockade,” Gilmore, who also holds the post of trade minister, said after meeting with Israeli Ambassador to Dublin Boaz Moda.

“In particular, I would expect that any interception of ships is conducted in a peaceful manner and does not endanger the safety of our citizens or other participants,” he added, reiterating the country’s position that the Gaza blockade was “unjust and counterproductive’” and that the violence that marked last year’s flotilla venture was “completely unacceptable and unjustified.”

That type of uncontroversial statement — you shouldn’t shoot our unarmed citizens — is inconceivable when it comes to the U.S. and Israel.  So devoted is the U.S. Government to defending the actions of Israel’s that it will even preemptively justify violent attacks on its own citizens, threaten Americans protesting Israel’s policies with prosecution for aiding Terrorism, and isolate itself from the world to defend them.

Meanwhile, like the U.S., Israel is issuing its own menacing threats.  Yesterday, Israel announced that any journalists who are on the flotilla merely to cover it will be subject to a 10-year-ban from the country and the confiscation of their equipment. As noted this morning by the New York Times — one of whose reporters intends (or at least intended) to be on the flotilla — this is but the latest Israeli attack on press freedoms as a means of suppressing reports and examination of their conduct:

Two and a half years ago, when Israel invaded Gaza to stop Hamas from shooting rockets at Israeli communities — about 8,000 had been fired — the Israeli military barred reporters from entering Gaza to report on the war.

There was no public outcry, but the Foreign Press Association took the case to the Israeli Supreme Court, which ruled that the army had acted improperly. It ordered the army to admit a small groups of reporters. Commanders kept saying that it was unsafe, and it was not until the last day of the war that the foreign journalists were allowed to enter.

Israel did the same thing in the wake of the last flotilla attack, confiscating all video and other evidence from passengers and detaining on-board journalists, all to prevent the world from learning what it really did, ensuring that the heavily edited propaganda video the IDF produced and released to the world could not be critically examined. It’s strange that a country which incessantly claims that it acted properly is so fixated on suppressing journalistic freedoms and reports about what it did. And one thing is certain: if Israel does make good on its threats to violently attack protesting passengers and/or punish journalists for covering the event, the U.S. — even as it lectures the world on the evils of identical behavior — will have nothing but praise to offer.

UPDATE:  Israel now appears to be backing away from its threat to impose a 10-year ban on journalists, instead announcing it will “find a formula” to determine the proper sanction (h/t sysprog).  What’s most remarkable about all of this is that this flotilla (like the last one) has no intention of entering Israeli waters, nor is it delivering anything other than basic humanitarian supplies.  It is, manifestly, a theatrical, non-threatening form of peaceful protest against the blockade. Yet Israeli and U.S. officials continue to bloviate about “self-defense,” “entering into Israeli waters,” and criminally aiding Hamas; all of that is nothing more than a by-product of the notion that they own the world, and anyone who fails to honor that claim is either a Terrorist-sympathizer or even a Terrorist. 

UPDATE II [Tues.]:  I highly recommend this amazing story of how Israeli flotilla opponents got caught red-handed manufacturing and distributing an obnoxious, offensive fraudulent propaganda video, with the help (unwitting or otherwise) of the Israeli government.  As the links in that story demonstrate, this is anything but unusual.

The Malaysian group, the Perdana Global Peace Foundation, said its ship was fired at when it tried to reach Gaza. The military denied firing at the ship.

Perdana said no one was injured.

Gaza’s prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, condemned what he called “Israeli piracy” and urged other flotillas to attempt to break the Israeli blockade “so Gaza can have freedom of movement to the outside world.”

An aid flotilla is scheduled to depart for Gaza in the third week of June, about a year after Israeli forces raided a similar flotilla and killed nine people on a Turkish boat, the Mavi Marmara.

Israeli military officials have confirmed that preparations are under way to stop any new flotilla.

“This cabinet has become a burden on the Lebanese, unable to do its work,” Energy Minister Jibran Bassil said at a news conference announcing the resignations, flanked by the other ministers who are stepping down. “We are giving a chance for another government to take over.”

Hezbollah, which is backed by Iran and Syria, has denounced the tribunal as an “Israeli project” and urged Western-backed Prime Minister Saad Hariri — the son of the slain politician — to reject any findings by the court even before it announced any indictments.

But the prime minister has refused to break cooperation with the tribunal.

The office of Hariri had no immediate comment on the walkout that brought down his year-old government. Hariri was in Washington on Wednesday to meet with President Barack Obama.

The walkout followed the failure of a diplomatic push by Syria and Saudi Arabia to ease political tensions in Lebanon. There had been few details about the direction of the Syrian-Saudi initiative, but the talks were lauded as a potential Arab breakthrough, rather than a solution offered by Western powers.

Bassil said the ministers decided to resign after Hariri “succumbed to foreign and American pressures” and turned his back on the Syrian-Saudi efforts.

Calls to the tribunal seeking comment Wednesday were not immediately returned.

Hariri formed the current national unity government in November 2009, but it has struggled to function amid deep divisions. The crisis over the tribunal has paralyzed the government in recent months.

Violence has been a major concern as tensions rise in Lebanon, where Shiites, Sunnis and Christians each make up about a third of the country’s four million people. In 2008, sectarian clashes killed 81 people and nearly plunged Lebanon into another civil war.

Rafik Hariri’s assassination in a suicide bombing that killed 22 other people both stunned and polarized Lebanese. He was a Sunni who was a hero to his own community and backed by many Christians who sympathized with his efforts in the last few months of his life to reduce Syrian influence in the country. A string of assassinations of anti-Syrian politicians and public figures followed, which U.N. investigators have said may have been connected to the Hariri killing.

The Netherlands-based tribunal has not said who it will indict, but Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has said he has information that members of his group will be named.

——

AP Writers Bassem Mroue and Elizabeth A. Kennedy contributed to this report.

That name, of course, is a play on the Gaza aid flotilla, the boats carrying humanitaritan aid that were raided in May by Israeli commandoes, who killed nine of the passengers.

Those participating in the Hebron Aid Flotilla select from donation levels ranging from $100 to $100,000 in order to “raise our voices and take out our checkbooks in protest against the evil discrimination against the Jews of Hebron and Eretz Yisrael.” The main honoree and keynote speaker, will be Caroline Glick, the right-wing Jerusalem Post editor.

The Jews of Hebron are no ordinary settlers:

Today there are between 500 and 600 settlers living in the center of the city, guarded by 4,000 Israeli troops. They live among nearly 200,000 Palestinians.

The opulence of the recent Grand Hyatt event in New York stands in stark contrast to the brutal reality of life for the Palestinians who must live amid the settlements supported by the Hebron Fund’s charity. Like most of the West Bank and the entirety of Gaza, the Israeli occupation has transformed Palestinian Hebron into an open-air prison in which any sort of normal life is impossible. Hebron’s Palestinian citizens regularly endure round-the-clock curfews. They are effectively under house arrest, sometimes for weeks at a time. Violence at the hands of settlers is also a fact of Palestinian life in Hebron.

In its fundraising pitch, the Hebron Fund boasts that tax-deductible donations to the group will work against U.S. government policy:

2) Support for settlements is tax deductible! The fact that this administration may decide to fly in the face of US law and commitment does not negate the tax deduction on donations to Jewish causes on the West Bank. Even the NY Times wrote: “…the tax code encourages citizens to support nonprofit groups that may diverge from official policy, as long as their missions are educational, religious or charitable.”

They’re right — that Times article is right here.

Even more striking in terms of U.S. media and government silence on this report is the fact that one of the victims of the worst Israeli violations was a 19-year-old American citizen.  As Gareth Porter documents in an excellent article at The Huffington Post, the report “shows conclusively, for the first time, that US citizen Furkan Dogan and five Turkish citizens were murdered execution-style by Israeli commandos.”  In particular:

The report reveals that Dogan, the 19-year-old US citizen of Turkish descent, was filming with a small video camera on the top deck of the Mavi Marmara when he was shot twice in the head, once in the back and in the left leg and foot and that he was shot in the face at point blank range while lying on the ground.

The report says Dogan had apparently been “lying on the deck in a conscious or semi-conscious, state for some time” before being shot in his face.

The forensic evidence that establishes that fact is “tattooing around the wound in his face,” indicating that the shot was “delivered at point blank range.” The report describes the forensic evidence as showing that “the trajectory of the wound, from bottom to top, together with a vital abrasion to the left shoulder that could be consistent with the bullet exit point, is compatible with the shot being received while he was lying on the ground on his back.”

Needless to say, the Israeli Government — as it virtually always does when confronted with well-documented, official findings of its severe human rights violations — attacked the source, accusing the report of being ”biased and distorted.”  The U.N. investigators interviewed 112 witnesses and consulted with numerous forensic and medical experts, while Israel refused to speak with its investigators (though Israeli officials are cooperating with a separate group investigating the attack).  There’s no reason to take the findings of this report as Gospel:   like everything, it’s subject to reasonable dispute, but it’s clearly well-documented, consistent with documentary evidence and overwhelming witness tesitmony, and is entitled to be taken seriously.

To this day, I’m still amazed by how the American media and U.S. Government responded to this incident, given the fact that it was painfully obvious from the start that the Israelis’ conduct was the behavior of a guilty party.  The Israelis immediately seized all documentary evidence from the passengers showing what actually happened, blocked all media access to witnesses by detaining everyone on board (including journalists) for days, and then quickly released its own highly edited video — spliced to begin well into the middle of the Israeli attack — that was dutifully and unquestioningly shown over and over by the U.S. media to make it appear that the flotilla passengers were the first to become violent.  That was a lie from the start, and it was an obvious lie. 

In no other situation would a party to a conflict who steals all of the evidence, withholds it from the world, and then selectively releases its own blatantly distorted, edited version of a fraction of the evidence be trusted.  The opposite is true:  that party would immediately be assumed to be guilty precisely because of that very behavior of obfuscation; that behavior is the behavior of a guilty party.  But with Israel, the opposite happens (at least in the U.S.).  The IDF video was shown over and over to propagnadize Americans into believing that the passengers were the first to engage in aggression, even though the video — and the Israelis’ withholding of all the rest of the evidence — begged the glaringly obvious question:  what happened before the commandos descended onto the ship?  Based on smuggled video and forensic evidence, this new report documents what countless flotilla witnesses tried to tell the world once they were finally released:  ”live ammunition was used from the helicopter onto the top deck prior to the descent of the soldiers” (p. 26; para. 114 — emphasis added).

Last Wednesday night, I spoke at Brooklyn Law School on this event, and with me on the panel were Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi and Iranian-American lawyer Fatima Mohammadi, who was on the Mavi Marmara.  I’m trying very hard to obtain the video of that event because Mohammadi’s narration of what happened — all documented by smuggled video from passengers’ cell phones — leaves little doubt as to who the guilty aggressors were here.  I would really like as many people as possible to hear what she has to say and view the video evidence and make their own assessments as to her credibility and persuasiveness.  Suffice to say, there is no doubt that the Israelis used force against the passengers long before the commandos descended onto the ship — which is precisely why Israel prevented the world from seeing any evidence showing what happened before the events in the IDF video, and why the U.N. Report so conclusively found Israel at fault.  I’d be willing to venture that a tiny percentage of the American public, whose perceptions were shaped by American media coverage, have any clue that this is the case.

The fact that a 19-year-old American citizen was one of the dead — among those whom the report concluded was “summarily executed” by the Israelis — makes the U.S. Government’s silence here all the more appalling.  One of the prime duties of a government is to safeguard the welfare of its own citizens.  It’s inconceivable for most governments in the world to remain silent in the face of formal findings that a foreign nation “summarily executed” one of its own citizens.  One of the reasons Turkey was so emphatic in its condemnation of Israel was because the dead were Turkish citizens; that’s what governments do when a foreign nation kills its own citizens.  Yet not only does the U.S. Government sit silently, but its prior statements defending Israel were disgustingly cavalier.  Virtually the entire world — literally — vehemently condemned Israel for what it did here, yet the U.S. refused and continues to refuse to do so, notwithstanding these findings that one of its own citizens was essentially murdered.

Perhaps most illustrative of all is how inconceivable it is to imagine the U.S. Congress doing anything at all in the face of this report . . . . except passing a Resolution condemning the investigators themselves while defending Israeli actions, including the actions that resulted in the death of an American teenager.  Is there any doubt that such a Resolution would pass with overwhelming bipartisan support, approaching unanimity — as happens each and every time there is a controversy involving Israel?   Thus far, the U.S. media and Government are largely silent about this U.N. Report, but if they are prodded into responding, the response will almost certainly be to condemn the report itself while defending and justifying Israeli actions even in the face of overwhelming evidence as to what really happened here, which managed to emerge despite the Israelis’ very telling efforts to keep it suppressed.

* * * * *

In not unrelated news, a new Gallup survey of numerous Middle Eastern and North African nations finds that public opinion of the U.S. and its political leadership has collapsed back to Bush-era levels.  That is consistent with prior polls in the Muslim world finding the same thing.  One of the central, stated goals of the Obama campaign and his presidency was improving how that part of the world perceives of the United States, on the ground that widespread anti-American sentiment is what fuels Terrorism and endangers Americans around the world.  That effort is clearly failing.

UPDATE:  Just to get a sense for how little attention has been paid to the killing of this American teenager by Israel, contrast how much media attention was devoted to mourning the Iranian Government’s killing of Neda Agha-Soltan with the attention paid to Dogan.  A NEXIS search for “Neda and Iran” produces this:

A search for “Furkan Dogan” produces this (click image to enlarge):

In terms of attention and coverage, they’re not even in the same universe.

UPDATE II:  I neglected to mention that the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council voted to endorse this report.  The vote was 30 in favor, 15 abstentions, and 1 opposed.  No prizes are available for those who are able to guess the one nation voting against.

UPDATE III:  Mark Leon Goldberg notes that he wrote about the U.N. Report yesterday for U.N. Disptach, as did The Washington Post‘s Column Lynch, so there was some limited media coverage.