There would no longer be an Iran.
A U.S. citizen who lived in Turkey is among the nine people killed when Israeli commandos stormed a Turkish aid ship heading for the Gaza Strip, officials said today. The victim was identified as Furkan Dogan, 19, a Turkish-American. A forensic report said he was shot at close range, with four bullets in his head and one in his chest, according to the Anatolian news agency. Dogan was a high school student studying social sciences in the town of Kayseri in central Turkey. He was born in Troy, N.Y., and moved to Turkey at the age of 2. He will be buried in his hometown tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the Party Known as Scum weighs in
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While the Obama administration takes a wait-and-see approach to the newest crisis in the Middle East, some Democrats in Congress stand firmly behind Israel’s raid of a Turkish flotilla en route to Gaza.
New York Democratic Reps. Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Gary Ackerman, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Rep. Ron Klein (D-Fla.) have all vigorously supported Israel’s boarding an aid ship bound for the blockaded Gaza — an act that resulted in ten deaths and a U.N. condemnation.
The comments expose a bit of daylight between the White House and some staunch defenders of Israel in Congress. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said the administration is “greatly supportive of [Israel’s] security. That’s not going to change.” And in a statement, the White House said it had “regret” for the deaths but supported an investigation to uncover the facts.
Pro-Israel Democrats aren’t being so nuanced.
I think that members of the United States Congress understand why the blockade was in place against Hamas and support it, once you start at that place, a boat that bows into the teeth of that blockade isn’t going to be viewed sympathetically,” Weiner said. “To the extent that any time that there is a flare-up of tensions, it’s bad for U.S. and Israeli efforts of peace. We obviously had a bad weekend.”
Ackerman, who chairs the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East, said he “strongly support(s) Israel’s right to defend itself, and the right of Israel’s naval commandos, who were executing a legal mission, to defend themselves by using force when they were brutally attacked.”
He called Hamas the “true villain in this drama.”
And of course there's the Afrikaner Party
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Some conservative commentators and lawmakers are pointing the finger of blame at President Barack Obama over Israel's raid on a Gaza-bound humanitarian flotilla that ended with the death of nine activists.
On Tuesday, Sen. John McCain told Fox News that the Obama administration's calls for a settlement freeze in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem set the stage for the deadly May 31 incident.
"This is another step in a chain of unfortunate events beginning with President Obama’s insistence that there be a freeze, as a precondition for peace talks, a freeze on settlements in Jerusalem," McCain told Fox's Sean Hannity. "Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, not a settlement."
Talk show host Michael Savage linked President Obama to the flotilla raid much more directly. Savage told listeners that he believed the Israeli commandos sent on board the Mavi Marmara were "betrayed" so that their deaths would be "good PR" for Israel's allies. (No Israeli service members died in the raid.) And he suggested it was the Obama administration that pressured Israel into "dangling [its] soldiers like bait into a tank of sharks."
As far as I know, it was Obama's administration that told them how to do this attack," Savage said. "It was probably one of America's peace-loving generals, who knows which one of them did it."
Savage then went on to suggest an even stranger theory: That the flotilla itself was set up by political extremists in the United States who have been linked to Obama.
"There are Web sites that are alleging that this was orchestrated not so much by Turkey but by the United States, from Chicago, by Bill Ayres and Bernadette Dhorn, who are members of the Free Gaza group."
The West Bank, hell. Looks like the entire Eastern seaboard is IDF occupied territory.
