JERUSALEM — A Maryland woman lost her eye after being injured at a Jerusalem demonstration against Israel's naval raid on a Gaza aid flotilla, a hospital official said Tuesday.
Emily Henochowicz, 21, underwent surgery after suffering the injury, said hospital spokeswoman Yael Bossem-Levy.
Henochowicz was hit in the face by a tear gas canister shot by an Israeli border policeman, said witness Jonathan Pollak.
He said Palestinian youths were hurling rocks, but Henochowicz didn't participate in any violence and was standing at a distance.
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Mondoweiss): Can the Israel government maim Americans with impunity?
Glenn Greenwald - The Israeli flotilla attack: victimhood, aggression and tribalismCry, my beloved country, this amazing photo of the shooting of Emily Henochowicz, 21, a Cooper Union art student demonstrating against Israel's flotilla raid on Monday, is at the Baltimore Sun site (she's from Maryland). It was taken by Majdi Mohammed of AP. More photos of Henochowicz, I'm afraid very graphic, at ISM site. Henochowicz lost her left eye and had to have reconstructive surgery on her face, in Israel.
No news at the Cooper site, though they did issue a statement we picked up Tuesday.
Note the grim surroundings of the Qalandiya checkpoint, this is the eastern side of the checkpoint. Oh and it has been reported that Henochowicz is Jewish.
She is an artist. Here is her youtube page, check out Walkers and a frontier, and the flipbook. Wow. What was such a young and gifted American artist doing at Qalandiya checkpoint? We're pulling for you, Emily.
One of the primary reasons the Turkish Government has been so angry in its denunciations of the Israeli attack on the flotilla is because many of the dead were Turkish citizens. That's what governments typically do: object vociferously when their citizens are killed by foreign nations under extremely questionable circumstances. Needless to say, that principle -- as all principles are -- will be completely discarded when it comes to the U.S. protection of Israel:
A U.S. citizen of Turkish origin was among the nine people killed when Israeli commandos attacked a Gaza-bound aid flotilla . . . An official from the Turkish Islamic charity that spearheaded the campaign to bust the blockade on Gaza identified the U.S. citizen as 19-year-old Furkan Dogan . . . . Dogan, who held a U.S. passport, had four bullet wounds to the head and one to the chest . . . .
Will the fact that one of the dead at Israel's hands was an American teenager with four bullet wounds to his head alter the Obama administration's full-scale defense of Israel? Does that question even need to be asked? Not even American interests can undermine reflexive U.S. support for anything Israel does; even the Chief of the Mossad acknowledged this week that "Israel is progressively becoming a burden on the United States." One dead 19-year-old American with 4 bullet holes in his head (especially one of Turkish origin with a Turkish-sounding name) surely won't have any impact.
Yesterday, newly elected British Prime Minister David Cameron became the latest world leader to unequivocally condemn Israel, saying the attack was "completely unacceptable" and demanding an end to the blockade. But last night on Charlie Rose's show, Joe Biden defended Israel with as much vigor as any Netanyahu aide or Weekly Standard polemicist. Biden told what can only be described as a lie when, in order to justify his rhetorical question "what's the big deal here?," he claimed that the ships could have simply delivered their aid to Israel and Israel would then have generously sent it to Gaza ("They've said, 'Here you go. You're in the Mediterranean. This ship -- if you divert slightly north you can unload it and we'll get the stuff into Gaza'."). In fact, contrary to the Central Lie being told about the blockade, Israel prevents all sorts of humanitarian items having nothing whatsoever to do with weapons from entering Gaza, including many of the supplies carried by the flotilla.
One can express all sorts of outrage over the Obama administration's depressingly predictable defense of the Israelis, even at the cost of isolating ourselves from the rest of the world, but ultimately, on some level, wouldn't it have been even more indefensible -- or at least oozingly hypocritical -- if the U.S. had condemned Israel? After all, what did Israel do in this case that the U.S. hasn't routinely done and continues to do? As even our own military officials acknowledge, we're slaughtering an "amazing number" of innocent people at checkpoints in Afghanistan. We're routinely killing civilians in all sorts of imaginative ways in countless countries, including with drone strikes which a U.N. official just concluded are illegal. We're even targeting our own citizens for due-process-free assassination. We've been arming Israel and feeding them billions of dollars in aid and protecting them diplomatically as they (and we) have been doing things like this for decades. What's the Obama administration supposed to say about what Israel did: we condemn the killing of unarmed civilians? We decry these violations of international law? Even by typical standards of government hypocrisy, who in the U.S. Government could possibly say any of that with a straight face?
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Obama hasn't commented forcefully on either the protest incident or Israel's criminal raid of the Gaza aid ship and its murder of humanitarian activists. That's because America is led by fucking murderers, cowards, and traitors. And hypocrites. If Iran had done this, U.S. politicians would've gone ballistic.
