There have been many low points in the course of President Joe Biden’s unconditional backing of Israel’s razing of Gaza the past year — the mass murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians first among them. But we keep discovering new ones. As the fallout from the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) September 6 murder of American activist Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi continues to billow out, it’s become undeniable that not only the Israeli government was lying about how she was killed but that the Biden administration has been too.
The administration’s immediate reaction to the murder was bad enough: silence, followed by a series of emotionless insistences to wait for more information, a world away from the instant outrage and threats that the discovery of the body of US hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, killed by Hamas a few days earlier, had triggered. But now it’s even worse.
The Biden administration has accepted and now backs Israel’s claim that the shooting was merely an accident, with the president calling it “a tragic error resulting from an unnecessary escalation” in a statement on Eygi’s death (released, unlike with Goldberg-Polin, two days after it happened). Talking off the cuff to reporters, Biden went further, claiming the IDF bullet had simply “ricocheted off the ground” and hit her. (This is all on top of the insult of multiple White House officials not learning to pronounce Eygi’s name properly, and the fact that Biden has not bothered to call up and talk to her family).
This has all now, predictably, been proven to be lies. Three forensic experts who reviewed the autopsy report of Eygi prepared by the Palestinian Authority (the entity that collaborates with Israel to govern the West Bank, and which is dominated by Hamas’s bitter political rival), told Middle East Eye its results indicate the sniper’s bullet was a direct shot to the activist’s head — not, in other words, a ricochet.
Meanwhile, based on its…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
