Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

As pathetic as this woman was, she does give me a perverse sense of cultural superiority as an American. Palestinians have their misguided suicide "martyrs" and we have ours, but at least our would-be martyrs don't take down innocent victims with them. As this blog is dedicated to proving that Rachel Corrie was a fool, any comments that stray towards other topics, such as justifying Islamic fascist terrorism, will be deleted. But feel free to post any rebuttal of the information provided.

Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Rachel Corrie is still dead.

Who Killed Rachel Corrie?
Still confused? You should be

By Judy Lash Balint

According to a fellow Evergreen State College student, Joseph Smith, 21, who was at the site, Corrie dropped her bullhorn and sat down in front of one of the bulldozers. She fully expected that the driver would stop just in front of her. “We were horribly surprised,” Smith told me by phone from Rafah the day after the incident. “They had been careful not to hurt us. They’d always stopped before,” he said.

As the bulldozer plowed forward heaping up a pile of dirt and sand, Corrie scrambled up the pile to sit on the top, screaming slogans at the driver. Smith says she lost her footing as the bulldozer made the earth move beneath her feet. “She got pulled down,” he says. “The driver lost sight of her and continued forward. Then, without lifting the blade he reversed and Rachel was underneath the mid-section of the bulldozer--she wasn’t run over by the tread.”

...I ask about the series of photos printed in an Arab newspaper I picked up that morning in Jerusalem’s Old City. “They aren’t of the actual incident,” he states firmly. “We’d been there for three hours already, we were tired: we already had a lot of pictures.”

Yet these are the pictures used on the ISM website, to document the before and after of Rachel’s interaction with the bulldozer. The same pictures are featured as a photo-essay on the site of Electronic Intifada, where they’re even attributed to Joseph Smith.
...
Even Michael Shaikh, the ISM media coordinator, won’t confirm that these are pictures of Corrie taken the day she died. “I’m fairly sure—they’re of the incident,” he tells me by phone from his Bethlehem office. In the same conversation, Shaikh asks me not to contact Joe, Greg or Tom, the Rafah ISM eyewitnesses again directly: “They’re still in traumatized.”

Where is the mound of earth Rachel clambered up and was buried in? The woman shown lying bleeding from her nose and mouth is lying on a flat piece of ground, and she’s not covered in sand.

...was Rachel alive when she was taken by Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance to Martyr Mohammed Yousef An Najar Hospital? In other words, where did she die? Were adequate efforts made to save her in the hospital?

Again, there are conflicting stories. Joseph Smith tells me in a telephone interview the day after the tragedy, “She died in the hospital or on the way to the hospital.” CNN also reported that Rachel died there.

In his account posted on www.arabia.com, ISMer Tom Dale has a slightly different story. On March 17 he writes: “I ran for an ambulance, she was gasping and her face was covered in blood from a gash cutting her face from lip to cheek. She was showing signs of brain hemorrhaging. She died in the ambulance a few minutes later of massive internal injuries.”

But Dr. Ali Mussa, director of Martyr Mohammed Yousef An Najar Hospital where Corrie was taken isn’t so clear. On the day of the event, Dr. Mussa tells AP Gaza reporter Ibrahim Barzak that Rachel died in the hospital.

One week later, in a telephone interview with me, Dr. Mussa states definitively that Rachel died at the scene, “in the soil,” as he puts it. “The main cause of death was suffocation,” Mussa asserts. There were no signs of life, no heartbeat or pulse when she arrived at the hospital, he says. Mussa states that Rachel’s ribs were fractured, a fact determined by X-rays. (Is it normal procedure to X-ray a dead body?)

Doesn’t quite jive with the photo essay on the pages of the Electronic Intifada website for March 16, 2003.

A caption under one photo of doctors leaning over a female patient reads: “Rachel arrived in the Emergency Room at 5:05 p.m and doctors scrambled to save her. By 5:20 p.m, she was gone. Ha’aretz newspaper reported that Dr. Ali Mussa, a doctor at Al Najar, stated that the cause of death was “skull and chest fractures.” Dr. Mussa told me he was one of the treating physicians--yet he alone maintains that Rachel was dead before she was put into the ambulance. To further complicate matters, on that same website, a report from the Palestine Monitor is cited. Here, the writer says that Rachel fractured “both her arms, legs and skull. She was transferred to hospital, where she later died.”

...Just who is Dr. Ali Mussa? Clearly a man in favor with the Palestine Authority hierarchy. Dr. Mussa’s views are aired on the official website of the PA’s Ministry of Planning and International Cooperation: (January 27, 2003)

A few days after the incident, ISM Media Coordinator Michael Shaikh tells me by phone from Rafah that three ISMers, Tom, Alice and Greg were in the ambulance with Rachel. “She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” says Michael. But Greg Schnabel, 28, who is quoted in numerous wire service and newspaper stories, never says he witnessed the death of his comrade in the ambulance. In his account published a few days later on the ISM website, he carefully states that she died twenty minutes after arriving at the hospital.

What happened to Rachel’s body after her death? Depends who you ask. Dr. Mussa says it was kept for 24 hours at the hospital before a Red Crescent ambulance transported it “to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv,” via the border where an Israeli ambulance took over. Michael Shaikh says “we lost track of it (her body) after she died.” Three ISMers tried to escort the body, but only one was permitted on the ambulance on the Israeli side. According to his account, the ambulance drove straight to the Israeli Forensic Institute at Abu Kabir, where an autopsy was performed. “The Israelis are trying to say she died from a blow to the head by a rock,” Shaikh recounts.

...Confusion and obfuscation seem to be a trademark of the ISM.

...So, while the memorial services laud and remember Rachel Corrie as a 'peace activist' 'murdered by Israeli occupation forces,' the truth lies elsewhere.

An Israeli bulldozer injured Corrie as she tried to prevent it doing its job of protecting Israeli civilians, but she was alive when she was taken to An Najar Hospital, according to at least three eyewitnesses. Only Dr. Mussa, a man intent on accusing Israel of child killing, claims otherwise. None of Rachel's comrades have stated they were with her in the hospital when she died.

"Bring on the inquiry," writes Jerusalem Diaries founder Judy Lash Balint.

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

Corrie died as a result of her own stupidity!

Rachel Corrie, One Year Later
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 13, 2004

The one-year anniversary of the demise of Rachel Corrie has not passed without fanfare. Rachel’s mother and others on the Left have observed the cosmic event by condemning alleged Israeli (and U.S.) intransigence in the investigation of the death. In the Boston Globe of March 18, 2004, Rachel Corrie's mother wrote:



Rachel was an unarmed peace activist trying to prevent the demolition of the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, his wife, and three children. She believed that nonviolent direct action against the Israeli occupation would make Palestinians, and also Israelis and Americans, more secure. Rachel stood there to protect a home and family in Gaza because the United States and Israel rejected a UN proposal to send international human rights monitors there. International activists went instead. Rachel stood there protesting illegal home demolitions that the United States opposes on the record yet fails to stop – destruction that we support with billions in annual military aid to Israel for bulldozers, Apache helicopters, F-16s, and more.



She went on to demand that the United States run its own investigation into her daughter's death, and reject the conclusions from Israel's own official investigation, which concluded that Corrie had been struck accidentally by a bulldozer operator who was unable to see her, blaming Corrie herself for blocking the bulldozer in the middle of its operation. In other statements, the Corrie family has been far more bellicose, denouncing Israel for maintaining an “illegal occupation of Palestinian lands.”



What are we to make of this new Corrie family jihad? For those whose memories fail them in this matter, let me refresh things. Rachel Corrie was a young fanatic college student from Washington State, who decided she could make the world a better place by showing her solidarity with Middle East terrorism and Palestinian mass murderers. She joined the International Solidarity Movement, a communist-anarchist group who openly support Palestinian terrorism. Corrie set up shop in the Gaza Strip, where she and her ISM comrades spent their days trying to harass and provoke Israeli troops and interfere with Israel's anti-terrorist military operations. They would set up obstacles on roads to prevent Israeli troops and otherwise assist and defend the terrorists. The ISM is probably the campus organization most upfront about its support for the Palestinian “right” to engage in terrorism, and that is saying quite a lot these days!



In one confrontation with the Israelis, Corrie was trying to block an army bulldozer that was knocking down homes of terrorists and buildings hiding tunnels through which weapons and explosives were being smuggled into Israel. These tunnels brought weapons from Egypt to the Gaza city of Rafiah. One of these homes might have been that which Corrie's parents describe as that of an “innocent pharmacist.” Corrie and her ISM comrades wanted to help protect the Gaza smuggling tunnels. Rachel Corrie put herself in a position where the bulldozer driver could not see her, and she was dragged under the heavy machine. She died in a PLO ambulance or hospital shortly thereafter. The ISM then issued a host of "eyewitness" reports about the accident, which turned out to be fabrications. The simple fact of the matter was that Corrie had figured the Israeli bulldozer driver could be cowed into backing off if he saw her blocking his access to the terrorist house; she probably figured correctly, except that he did not see her from his limited-visibility window in the rig.



Ever since, Rachel Corrie has become the matron martyr saint for the pro-terrorism Left, the Joan of Arc of Palestinian terrorism. Her ISM friends declared she was "murdered" intentionally by Israel (see for example http://www.rachelcorrie.org/ ). Her death has been exploited by the Bash-Israel movement and by anti-Semites all over the world, as a means to delegitimize Israel. The PLO adopted her as mascot, declaring that she died “fighting Israel's security fence”; never mind that Israel did not begin building the security fence until well after she was dead.



Later other ISM activists were also injured when they put themselves in the middle of firefights, started when the PLO would fire on Israelis, and – like Corrie – they were injured and one other died trying to protect those terrorists from Israelis shooting back. In this other case of a death of ISM member Tom Hurndall, the ISM led a worldwide campaign to demonize the soldier who shot him. Ironically, it turned out the soldier who shot Hurndall was an Arab Bedouin patriot living in Israel and serving in the Israeli military.



Corrie's own parents have gone on their own revenge, touring the world to demonize Israel, and represent daughter Rachel as a "victim of Israel's illegal occupation." They and other ISM supporters have been organizing a boycott of the Caterpiller Corporation, because it sells machines to Israel, including the one with which Corrie chose to face down a year ago. The Corrie parents insist that Rachel was there to promote non-violence and brotherly love. But Rachel and her ISM friends of course believed in nothing of the sort and were doing nothing of the sort. The official ISM web site endorses "armed struggle" by Palestinians, which means random mass murders of Israeli children.



Corrie died as a result of her own stupidity.

Monday, November 27, 2006

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

Evergreen State College is honoring ISM terror enabler Rachel Corrie today at their graduation ceremonies: Graduation day activities to honor slain activist. (Thanks to all who emailed about this.)

Of course, this article in the Olympian repeats the lie that she was “run over by a bulldozer” again. This is becoming an item of faith, repeated endlessly, never checked for truth.

Rachel Corrie, the young Olympia woman who died March 16 in the Palestinian community of Rafah when she was run over by an Israeli military bulldozer, would have graduated today.

Instead, her mother, Cindy Corrie, will accept a posthumous diploma on her behalf. It is one of two posthumous diplomas being awarded.

The diploma is part of the official program, but at least two separate efforts in Corrie's name promise to inject a dose of politics into Evergreen's graduation program.

Hundreds of volunteers from Women in Black, an international women's group promoting peace between Israelis and Palestinians, will stage a vigil during graduation.

The group's twin goals today are to honor Rachel Corrie's memory and to push Congress to demand a full investigation into her death.

Organizers are aware that some critics have expressed concern about the attention given to Rachel Corrie and see it as criticism of Israel that borders on anti-Semitism.
Yes, organizers are “aware” of this, but that isn’t stopping this offensive travesty of a graduation ceremony.

Is the college aware of this photograph showing Saint Rachel teaching the little children of Palestine, which can still be found at the web site of the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace?

Sunday, November 26, 2006

RACHEL CORRIE: A SAD "SOLIDARITY" STORY

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!
RACHEL CORRIE: A SAD "SOLIDARITY" STORY!!!

By Gary Fitleberg

According to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and falsely perpetuated by the vast majority of the media, allegedly "Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israel while she was peacefully protesting against the illegal demolition of a Palestinian home."

American Rachel Corrie was killed in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003, when she entered an area where Israeli forces were carrying out a military operation. The incident tragically and unfortunately occurred while IDF forces were removing shrubbery along the security road near the border between Israel and Egypt at Rafah to uncover explosive devices, and destroying tunnels used by Palestinian terrorists to illegally smuggle weapons from Egypt to Gaza.

Corrie was not demonstrating for peace or trying to shield innocent civilians, she was interfering with a military operation to legally demolish an empty house used to conceal one of these tunnels.

A misleading photo published by the Associated Press gave the impression that Corrie was standing in front of the bulldozer and shouting at the driver with a megaphone, trying to prevent the driver from tearing down a building in the refugee camp. This photo, which was taken by a member of Corrie's organization, was not shot at the time of her death, however, but hours earlier. The photographer said that Corrie was actually sitting and waving her arms when she was struck (Christian Science Monitor, April 02, 2003).

Israel's Judge Advocate's Office investigated the incident and concluded that the driver of the bulldozer never saw or heard Corrie because she was standing behind debris that obstructed the view of the driver whose field of view was limited by the small armored windows of his cab. An autopsy found that the cause of Corrie's death was falling debris (Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2003).

The State Department warned Americans not to travel to Gaza, and Israel made clear that civilians who enter areas where troops are engaged in counter-terror operations put themselves unnecessarily at risk. This was not the first time protestors have tried to obstruct Israeli operations, and the IDF has made every effort to avoid harming them. This case received worldwide publicity in large measure because it was the first such incident where a protestor was killed. In fact, the army had told Corrie and other demonstrators from the anti-Israel International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to move out of the way. "It?s possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked," admitted Thom Saffold, a founder and organizer of ISM (Washington Post, March 17, 2003).

The death of an innocent civilian is always tragic, and the best way to avoid such tragedies in the future is, first and foremost, by the Palestinian Authority putting an end to violence, and stopping the smuggling operations that have brought huge quantities of illegal weapons into the Gaza Strip. Activists interested in peace should be protesting the Palestinian actions. Activists also have every right to express their views about Israel?s policies, but they should take care to avoid the appearance of siding with the terrorists or placing themselves in positions where they could be inadvertently caught in the crossfire of a counter-terror operation or otherwise endangered by entering an area where military operations are being conducted.

Gary Fitleberg is a Political Analyst specializing in International Relations with emphasis on Middle East affairs.

"Rachel Corrie went out last night and stopped a tractor with her head."

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

They say that Rachel Corrie was a girl of youthful age,
with political impressions that filled her full of rage.
Born into America, she hated her own land,
She had everything a girl could want: beauty, brains, degrees.
But I have something else I see
And I curse the life she's wasted
and I curse stupidity,
and I wish that I could see,
oh, I wish that I could see,
a point on which we could agree:
Rachel Corrie.

The papers print her picture as a constant running gag,
Rachel Corrie at a peace march, Rachel Corrie burning flags.
And the rumor of her protests, and the stories that she's dead,
Oh, the ISM is happy, with the fallout from this thread.

But I have something else I see
And I curse the life she's wasted
and I curse stupidity,
and I wish that I could see,
oh, I wish that I could see,
a point on which we could agree:
Rachel Corrie.

She freely hated her land; she lived a vicious lie,
and the Arabs were so grateful that she never asked them, "why?"
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Rachel Corrie went out last night and stopped a tractor with her head."

But I have something else I see
And I curse the life she's wasted
and I curse stupidity,
and I wish that I could see,
oh, I wish that I could see,
a point on which we could agree:
Rachel Corrie.


"Rachel Corrie" myths inspire antisemitsm

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | The deplorable state of Middle East Studies on college campuses has been a topic of grave concern for many of those who follow the declining fortunes of American scholarship. That an entire field of academic study has grown up in the last quarter-century that seeks to delegitimize Zionism and Israel is not news. But efforts to do something about it are worth mentioning.


How bad is the situation? Bad enough that Gratz College, a nondenominational Jewish institution here in the Philadelphia region feels that it's worth it to create a new institute specifically designed to be an academic answer to Mideast-studies departments that are hotbeds of anti-Zionism. Speakers at a local dinner that sought to galvanize support for the project noted that pervasive bias in the academy against Israel that is the hallmark of intellectual discourse at campuses around the country needs an academic response rooted in scholarship.


But how is it that supposedly intelligent people have bought in to the notion that the presence of Jews in their ancient homeland and their attempts to defend their presence are an offense to Arabs?


As it happens, you needn't go back to college to observe how the conversation among the elites about Jewish topics is changing. Instead, a visit to a performance of a much acclaimed British play that opened at an off-Broadway theater in New York City this week will give you an indication of which way the wind is blowing.


The play is "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," an adaptation of the letters and e-mail messages of a member of the International Solidarity Movement, a group that proclaims its opposition to Israel's existence and whose members actively seek to prevent the Israeli army from acting against terrorist targets.

A SAINT'S LIFE
Corrie, a 23-year-old American from Everest, Wash., was one of the "internationals" planted in the border town of Rafah, where the IDF was seeking to demolish tunnels that were used by the Palestinians to bring arms and explosives into Gaza to use against Jewish targets (a practice that continues to this day).


In the course of one such Israeli attempt to knock down a structure shielding one of the tunnels that ran from Egypt into Gaza in March 2003, she placed herself in front of an Israeli bulldozer. But she slipped on a mound of dirt, and was killed in what the IDF determined was an accident, but her cohorts charged was murder.


It was — like all the deaths that have resulted from the Palestinian war to destroy Israel — a pointless waste of life. But for left-wing activists like acclaimed British actor Alan Rickman and former Guardian editor Katherine Viner, Corrie's life and death was perfect fodder for a work designed to further the cause for which she gave her life: the delegitimization of the State of Israel.


You needn't waste time discussing the artistic merit of the piece. Despite the praise it got in London, the Corrie play is a one-woman rant devoid of drama or literary appeal that is as likely to put its audience to sleep as it to send them to the barricades.


But "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" isn't merely propaganda; it's a polemic with a clear purpose: the creation of a secular saint. And not just an ordinary saint. It is a hagiography of a particular kind of saint: the victim of a Jewish blood libel.


The seemingly endless first half of the play is devoted to her life back home in Washington. But the banality of her life and observations are not without purpose. The Rachel Corrie we are shown is a New Age, non-Jewish Anne Frank.


She is portrayed as a sensitive American kid who went off to Gaza, where she wound up questioning her belief in the humanity of the Israelis who were battling her Palestinian pals.


Seen through Corrie's peculiar tunnel vision, Israel is an evil power whose only purpose seems to be to make nonviolent Palestinian Arabs miserable.


In her version of Gaza, terror groups were invisible. The Palestinian decision to launch the intifada, which created the fighting she witnessed never happened. All she sees are a Palestinian population resisting Israeli "oppression" with "Ghandian" forbearance.


The Israel that Corrie passes briefly through on her way to Gaza is a blank slate. Though she disavows anti-Semitism, the Jewish state is for her, and for the play's authors, merely an extension of evil American foreign policy and military power. Her only reaction to signs of Jewish life is to note that she has never before seen a Star of David used as a symbol of "colonialism."


As for Corrie's take on the other side of the ledger, the deaths of a thousand Jews at the hands of her nonviolent buddies aren't worth mentioning.


Her reaction to an e-mail from her mother questioning Palestinian violence is an impassioned rant justifying any measures the Palestinians might take to fight the Israelis. Suicide bombings get kashrut certification from Corrie because the sweet Palestinians she meets are worthy — and the faceless Israelis are not.

THE POWER OF A LIE
The play concludes on this moderate note. What follows then is an audiotape of one of Corrie's confederates, claiming she was killed deliberately.


After that, the audience is treated to an actual home video of the 10-year-old Corrie affirming her opposition to world hunger before the lights go out.


We can poke fun at the pretensions of the authors of such maudlin trash, as Oscar Wilde did over a century ago when he wrote of another piece of sentimental hogwash, "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."


But it would be a mistake to underestimate the power of a lie, even one so transparent as Rickman and Viner's mythical version of the misguided Corrie.


There is a tradition of using theater as a political bully pulpit, and you can easily imagine this farrago having a long shelf life, touring the provinces and college campuses where untold numbers of naive audience members will grieve anew over the death of innocent little Rachel at the hands of the rapacious Jews.


Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner — and all those who applaud their work — want you to believe that Rachel Corrie died for America's Middle East sins.


But if you believe that, it isn't much of a stretch to think, as Corrie apparently did, that the Jews of Israel deserve to die, too. As British writer Tom Gross noted at the time of the play's opening, its promoters, like Corrie herself, might have taken the time to learn about the many other Rachels, the Jewish women and girls slaughtered by Palestinians in the name of a jihad that Corrie supported.


Yet what makes "Rachel Corrie" worth noting is that this premise of Israeli perfidy and Palestinian victimhood is actually presented in many an American classroom.


Those who wonder that truth can be so easily stood on its head need only wander up from the West Village playhouse where the show will appear until the end of the year, and visit virtually any campus where a Middle East Studies department has taken root.

Friday, November 24, 2006

: "Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

Bulldozed by Naivete
Terror advocate dies in accident. Atrocious drama ensues.
BY TERRY TEACHOUT
Saturday, October 21, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--Politics makes artists stupid. Take 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie,' the one-woman play cobbled together from the diaries, emails and miscellaneous scribblings of the 23-year-old left-wing activist who was run over by an Israeli Army bulldozer in 2003 while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian house in the Gaza Strip. Co-written and directed by Alan Rickman, one of England's best actors, 'Rachel Corrie' just opened off-Broadway after a successful London run. It's an ill-crafted piece of goopy give-peace-a-chance agitprop--yet it's being performed to cheers and tears before admiring crowds of theater-savvy New Yorkers who, like Mr. Rickman himself, ought to know better.

So why don't they? Because Palestine is the new Cuba, a political cause whose invocation has the effect of instantaneously anesthetizing the upper brain functions of those who believe in it. Take Mr. Rickman, who evidently intended 'My Name Is Rachel Corrie' to be a pro-Palestinian equivalent of 'The Diary of Anne Frank.' Alas, wishful thinking is not the stuff of exciting theater. The script is disjointed to the point of incoherence, the staging crude and blatant, while Megan Dodds's performance as Rachel Corrie is frankly cartoonish.