Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

A Chutzpa to Corrie's memory

2011-06-11T17:13:00.000-07:00

A chutzpa to Corrie’s memory
By JUSTUS REID WEINER AND ITAI ERES 05/27/2010 06:24

Radical groups are hijacking her name for their purposes.

International “activists” are at it again. A nine-ship flotilla of “peace activists” is on its way from Turkey, Greece and other European countries toward the Gaza strip, laden with left-wingers and a variety of goods to supplement those available to Gaza residents. This represents the latest effort by a radical group known as the Free Gaza Movement (FGM). In an attempt to galvanize support and sympathy, and achieve a better result than the three earlier abortive attempts, the group has chosen to name the lead ship the Rachel Corrie.

For those who don’t recall, Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old American student activist killed in a tragic accident in 2003 while attempting to block an IDF bulldozer.Corrie arrived in Israel as part of an independent study program during her senior year at Evergreen State College. It was there that Corrie first heard of going to Gaza with the loosely affiliated assortment of left-wing radicals known as the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Evergreen’s faculty also displayed gross negligence in allowing her to spend a semester abroad, for course credit, in the West Bank and Gaza during the height of the second intifada. After a mere two days of ISM “training,” Corrie and her fellow activist trainees were sent to the Rafah crossing, described by IDF spokesman Capt. Jacob Dellal as “the most dangerous area in the West Bank and Gaza.”

Ironically however, Corrie is perhaps a more apt reference than the FGM organizers realize. The tragedy of her death is that it was completely avoidable. Moreover, her behavior, flouting local and international law, raises the question of what role, if any, small groups of extremist activists have in interfering in the counterterrorism measures of a democratic state.Despite dishonest testimony by the ISM, subsequent developments revealed that the driver of the bulldozer likely couldn’t even see Corrie. The most startling discovery was the recklessness of the ISM in dealing with its volunteers. They were encouraged to prevent the demolition of buildings and smuggling tunnels by using their bodies as shields against trucks and bulldozers. Although the volunteers were provided with visibility vests and megaphones, it was only a matter of time before the folly of the ISM led to catastrophic results.If playing chicken with cars is suicidal, doing so with an armored bulldozer, more difficult to control and with less visibility, borders on insanity. Yet that is exactly what the ISM advocated, while making sure to record all their encounters for use in the event of just such an accident. As one of Corrie’s colleagues stated, “Several times we had to dive away at the last moment in order to avoid being crushed. This continued for about two and a half hours.”

WHILE THIS may not have been exactly what Evergreen College envisioned as Corrie’s independent study, the ISM was complicit in these dangerous antics, having promoted activism that would “more directly challenge the Israeli military.” The ISM views its volunteers as pawns in a political game, fully aware that some gambits require the loss of a pawn. Corrie’s death, a terrible accident for the IDF, became a propaganda weapon for the ISM.ISM is an organization that recognizes a Palestinian “right” to resistance via “legitimate armed struggle.” Its “accolades” include preventing IDF demolition of bomb-making factories and weapons-smuggling tunnels as well as the aiding, abetting and protecting of terrorists. In addition, the ISM also encouraged confrontational, reckless resistance by its international volunteers. In 2002, in the midst of a violent takeover of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem by Palestinian terrorists, 10 ISM members ran in to act as human shields.

The same year as Corrie’s death, a popular bar in Tel Aviv, Mike’s Place, was attacked by two suicide bombers who had had tea with ISM members only five days earlier. The ISM’s behavior is typical of such radical groups. Purporting to protect human rights, they are often callous toward human life in general. What legitimacy is warranted by NGOs that have no respect for the lives of their volunteers?

2011-06-11T16:39:00.000-07:00

A recap of Saint Rachel:

Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old American activist from Olympia, Washington, who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer, considered an accidental suicide, on 16 March 2003, while undertaking dangerously direct action to interfere with what she thought was the demolition of a home of a Palestinian family.

Since her death, an enormous amount of hate-filled activities have been carried out in her name around the world.

Currently, her parents are still attempting to blame everyone, but their stupid daughter, for her death by mis-adventure (A kind term for accidental suicide). Their latest folly is filing a wrongful death suit against the state of Israel.

Excellent reference to combat the Corrie Myth

2011-01-28T13:37:00.000-08:00

My Name is Rachel Corrie is a simplistic, incomplete, one-sided portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

http://rachelcorriefacts.org/default.aspx
The show, based on Rachel's diaries and letters, does not attempt or claim to be an objective or balanced report from the region. It contains many factual errors and myths. [More...]
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-run organization that lures its members into war zones to act as human shields in obstructing counter-terrorism efforts.
The ISM describes itself as a peaceful humanitarian group, but in reality it is sympathetic to terrorist tactics and lures well-intentioned, idealistic young adults to the Palestinian Territories to promote its anti-Israel views. The ISM then knowingly leads its members into war zones, placing them directly in harm's way as human shields in an attempt to obstruct Israel's counterterrorism operations. [More...]

Rachel Corrie's death was a tragic accident.
On March 16, 2003, Rachel, acting as a human shield, attempted to deter bulldozers clearing brush and earth around homes in Rafah. According to a witness, Rachel slipped as she moved in front of the bulldozer, fell in front of the slow moving blade and was crushed by unearthed debris. An investigation, which included extensive interrogation of the driver and his commanders, using polygraphs and video evidence, revealed that the driver's view had been obstructed by the debris and by the bulldozer’s protective driver cage. An autopsy confirmed that the bulldozer had not touched Rachel. [More...]

Gaza was, and still is today, a hotbed and source of violent terrorism against Israeli civilians.
Between 2000 and early 2003, hundreds of Israeli men, women and children had been murdered and thousands were injured in suicide bombings and other attacks by Palestinian terrorist groups. Israel had escalated its military operations against Palestinian terrorist groups and infrastructure in 2002 and 2003 in an effort to protect Israeli citizens from terrorist violence. [More...]

Israel wants peace and has made sacrifices and territorial concessions in its quest for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Israel has always sought long-lasting peace with its Arab neighbors. Israel gave up all of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 to achieve peace with Egypt, left its security zone in Lebanon in 2000, and withdrew soldiers and settlements from the Gaza Strip in August 2005. Israel remains ready to negotiate peace based on a two-state solution. [More...]

Rachel Corrie's Parent set to cash in?

2011-01-12T11:02:00.000-08:00

Rachel Corrie's (Ill-conceived) Dreams
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/the--self--deceit-of-rachel-corrie-11453?page=all

Roberta P. Seid

The publication of Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie adds yet another item to the growing body of Corrie memorabilia.

The twenty-three-year-old American from Olympia, Washington, died in Gaza in March 2003 when, as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), she tried to obstruct an IDF bulldozer that, according to the IDF, was destroying rocket launchers in the overgrown brush near a Palestinian home.

An official Israeli investigation concluded that her death was an accident. The driver, in the 10 foot-high bulldozer with its limited visual field, could not see Corrie, who was hidden by a mound of dirt or standing in a trench in the military security zone. The Israeli autopsy report determined that she had been killed by a blow to the head from debris probably dislodged by the bulldozer.

However, the ISM and other activists insisted the driver had seen Corrie, and intentionally killed her. They released two photographs for evidence. The first showed Corrie standing in full view of the bulldozer, shouting at the driver through a bullhorn she was holding. In the second photo, she lay crumpled on the ground in front of the bulldozer. Within hours of the photos’ release, observers noticed from the position of the sun that the two photos had been taken hours apart, and that the bulldozer in the first picture was not the same as the one in the second. Other questions surrounded her death: had she died on the spot, in the ambulance or in the hospital emergency room; did the Gazan doctor do all he could to save her?

Despite these questions, the ISM and other anti-Israel activists seized upon Rachel’s death for public relations purposes. The young American instantly became their poster child, an alleged symbol of youthful idealism, Palestinian victimization, and Israeli brutality. As a Hamas activist said at Rachel’s funeral, “'Her death serves me more than it served her…Her death will bring more attention than the other 2,000 martyrs.'….” Corrie was the first American to be hailed as a Palestinian martyr. It is not surprising that these activists refuse to even entertain the possibility that her death was an accident. If it were, she would no longer be a useful symbol for indicting Israel’s self-defense measures and its very right to exist.

The efforts to elevate Rachel into a martyred idealist and artist began immediately, followed shortly by efforts to portray her as a new Anne Frank. Today there are Rachel Corrie memorial websites, scholarship funds, and events commemorating the anniversary of her death. More well-known is the controversial play based on her diaries, My Name is Rachel Corrie, which had runs in London, Seattle, New York and other U.S. cities. Her parents, who had never shown interest in the Middle East conflict, are now regulars on the international anti-Israel lecture circuit. This spring, they appeared at several southern California anti-Zionism week events, which are mounted annually by campus Muslim Student Associations. Corrie has also become the cause celebre for divest-from-Israel campaigns whose new strategy is to focus on the Caterpillar Corporation, primarily because a Caterpillar bulldozer was involved in her death. The family and other Palestinians brought a suit against Caterpillar in U.S. federal court for its complicity in Israel’s “inhumane actions.” The court dismissed the suit in July 2007 for being a political issue outside the court’s jurisdiction.

Now yet another item has been added to the Rachel Corrie industry: the book, Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie edited by her family with an introduction by her father, and released in 2008.

“She was, first and last, a writer and artist,” her father writes in the introduction, and her family evidently wanted to give her, posthumously, the writing career she sought. According to her father, “In offering Rachel’s writing to the public, our family helps her complete the journey to become a published author.”

Her depiction of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and of Gaza in the journals seems almost quaint, an echo of Palestinian propaganda from the days before Israel’s disengagement, the brutal Hamas coup, and surfacing reports that Hamas charges a $3,000 tax on owners of Gaza’s 150 tunnels -- the very kinds of tunnels Rachel was trying to protect. Historians may find the Journals useful for documenting the stages of the propaganda war against Israel.
The Journals are of interest primarily because they provide insight into how a young American girl ended up in Gaza with the ISM, trying to protect terrorist operations and demonizing Israel, about how anti-Israel propaganda and the ISM work, and about who or what actually killed Rachel Corrie.

Little in her diaries and writings suggested her future activities. She had what comes across as an almost idyllic childhood in a semi-rural area of Olympia, with an older sister and brother and doting, modestly middle class parents who liked camping and the out-of-doors, and who encouraged her writing, drawing and ballet, and seemed to help cultivate her belief that she had a “special potential.” Raised in a nurturing home and apparently nurturing schools, she had little reason to doubt herself or doubt that the “fire in my belly” was a sign of artistic drive and of achievements to come.

Her more rebellious teen and college years were filled with intermittent depression, struggles with her mother, neo-beat activities, all-night drug and alcohol parties, a job on the graveyard shift of a mental health service for low-income clients, cigarette smoking in the early dawn streets with the town’s derelicts after her shift, and bouts of agoraphobia.
The diaries demonstrate little introspection. Rachel Corrie rarely questioned herself, her opinions, or her motives. In her writings, she attempted no human portraits, except very brief ones of her first love, Colin, and even these are about how he reacts to her. Hers is a hermetic world, and her idealism was similarly focused inward -- an inchoate, vague passion that fastened on a variety of the progressive causes espoused by her family, home town, and college, Evergreen.

All this made Rachel ripe fodder for the ISM. This Palestinian-led organization callously recruited idealistic, naïve “internationals” to break Israeli law, violate IDF security zones, indoctrinate them with its peculiar version of the conflict, and to groom them as future speakers for its anti-Israel cause. While soothing volunteers by insisting that ISM engaged only in non-violent resistance, the organization nonetheless defended and abetted Palestinian violence (its website affirmed the “right to armed resistance against occupation”) and was committed to dismantling Israel’s counter-terrorism measures which were intended to prevent the mass murder of Israelis.

Paradoxically, the ISM described the Territories as a war zone where Israel wantonly killed Palestinians, but assured volunteers that they would not be harmed because of their “international white-person privilege,” in the words of the diaries, and that the greatest risk they faced was “arrest and deportation even though none of us have done anything illegal.The ISM was offering tantalizing heroism: the chance to stand up against an unjust military power as a human shield with any personal danger neutralized by a “white person privilege” as protective as a superhero’s invisible shield.

Despite these reassurances, the ISM’s own website admitted that if an “international” was harmed, the resulting media attention would help its cause. The ISM intentionally exploited the idealism of young foreigners, misled them into believing violating Israeli law and military security was not illegal, and intentionally put them in extremely dangerous situations.
The second culprit should be Corrie’s school, the progressive Evergreen College, which irresponsibly encouraged her participation with ISM. Corrie wrote that the course that most affected her was “Local Knowledge,” whose primary purpose was to get students involved in community activism for progressive causes. The class focused on the “links between historic repression, racism, propaganda campaigns and xenophobia to our present situation.” She concluded that “it’s important that human rights and resistance to oppression be included in the way we define ourselves as a community.” Maybe it was in this class, too, that she learned that the United States is “perhaps one of the most racist countries in the world.”

She had had no particular interest in the Middle East or knowledge about it, but spurred by the class, she began attending Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace (OMPJ) meetings since anti-Israel activism was one of the smorgasbord of causes. There she uncritically absorbed OMPJ’s ideology and learned about “people offering themselves as human shields in Palestine,” and heard ISM activists talk about their “Freedom Summer” in Palestine in September 2002. She was inspired: “They say we are invited there. I can’t believe this can be true. Even me?”
She eagerly signed up, and her indoctrination continued. She began ISM training and reading ISM recommended tracts about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and staple anti-Israel narratives from Amira Hass, Sarah Roy, Noam Chomsky, Al-Ahram Weekly, and journalist Graham Usher. The three Evergreen faculty and staff members she consulted included Simona Sharoni, an Israeli who co-founded Women in Black. They did not try to dissuade her from going.
There is an air of unreality in all of this. Neither Corrie, nor the faculty, nor the ISM activists ever acknowledged she would be entering a war zone. Suicide bombing in Israel had reached a peak in early 2002, and Israel had launched Operation Defensive Shield to wipe out the terrorist networks in late March and early April. The violent conflict was still intense when Rachel chose to go to “meet the people who are on the other end of the portion of my tax money that goes to fund the U.S. and other militaries”—and to “get the learning that comes from traveling while hopefully having my trip have some use to the people I am going to see.” No one warned her that entering a war zone was not just an interesting travel experience.

She was oblivious to the larger context of the conflict and to her surroundings, and her apparent lack of curiosity about them, is breathtaking. There is not a word in the journals about the terrorist campaign unleashed on Israel in September 2000, not a word that reveals that Gaza, especially Rafah (where Corrie stayed) was a hotbed of terrorism and arms smuggling. She apparently never watched the videos of suicide bombers’ last statements, or questioned the increasing radicalization of Palestinian society. Rachel never mentions the Palestinian Authority or Yasser Arafat, and gives no inkling of Gaza as a clan-based society with competing clans vying for power. There is no sense that she tried to understand or was even aware of the society in which she now lived.

Nor did she make any effort to analyze Israel’s predicament. Her radical sources convinced her that Sharon’s “fingerprints” were on Palestinian suicide bombings: Sharon’s policy is “assassination-during-peace-negotiations/suicide attack within the green line/land grab strategy, which is working well now to create settlements all over the Occupied Territories….” – and again--“Sharon has I think pretty much admitted that suicide bombings are a way of getting more land under the guise of security.”

She continually imposed her own grid of beliefs to interpret facts on the ground. She defended terrorism when she acknowledged it existed, claiming that “international law…recognizes the right of people to legitimate armed struggle.” If people in her hometown of Olympia faced the dire conditions Gaza faced, she rhetorically asked her mother, don’t you think “we might try to use somewhat violent means to protect the edge of the greenhouses, to protect whatever fragments remained?” Unless her family excluded them from the published journals, she also made no mention of Israeli terror victims. Instead, she claimed that “the vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance” -- a counterfactual observation that led Times of London reviewer Clive Davis to write that “Even the late Yassir Arafat might have blushed at that one.”

Finally, what is most curious about Corrie’s Journals is that hard as she tried to impose the ISM narrative on what she saw, her reports constantly contradicted this narrative, though she didn’t recognize the contradictions.

She wrote that decades of occupation had oppressed Palestinians, yet Gazans kept saying that their difficult situation was due to the Intifada and to Israel’s subsequent counterterrorism measures, not to a decades-old occupation. One Gazan said, “There was a peaceful time in the late seventies and early eighties…things were better before Sharon”—that is, before Sharon became Prime Minister in 2001. (253) Another told her: “Before—no tanks, no bulldozers, no gunshots. Quiet….No noise. After Intifada, daily. Gunshots daily.”

She even confirmed that conditions in Gaza worsened only with the Intifada. She wrote that 60,000 people from Rafah had worked in Israel in 2001, but that the number had dropped to 600 by 2003. But she never drew the logical conclusion that her Gazan informants kept repeating—the terrorist campaign had forced Israel to take defensive measures.
Similarly, Corrie demonized the Israeli soldiers, but they hardly appear demonic. When she and other internationals stand in front of the tanks, the soldiers “open their weird tank lids and wave at us.” The Israeli district command officer worked to “ensure the safety of Palestinian workers.”

Nor, to her surprise, were Palestinians afraid of the soldiers. When a Gazan runs from his home with his two children after ISM mistakenly informed him that his house was to be demolished, she “was terrified to think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house.” She tried to interpose herself between him and the tanks, yet he clearly did not need her protection. Children play in full view of the tanks, apparently unafraid. (She was stunned to find that despite tanks and bulldozers passing by, “all of these people are genuinely cheerful”—even though this did not fit into her preconceived notions. When IDF soldiers entered a house to position themselves on the roof, no one was bothered or harassed. The children just watched cartoons on TV.

Indeed, despite Israel’s counterterrorism measures, Palestinians were free to carry on their usual activities and even anti-Israel rallies. While she was there, Eid celebrations were held, and so was the anti-Israel, anti-US rally where Rachel burned a paper replica of the American flag. Such rallies were held even though, according to Corrie, a former IDF commander expressed concern that “terrorists would sneak into our ‘political protest’ and attack settlements.”
While she claimed that the IDF bulldozed homes even though families were still inside, she also admitted (on page 311) that most of the homes were empty during these IDF operations. While she and other internationals denounced the checkpoints, they nonetheless described them as similar to the security checks at international airports.

Oddly, too, while Rachel condemned various IDF actions that she witnessed, she inadvertently revealed that they were justified. When she and other ISM internationals ran to retrieve the body of a “martyr,” she did note that the terrorist group, DFLP, had sent him on his mission to attack soldiers. While she bemoaned the IDF’s destruction of Gazan homes, she admitted that most were located near tunnels—the arms smuggling tunnels the IDF was trying to destroy—or just along the border, precisely where Israel was trying to create a buffer zone to prevent more arms smuggling. She blamed the IDF for blowing up a Palestinian greenhouse, even while she acknowledged that someone from the “Palestinian resistance” had planted an explosive there and the IDF was merely defusing it.

“The surreal thing is that we are safe” here, she wrote. More surreal is the fact that Rachel Corrie, indoctrinated by the ISM, her college, and suspect sources, imposed her preconceived notions on a situation that did not match those preconceptions. Tragically, anti-Israel activists are exploiting her accidental death to promote this surreal narrative.

The greater tragedy is that her parents are doing the same. Their lack of curiosity about the ISM and their wholesale acceptance of its propaganda are startling, especially given that the ISM put their daughter in danger. Nor has evidence that the ISM activists sheltered known suicide bombers and terrorists, and was barred from entering Israel, dampened their defense of the organization. Instead of using their bitter experience as a warning to parents of other would-be ISM recruits, they are using their position as bereaved parents to win sympathy for the group most responsible for their daughter’s death.

2011-01-01T07:48:00.000-08:00

From YID WITH A LID:

The Rachel Corrie Hoax Now Six Years Old
Rachel Corrie has been set up to be a martyr to the Palestinian cause by the International Solidarity Movement, yet the circumstances surrounding her death are almost as suspect as those of Muhammad al-Dura. The only difference is that we know that Corrie really died. We also know that she jumped out of a hole and placed herself in front of an IDF bulldozer six years ago outside of the drivers sight lines and that when she left the accident site she was very much alive. What happened afterward has been covered up by the Palestinian Authority and the International Solidarity Movement.

The Myth of Rachel CorrieBy Judy Lash BalintFrontPageMagazine.com 3/20/2008

Jerusalem: The news that a senior Islamic Jihad terrorist, Shadi Sukiya, was captured by an elite anti-terror unit of the Israel Defense Forces while hiding out in the Jenin offices of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) did not make a ripple in the flood of coverage from the Iraqi front in late March 2003.

Just eleven days earlier, on March 16, the ISM did make world headlines when Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old ISM member, was run over by an Israeli bulldozer in Rafah and died of her injuries. Maybe the fact that a "peace organization" was found to be defending terrorists twice in a two-week period will factor into the inquiry called by several Washington state congressional representatives into the circumstances of Rachel Corrie's death.

With the fifth anniversary of Corrie's death having just passed us, only one thing remains certain about the events of March 16: Corrie died in Rafah, on the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, under very questionable circumstances.

The questions remain: Is Israel responsible for Corrie's death, or do the doctors at the Arab hospital where she was taken still alive after the accident bear any responsibility? What about the ISM that organizes protests in a closed military zone and encourages its members to play cat and mouse among the tanks and bulldozers? Or the Arabs who invite the "internationals" to risk their lives in a war zone? How she died, exactly where she passed her last moments and who should take the blame for Rachel Corrie's death are questions that demand answers.

The inconsistencies in eyewitness testimony raise doubts about the simplistic conclusions drawn ever since the event.

By all accounts, Rachel Corrie was one of a group of protesters attempting to disrupt the work of two IDF bulldozers leveling ground to detonate explosives in an area rife with terrorist activity. The bulldozers moved to a different area to avoid the protesters, and Corrie became separated from the group. Some of the agitators stood with a banner, while Corrie picked up a bullhorn and yelled slogans at the driver encased in the small cabin of the dozer. This went on for several hours on the afternoon of March 16. It's the kind of activity favored by the young pro-Palestinian types who make up the ISM.There wasn't enough action for Corrie. According to 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 dozer plowed forward heaping up a pile of dirt and sand, Corrie scrambled up the pile to sit on the top. 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 dozer, she wasn't run over by the tread."

Capt. Jacob Dellal of the IDF spokespersons office confirms what Smith says about the driver: he lost sight of Rachel. Inside the cab, some six feet off the ground, visibility is very restricted. The protesters should have known that and kept within the driver's line of sight to avoid getting hurt, Dellal asserts.The strange thing about this part of the story is the discrepancy over the photos given to the press and posted on several pro-Arab websites.As Smith describes to me his version of events, I ask about the series of photos printed in an Arab newspaper I picked up the morning after the incident, 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.

There are several shots of the back of a woman with a blond ponytail facing a bulldozer. She's standing in an open field, wearing an orange fluorescent jacket, holding a megaphone.Even Michael Shaik, the ISM media coordinator at the time, wouldn'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, Shaik asks me not to contact Joe, Greg or Tom, the Rafah ISM eyewitnesses again directly: "They're still in trauma."The pictures should have raised all kinds of questions to photo editors, but all the major newspapers and wire services chose to run the photos regardless. If there are pictures of Rachel before and after, why didn't the same photographer consider it important to document the act of the bulldozer running her down?

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.So, Corrie was either knocked down by the dozer, or fell in front of it. ISMers assume that she was intentionally run over, but there's no proof that was the driver's intent.

The real issue is, 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. (Israeli bulldozer runs over 23-year-old woman. CNN, Monday, March 17, 2003)In his account posted on http://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, seems confused. On the day of the event, Dr. Mussa tells AP Gaza reporter Ibrahim Barzak that Rachel died in the hospital. (American Killed in Gaza. AP. March 16, 2003)

One week later, in a telephone interview, Dr. Mussa states definitively to me 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.Doesn't quite jive with the photo essay on the pages of the Electronic Intifada website for March 16, 2003. (Photo story: Israeli bulldozer driver murders American peace activist by Nigel Parry and Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada, 16 March 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 her arms, legs and skull. She was transferred to hospital, where she later died, says this report.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)There, Dr. Mussa accuses Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's "terrorist government" of deliberately killing Palestinian children in Rafah.

A few days after the incident, ISM Media Coordinator Shaik 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 whom 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. l Shaik 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, Shaik recounts.

Speaking about the autopsy, one of Rachel's ISM trainers, Iowa native LeAnne Clausen, a fieldworker for the Christian Peacemaker Team based in Beit Sahour, tells me: "The general sentiment within ISM is that the Israelis are trying to suggest perhaps Rachel was on drugs. "In reality, IDF spokesperson Dellal says that initial Israeli investigation results indicate that the cause of death was most likely a blow to the head and chest by a blunt object, possibly a chunk of cement dug up by the bulldozer.In keeping with ISM sympathies, Rachel received a shaheed (martyr) procession in Rafah, the day after her death. But here again, there's confusion between reality and photo op. Some accounts noted that her coffin draped in an American flag was paraded through the streets. Yet a picture on the site of her college town's peace movement, the Olympia Movement for Justice and Peace, shows Arab women holding a coffin covered by a Palestinian flag with the caption: Palestinian funeral for Rachel.Confusion and obfuscation seem to be a trademark of the ISM. In May 2002, a number of ISMers raced past Israeli soldiers into the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, where dozens of Palestinian terrorists had holed up to evade capture by the IDF outside. After an agreement was reached, the ISM members refused to leave the church, holding up the solution. Then they charged that they were mistreated by clergy, who claimed the ISMers desecrated the church by smoking and drinking alcohol.

Another revealing ISM action took place shortly before the Bethlehem incident, when a number of protesters managed to make their way past IDF barricades into Yasser Arafat's Ramallah compound to protect the terrorist leader.Strange, given the fact that most ISMers are avowed anarchists decrying any kind of governmental authority. Corrie's Swedish boyfriend and fellow ISMer told a reporter for Seattle's The Stranger newspaper, (April 4, 2003) that Corrie could be described as an anarchist.Still, the politics of the Ismers are predictable. Another Evergreen student who arrived in Israel around the same time as Corrie says he has "been at war with the multinational corporations for some time now." His "baptism of fire" took place at the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, he proclaims.Joe Smith, recounts his motivation to join forces with the ISM . "Because I felt it was one of the best ways for me to use my privilege as a white middle class American male to directly serve impoverished people of color who are under-privileged due to the Israeli and other Western governments, especially mine.I have dedicated my life to serving such people (ed. Arabs), as I believe my over-privilege is a direct result of their under-privilege. I have benefited from their suffering, and this must stop."ISM activity in Rafah has more to do with being used to defend terrorists than preventing suffering of the masses. IDF efforts in Rafah were concentrated on preventing the flow of arms and explosives over the border from Egypt into the terrorist's dens that riddled the area. Less than a week after Rachel died defending terrorists, Israeli tanks moved into Rafah , surrounded several houses, and arrested two Hamas members. IDF spokesperson, Dellal calls Rafah, "the most dangerous area in the West Bank and Gaza," and decries the provocative protests of ISM. "There's nothing wrong with civil disobedience, but these people crossed the line of what was safe for everyone," Dellal says.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. No one has commented on the extent of efforts to preserve Corrie's life at An Najar.

And all the while, the ISM continues to encourage misguided young people from around the world,like Rachel Corrie, to spend time in the Middle East providing cover for terrorists.Lee Kaplan gave an Excellent Blow by Blow description of the Video evidence surrounding the Rachel Corrie Scam on Atlas Shrugs a few weeks ago. You can find it here St. Pancake's Suicide

Posted Verbatim

2010-12-13T20:00:00.000-08:00

'Rachel Corrie' Was a LiarPlay about a 'martyr' is potent symbol of rising intellectual tide of anti-ZionismOctober 26, 2006 - Jonathan S. Tobin, Executive Editor
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 messagesof 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.
Contact Jonathan S. Tobin via e-mail at: jtobin@jewishexponent.com.

http://www.jewishexponent.com/article/11088/

MondoWeiss newest lies about Rachel Corrie's trial

2010-10-26T12:36:00.000-07:00

In the latest trial where Corrie's misguided parents and their piss-poor attorney try to disprove the truth, the attorney, as portrayed in Philip Weiss' antisemitic blog, MondoWeiss, is depressed. It seems that he has been trying, unsuccessfully, to trick the witnesses. It would seem that that is an unethical practice, but since when do the Corries and their supporters care about ethics or morals, for that matter?

Of course, Corrie's supporters attempt to classify Rachel's accidental suicide as a murder, but the Corries have only themselves to blame. Had they instilled in her a sense of morality and ethics that teach that no one should support the murderers of women and children, as is the practice of many Palestinians. But no. The Corries taught Rachel to stand up for murderers, rapists, thieves, and pedophiles.

See http://mondoweiss.net/2010/10/kufur-qassim-rachel-corrie-and-premeditated-forgetfulness.html for Philip Weiss' latest post of bullshit.

Corrie's parents sponsor racist scholarship at Evergreen

2010-10-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

Corrie's parents sponsor racist scholarship at Evergreen.

If you go to Corrie's absurd website extolling the virtues of a hatemonger, you will see an advertisement regarding the Rachel Corrie Death Fund Scholarship at Evergreen College, forever famous for teaching idiocy, for any who will study in the "areas of interest (which) may include Arab culture and Arabic language, US Policy in the Middle East, and peace, justice, and conflict resolution studies." Funny how Hebrew language nor Israeli culture is not included as a subject for "students dedicated to gaining a better understanding of the Middle East and to working, locally or internationally, to further Middle East peace."

Actually, it goes to show how racist and antisemitic Rachel was before her accidental suicide.

How Rachel Corrie really died (Hint: Not protecting a house)

2008-04-13T07:05:00.000-07:00

http://israelmatzav.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-rachel-corrie-really-died-hint-not.html

Israel Matzav

On March 16, 2003, ISM 'activist' Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli D9 bulldozer in Rafah in the Gaza Strip. Rafah is in the Philadelphi Corridor in the map at left, along the border between Gaza and Egypt. You may recall that it's where the border between Gaza and Egypt was breached just a few weeks ago. At the time, the ISM claimed that Corrie was protecting a 'Palestinian' house:

Witnesses said Rachel Corrie, 23, from Olympia, Washington, was trying to stop the bulldozer from tearing down a building in the Rafah refugee camp when she was run over. She was taken to Najar hospital in Rafah, where she died, said Dr. Ali Moussa, a hospital administrator.

Corrie was a member of the International Solidarity Movement. Joseph Smith,21, of Kansas City Missouri, who was with Corrie at the site, said the driver of the bulldozer, an IDF soldier, could clearly see Corrie as she sat in front of the machine.

Contrary to Smith's report, IDF Capt. Jacob Dallal of the IDF Spoksewoman's Office said Corrie's death was an accident. The US State Department had no immediate comment.

In a series of three videos, each running approximately nine minutes, Becky Johnson and Lee Kaplan debunk the myth that Corrie was protecting a house. In fact, as Smooth Stone points out and as you will see in the video below, Corrie was standing in a trench where she could not be seen, protecting an entrance to a weapons tunnel.

Actual video footage from the Israeli Defense Forces show the real circumstances under which the terrorist loving anarchist died: knee-deep in a trench in the middle of dirt in an open dirt field. The left arrow on the photo below points to the tractor, the right arrow shows the kneeling Rachel Corrie. To see the live action footage moments before Rachel Corrie's accidental death, go to the Part 2 video [which I am embedding below. CiJ], approx 49 seconds into the video:

http://bp2.blogger.com/_n7RltmTdk-g/R7hHVrb6AHI/AAAAAAAAC0I/yyjiPS_suiI/s1600-h/RachelCorrieTractor1.jpg

I actually watched all three parts of this video and for those of you who are inclined to do so, it is well worth the time. But what I noticed was that Video # 1 had the most views, Video # 2 had 40% less and Video # 3 had 50% less than that. Video # 2 is - in my humble opinion - the most significant video. So I am embedding video # 2 below. After it is finished, I will give you links to Videos 1 and 3. I also urge you to go to Smooth Stone's site, because he shows how the ISM used fauxtography™ to create the image of Corrie standing in front of a house rather than being in the trench where she really was.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY2ohOsxQIU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_vlJo3g0Ys

For those of you who watch it, you will note that at the end of Video # 3, Lee Kaplan states his belief that the 'Palestinian' doctors who treated Corrie allowed her to die so that the 'Palestinians' would have their 'international' 'martyr.' At the time, Charles Johnson wrote the following underneath a picture of 'Palestinians' carrying out a mock funeral for Corrie:

Let’s see how many different versions of this story we can identify; she was crushed to death protecting a house; she was run over twice; she was crushed under a falling wall while trying to prevent a bulldozer from uprooting shrubbery; etc. etc. etc. Pitiful. And just look at all the Western media, falling for this garbage.Five years ago, I'm not sure even Charles realized how the ISM had doctored the photographs. It's a pity that the IDF waited this long to release the video.

UPDATE 1:40 PM February 20This post has been nominated for Non-Council Post of the Week by the Watcher's Council.

The Case Against Rachel Corrie

2008-04-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

The Case Against Rachel Corrie

Sun, May 30, 2004 at 3:18:09 pm PST

Bruce S. Ticker spells out the blindingly obvious fact about Rachel Corrie and all the other objectively pro-terror swine of the International Solidarity Movement—they know perfectly well what they are doing: The Case Against Rachel Corrie. (Hat tip: NY Nana.)

Maybe, just maybe, Rachel Corrie knowingly aided and abetted cold-blooded murderers.
Many of you will probably call me naive and roll over having belly-laughs. It took me long enough, right? [Laugh? Who, me? —ed.]

When Corrie died more than a year ago, it was no great stretch to suspect that she and others who converged on Israel’s territories knowingly supported terrorists. There was certainly no proof and it was just as difficult to figure out any hard connection. ...
The raid on Rafah brings new facts to light indicating that Corrie and other ISM members had to know they were aiding and abetting terrorists, if they were not participating in terrorism themselves.

The 23-year-old Corrie, who traveled more than 8,000 miles from Olympia, Washington, was run over by a bulldozer when she tried to block the vehicle from demolishing a house in Rafah - a house where she had been staying. The Israeli military ruled that this was an accident and ISM members accused the driver of murder even before the military could investigate the incident.
It may pass the “reasonable person” test that these ISM’ers knew very well they were helping terrorists. What would a reasonable person conclude?

Consider: The Israeli government revealed that 90 weapons-smuggling tunnels were constructed between the Egyptian border and Rafah. At least some of these tunnels were known to end underneath the homes in Rafah.

With 90 tunnels running underneath Rafah, there must have been lots of suspicious activity. Corrie and her friends would have had to be blind not to notice.

First, there are the tunnel connections underneath the homes. ISM’ers who stayed with Gazan families might have seen the tunnels themselves, or they at least spotted people going back and forth from the basement of the home. During deliveries, people would have been hauling the goods out of the homes. Maybe Corrie herself did some heavy lifting.

The weapons then had to be transported somehow. Vehicles appear to be the natural choice. They would have had to be driven to the tunnel entrances and the weapons would need to be loaded onto the trucks.

Would you wonder about this kind of activity if you were personally on the scene?
Wherever ISM members mingled and even lived among Gaza and West Bank Arabs, it is possible that many of these Arabs were terrorists or helped the terrorists by feeding and housing them. The ISM’ers could have been at gatherings where they were introduced to suspected terrorists, heard stories about violent activities or noticed otherwise suspicious activity.

Actually, there is not only evidence, but proof of ISM aiding and abetting terrorists. When terrorists seized a church in Bethlehem, a few ISM’ers smuggled food to them.
If you put it all together, a reasonable person must conclude that the ISM members knew they were aiding and abetting terrorists.

The instant that it dawned on any of them that they might be helping terrorists was precisely the time for them to end their involvement. That’s what a sincere and honorable person would have done.

From "Harry's Place"

2007-12-26T19:43:00.001-08:00

Billy Bragg's Rachel Corrie song
I was, for many years, a huge Billy Bragg fan.
I saw him perform three times when I lived in St. Louis in the 1980s and early 1990s.
When I lived in Israel, I joined a listserv of Bragg fans, made some online friends, and-- during a visit to the UK in 2000-- met some of them and saw him play at Tolpuddle.
I still think he wrote and performed some of the great songs of the past 25 years.
Which is why I'm so disappointed by his ripoff of the classic Bob Dylan song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" in a misbegotten tribute to Rachel Corrie.
Rachel Corrie's death was a tragedy. But she was terribly wrongheaded, and the organization she was involved in-- the International Solidarity Movement-- is far from the noble upholder of "non-violent resistance" suggested by Bragg's song.
The implied comparison of Hattie Carroll to Rachel Corrie is as ridiculous as the implied comparison of William Zanzinger to the Israeli army. I hope I don't need to explain why.
At least the song mentions suicide bombers in passing. But it fails to note that the Israeli military operations in Gaza, which Corrie was trying to stop, were part of an effort to stop those bombers from killing more Israelis. It would have been good if Bragg had included a verse about other Rachels who were victims of those bombers. Some of them may have had lives at least as compelling as Corrie's. And their deaths were no less tragic.
The song mentions that a New York theatre cancelled a production of the play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" and suggests it was part of an effort by powerful forces like Fox News to turn her into a "non-person." The play should have been produced in New York, and probably will be. But with more than three million Google entries, Corrie is not about to become a non-person.
I've paid tribute here to Fern Holland, a young American who came to Iraq after the invasion to work for women's rights and was murdered by the "resistance." I've wondered if anyone would ever produce a play based on her life. It is, unfortunately, as unlikely as Billy Bragg writing a song called "The Lonesome Death of Fern Holland."
(Note: With trepidation, I'm opening this post to comments. But I won't put up with any comments ridiculing the way Corrie died.)
Update: Now this is disgusting.
Posted by Gene at March 28, 2006 03:59 AM

More Proof that Rachel Corrie died for her sins

2007-12-24T07:27:00.000-08:00

Maybe, just maybe, Rachel Corrie knowingly aided and abetted cold-blooded murderers.
Many of you will probably call me naive and roll over having belly-laughs. It took me long enough, right? [Laugh? Who, me? —ed.]
When Corrie died more than a year ago, it was no great stretch to suspect that she and others who converged on Israel’s territories knowingly supported terrorists. There was certainly no proof and it was just as difficult to figure out any hard connection. ...
The raid on Rafah brings new facts to light indicating that Corrie and other ISM members had to know they were aiding and abetting terrorists, if they were not participating in terrorism themselves.
The 23-year-old Corrie, who traveled more than 8,000 miles from Olympia, Washington, was run over by a bulldozer when she tried to block the vehicle from demolishing a house in Rafah - a house where she had been staying. The Israeli military ruled that this was an accident and ISM members accused the driver of murder even before the military could investigate the incident.
It may pass the “reasonable person” test that these ISM’ers knew very well they were helping terrorists. What would a reasonable person conclude?
Consider: The Israeli government revealed that 90 weapons-smuggling tunnels were constructed between the Egyptian border and Rafah. At least some of these tunnels were known to end underneath the homes in Rafah.
With 90 tunnels running underneath Rafah, there must have been lots of suspicious activity. Corrie and her friends would have had to be blind not to notice.
First, there are the tunnel connections underneath the homes. ISM’ers who stayed with Gazan families might have seen the tunnels themselves, or they at least spotted people going back and forth from the basement of the home. During deliveries, people would have been hauling the goods out of the homes. Maybe Corrie herself did some heavy lifting.
The weapons then had to be transported somehow. Vehicles appear to be the natural choice. They would have had to be driven to the tunnel entrances and the weapons would need to be loaded onto the trucks.
Would you wonder about this kind of activity if you were personally on the scene?
Wherever ISM members mingled and even lived among Gaza and West Bank Arabs, it is possible that many of these Arabs were terrorists or helped the terrorists by feeding and housing them. The ISM’ers could have been at gatherings where they were introduced to suspected terrorists, heard stories about violent activities or noticed otherwise suspicious activity.
Actually, there is not only evidence, but proof of ISM aiding and abetting terrorists. When terrorists seized a church in Bethlehem, a few ISM’ers smuggled food to them.
If you put it all together, a reasonable person must conclude that the ISM members knew they were aiding and abetting terrorists.
The instant that it dawned on any of them that they might be helping terrorists was precisely the time for them to end their involvement. That’s what a sincere and honorable person would have done.

Idiot believes Corrie's preachment of hatred is equal to Anne Frank's story.

2007-07-28T09:35:00.000-07:00

Who would have thought that David Truskoff was a complete idiot?

Rachel Corrie, A Martyr's VoiceAs Powerful As That Of Ann Frank
By David Truskoff
23 March, 2007Countercurrents.org
The ruthlessness of the IDF: the horrific criminal cluster bombing of Lebanon and the shameful acts of starving children on the West Bank (I guess if you are going to lie, lie big) , are crimes against humanity that all Jews will someday have to answer for (Unlike the Arabs who will not have to answer for the actual crimes commited). The continuing acts of forcing the Palestinians into such dehumanizing poverty puts those responsible not only in the category of the oppressed becoming the oppressors as President Truman described them, but as the worst criminals in history, the Nazis (Yes, another idiot unfavorably compares the Jews to Nazis).
The perfect illustration of the blind faith mentality of the new Jew is the pressure brought against a theater to stop the showing of the Rachel Corrie play in New York. They would stop the story of Rachel Corrie, but ask all of us Jews to remember the story of Ann Frank.
Yes, we will stop the one-sided propagandist remarks of a noted antisemitic activist who supported Palestinian hopes of Genocide and still support the retelling of the Anne Frank story.

Rachel Corrie: Myths and Facts

2007-04-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

The Rachel Corrie propaganda site "rachelswords.org", is trying to fool a few more people by putting out a snow job with a fake 'Myth and Fact' file where they make up the myth and then prove it false.

Here is a real life "Myth and Fact" file.

MYTH
“Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israel while she was peacefully protesting against the illegal demolition of a Palestinian home.”

FACT
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 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.23

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.24

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.25
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.

Huwaida Arraf finds need to lie about Corrie to drum up support!

2007-02-11T13:54:00.000-08:00

Mark the date! MARCH 16, 2007! That is the date we will commemerate Corrie's hate- filled protest while she burned the American Flag.

Here are the lies posted by Huwaida Arraf in the attempt to increase hatred in the world (the corrections are in red)

1 ...an Israeli soldier (He wasn't a soldier) used a Caterpillar bulldozer to crush (He used it to move earth, he did not attack Corrie. She deliberately got in his way, knowing that he would stop once he saw her) to death 23-year old American activist Rachel Corrie.

2. Rachel was protesting the demolition of a home belonging to Samir Nasrallah (The home was not the target, nor was it slated for destruction), a Palestinian physician (He wasn't a physician, he was a pharmacy tech)

3. Rachel's parents called on the U.S. State Department to conduct an investigation into the details of Rachel's murder. (But there was no murder, therefore Congress saw no need to investigate. Plus the facts were clearcut: Idiots stands infront of moving bulldozer and gets bulldozed. This darwin Award winning event was Corrie's fault. Perhaps her estate should be sued for the deliberate trauma to the bulldozer driver.)

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

2007-01-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

Rachel Corrie's own words!

I was in the centre of Nablus yesterday, about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when a youth was shot and killed by the IOF. He is SAMER ZORBHA, aged 18, a student at the High School in Nablus. He was shot twice, one bullet to the shoulder and lung, a favourite target, another to the side of the head. Another very seriously shot and injured and another injured I don't know how badly. Samer is the best friend of a beautiful young Volunteer at the UPMRC Medical Relief Centre, Mohamed al Aseel, and we are feeling his loss with anger as well as grief

In retaliation for this murderous attack, fighters last night offered their life for their friend and killed two of the illegal occupying force, and injuring another. Two young fighters were killed and I don't yet know the extent of other injuries. I would tell you that, from my bedroom window, I saw the night sky in the area lit up like it was day for more than an hour with brilliant flares and I saw the trail of rockets missiles and machine-guns bullets fired from the US gunship helicopters - so inappropriately named "Apache' - and heard the rapid clatter of the guns of the ships of death riding the starry sky like alien invaders from another world. I heard the explosions of many shells and, I am not sure, but I think a bomb from a US F-16 warplane - the sky was full of them. There was protracted gun-fire for more than an hour. So these young guys really fought it out.
----
I would also like to ask you, and those to whom you pass this on, to think about the relative positions of the fighters and occupiers in this monumentally unequal struggle. While the huge force of Israelis have every technical aid invented by the US war machine, the few young fighters have NOTHING BUT THEIR WEAPON (and this not the most modern) - no helmet, bullet proof vest, radio contact or other protection. No back-up, no plane, helicopter, tank, APC, searchlight, dogs, flares, ambulance or refuge - put all the Israeli/American propaganda aside for a few minutes and try to imagine, please, the courage it requires to do what these young fighters do, knowing that the odds are against escape and that, every time they do succeed in evading death, the odds against a further survival are shortened. Even if the operation is a success the price is always high.

And every time the Israeli Command terrorises Nablus as today with tanks and Jeeps and APC's bristling with death at every junction within the city, operating a lock-down even worse than before (how can this be possible), more Martyrs are ready to defend the honour of Palestine and fight for the freedom of surely the most gentle, generous and peaceful people on earth..

Clarification re: Rachel Corrie

2007-01-07T08:31:00.000-08:00

: "Thursday, January 04, 2007
Clarification re: Rachel Corrie
I figure I owe you all a clarification on Rachel Corrie. There is a reason I hold a particular venom for this human being. This reason is that she chose hate. Rachel was not brainwashed from age 0 onwards to be a suicide bomber. She grew up in the relative lap of luxury in Washington State, and chose to aid and abet Hamas operatives, via the ISM. This was her choice. She chose to give up her life to protect a home with weapons and drugs inside: again her choice. She chose to burn an American flag at a Hamas rally, and showed exactly where she stands. Israelly Cool summed up the real life story of Rachel Corrie right here. When someone turns their back on their country in order to support suicide bombers, I view it as an abomination. As a perfect example, I despise Adam Gadahn more than, say, your average suicide bomber. Adam Gadahn chose hate, and chose to turn his back on his country and his people. He is a traitor to his country. As a corollary, I despise the Kapos in many ways more than the Nazis.

And so yes, I hold a special disdain for the Rachel Corries of the world.

I have no time to mourn the death of a terror supporter when thousands of people are killed every day. If that sounds harsh, so be it. There are millions of people in the world who do deserve my sympathy. Rachel Corrie is not one of them, and no, I am not sad she is dead. I certainly did not celebrate when she died, but I also am not sad that she is dead. Rather, I mourn the loss of her mind when she was alive and brainwashed. I mourn the loss of the minds of hundreds of thousands of other Rachel Corries from around the world. She was certainly not an important figure in the world when she was alive, but she has been martyred at her death, and that is what makes me flat out angry. If this shows I 'lack compassion,' then so be it. I have no compassion for those who aid and abet terrorists. Ms. Corrie did her small part to make the world a worse place to live, and the most tragic part about it is that she died as a true believer for a false cause.

I hope that clears things up.
posted by Red Tulips
http://cultureforall.blogspot.com/2007/01/clarification-re-rachel-corrie.html#links

Rachel Corrie - Hardly a Martyr

2007-01-07T05:20:00.000-08:00

Martyr

by Cynthia Ozick
Post date: 11.29.06
Issue date: 12.11.06

My Name Is Rachel Corrie:
Taken from the Writings of Rachel Corrie
Edited by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
(Theatre Communications Group, 57 pp., $12.95)

On Justice Brandeis's celebrated principle that "the remedy [for free speech] is more speech," it is good and salubrious that My Name Is Rachel Corrie can finally be seen on a New York stage. Last year, when the play was turned away by the New York Theater Workshop apparently because of objections from donors offended by its agitprop banalities, there sprang up, amid the foolish cries of "censorship" (as if the Constitution were being subverted), a newborn legend. The longer the play was absent from local scrutiny, the more romantically its faraway halo might glow: a visionary young woman on the barricades, part heroic Joan of Arc, part victimized Anne Frank, mercilessly cut down in the very act of defying brute injustice.

To have the play actually in hand--the naked script itself--is a down-to-earth corrective. It goes without saying that any play, and this one especially, is both more and less than its script: more, because of the theater's sensuous surround--the emotive ingenuities of set, lighting, and sound; an attractive actor's winning impersonation; the magnetic rapidity of gesture, movement, and voice; and an audience
whose sympathies are already in place, pacified by the play's radiant repute. But it is precisely on account of all these appeals to communal sensation that My Name Is Rachel Corrieis considerably less than its script. Stripped only to print, the play discloses what the theater's dazzlements are likely to obfuscate or diminish. Fortunately, we are assured by the director and co-editor that every word is Rachel
Corrie's own, culled directly from her journals and e-mail messages. Are there incendiary omissions? If so, it hardly matters; what is on the page is revealing enough. This means that we can reasonably trust the script--perhaps understandably manipulated as to selection and sequence--to represent Rachel Corrie as she was, unadulterated by theatrical seductions.

Rachel Corrie, then, as she was. She can be seen in two brief films on Wikipedia. She is in Gaza, a member of the International Solidarity Movement. In one film, she is burning a replica of the American flag. Her mouth is wide, yelling. In the other, she stands fixedly, repeating phrases that appear identically in the playscript; it is as if she has scripted herself, and is speaking by rote. Wound around her neck is the familiar Palestinian scarf, declaring solidarity.

She is twenty-three years old. Though she hopes to become a writer, even a poet, much of what she writes is a facsimile. Her "poetic" passages are an amalgam of Bob Dylan and diluted-to-the-third-generation Allen Ginsberg. Her thinking runs to slogans and robotic abstractions. At ten (her fifth-grade "Conference on World Hunger" speech is reproduced), this formulaic voice is already in training, the boilerplate language already ingrained: "I'm here for other children. I'm here because I care. I'm here because children everywhere are suffering and because forty thousand people die each day from hunger. I'm here because those people are mostly children." In middle school she gets a free trip to Russia (she doesn't say why),
where "everything was dirty." In her teens the spotted owl, suffering from possible extinction, is the fashionable victim of choice. At Evergreen College it is the homeless--including even the suffering salmon struggling through a pipe, "trying to get back home." And after the salmon, the Palestinians. "The salmon talked me into a lifestyle change," she explains.

The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is neither international in its origins nor spontaneous as a "movement." It is, simply, a front: a creature of the PLO, and under its vigilant supervision. In the United States, recruits are encouraged, partly funded, and trained by the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. Though the ISM is touted as non-violent, in reality it acts not merely as a shield for violence but as its proponent. One of the leaders of the California ISM, interviewed on Al-Jazeera, is forthright: "We recognize that violence is necessary and it is permissible for oppressed and occupied people to use armed resistance and we recognize their right to do so." Every Friday in Gaza, a day dedicated to sermonic incitements in mosques, the ISM organizes riots at Israel's security fence, erected to deter infiltration by suicide bombers.

Rachel Corrie is portrayed as selfless by her advocates, and as a naïve dupe by others. Yet after some fleeting hesitation--"I'm really new to talking about Israel-Palestine, so I don't always know the political implications of my words"--by the time she is placed in Gaza she is a complicit enthusiast. Arriving in Tel Aviv, coached beforehand on how to elude security, she records "very little problem at the
airport"; she has come forearmed by her recruiters with a referral to an "Israeli friend," who instantly vanishes out of her ken. "I took a shared taxi into Jeru-salem," she continues, "and noticed that the Holy Land is full of rocks." Though she thinks of herself as a poet, on the road to Jerusalem, and bearing the name Rachel (her sister is Sarah, and her brother is called Chris), she is curiously untouched by any biblical resonance: the old, old memory of the land she has come to defy.

"Sometimes," she writes of her mother, "she wondered if we would be healthier, better children if she had taken us to church.... She was determined I would define [spirituality] for myself." On the road to Jerusalem, spirituality is nowhere, and there are only the self-defining rocks--deprived and inert stoniness. No cities, no
society, no greenery, no population, no children, no birds, cats, or dogs, no sign of civilization ancient or renewed. In Jerusalem, in Israel itself, she sees nothing that she is not primed to see: a stony-hearted colonialist state. Israel is a nullity, despite some passing recognition that "Jewish people have a long history of
oppression"--a standardized note immediately canceled by the expected covering cant: "I think it's important to draw a firm distinction between the policies of Israel as a state, and Jewish people."

Her training--she accepts the term willingly--takes place in Jerusalem. Escorted by Palestinians while waiting "to get to Rafah to join the other internationals trying to prevent the demolition of civilian homes," she observes "blue stars of David spray-painted on doors in the Arab section of the old city." She concludes, "I am used to seeing the cross used in a colonialist way." Once in Rafah, she is under military orders. "The neighborhoods that have asked us for some form of presence are Yibna, Tel El Sultan, Hi Salaam, Brazil, Block J, Zorob, and Block O." The new recruits are called on to stand as human shields before arms caches or shooter hideouts. If through some mishap a young foreigner should be hit, all the better: fuel for international outrage. She imagines "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen."

But in fact the "civilian homes" are weapons depots; or else they are outlets, some-times with complicit families still in them, concealing tunnels dug from Egypt to Gaza. The tunnels smuggle guns, rocket launchers, explosives; and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) is there to stop the flow of arms intended for assaults on Israeli citizens, and to uncover the launchers secreted in olive groves and farms, where the gunmen also hide, or in the houses, where the gunmen hide among women
and children. Rachel Corrie is in a war zone. She cannot not know that she lives and acts among guns and gunmen, or that the children who are everywhere live and play among guns and gunmen.

"Someone had been killed at the Rafah/Egypt border," she reports. She and the other "internationals" are sent directly into the battle area to pick up the body.

We were given a stretcher ... and then we went out--each of us with a handle. We started into the field: five internationals plus Jehan [their Palestinian handler]. Jenny spoke over the bullhorn saying, "Do not shoot. We are unarmed civilians," naming the countries we come from and letting the IDF know our intention to retrieve this man's body. The first response from the IDF was shouting, "Go back."

They continue to walk toward the body, moving deliberately into the line of fire, which, as she notes, shifts away from them. And then: "A white truck with a blue light rolled up and the person in the truck spoke over the loudspeaker. Told us to leave. Stated, 'You'll get the body later.'"

All this is chilling reading. It exposes the brutal cynicism of Rachel Corrie's handlers, eager, for propaganda value, to bait bulldozers and tanks with the lives of their young recruits. But it also exposes Rachel Corrie: she is not a dupe, she is fully aware of where she is, and what she is doing there, and why. She is a dedicated believer and a shrewdly practiced marketing adviser. Among her notes: "Set up system for media work." Phoning home, she leaves a message for her mother:

I'm going to give The Olympian [her hometown newspaper] your number. Please think about your language when you talk to them. I think it was smart that you're wary of using the word "terrorism," and if you talk about the cycle of violence, or "an eye for an eye," you could be perpetuating the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a balanced conflict, instead of a largely unarmed people against the
fourth most powerful military in the world. These are the kind [sic] of things it's important to think about before talking to reporters.

To her father, in a lighter voice, she writes: "I feel like I spend all my time propagandizing Mom." Yet the statement to her mother, even apart from its cookie-cutter language, is a thing to marvel at. A young woman has journeyed from one continent to another to enter a history of which she is uncommonly ignorant. This is not the ignorance of naïveté.

It is willful, and willful ignorance is distinguishable
from false witness.

She has come as a determined tabula rasa. Absent are the Arab annihilationist wars of 1948, 1967, 1973. Absent are the repeated Palestinian refusals of statehood, beginning in 1948, when the United Nations proposed a partition of the land, and emerging again in 2000, when yet another Israeli (and American) appeal for Palestinians to accept statehood was answered by Yasir Arafat's murderous second
intifada. "A largely unarmed people"?

The English-speaking pharmacist in whose house Rachel Corrie is billeted admits to the culpable Palestinian origins of the current fighting: "Before intifada--no tanks, no bulldozers, no noise. After intifada, daily." But even this close-at-hand testimony of cause-and-effect cannot sway her. The believer is cognizant only of her
belief.

For Rachel Corrie, in 2003, living and writing in the very heart of the second inti-fada, there is no mention of intifada, only of Israeli aggression; no acknowledgment of ongoing suicide bombings, rockets, bus explosions, attacks aimed at discos, eateries, malls, holiday gatherings; no recognition, for all her concern for children, of kindergartens inculcating six-year-olds with the beauty of "martyrdom."
Or, rather, if any of these matters are argued, even in a mild and sympathetic tone (her mother's), against her belief system, she justifies in mechanical phrases what she permits herself, at least once, to call "Palestinian violence." And follows immediately with dogged, and preposterous, false witness: "The vast majority of
Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance."

The mechanical lingo, with its neo-Marxist paraphernalia and hate-America jargon, is consistently on display. "I've had this underlying need to go to a place and meet people who are on the other end of the tax money that goes to fund the US military." "What we are paying for here is truly evil. Maybe the general growing class imbalance in the world and consequent devastation of working people's lives is a bigger evil." "I went to a rally a few days ago in Khan Younis in solidarity with the people of [Saddam Hussein's] Iraq." "[Children] love to get me to practice my limited Arabic. Today I tried to learn to say, 'Bush is a tool.'"

On one occasion she confesses to seeing a Palestinian family put in
jeopardy through the meddling zeal of the "internationals." "Yesterday," she recounts, "I watched a father lead two tiny children holding his hand out into the sight of tanks and a sniper tower and bulldozers because he thought his house was going to be exploded. It was our mistake in translation that made him think this.... To think that this man felt it was less of a risk to walk out in view of the tanks with his kids than to stay in his house.... I felt like it was our translation problems that made him leave." But she is not really remorseful over the ineptitude of interlopers such as herself. "I'm sure it was only a matter of time," she comments, confident in predicting that the man's house will be brought down sooner or
later--so what difference if the ISM plays with his children's lives in the middle of a war?

And finally she begins to contemplate departing from Gaza.

I am trying to figure out what I'm going to do when I leave here.... People here can't leave, so that complicates things.... I really don't want to live with a lot of guilt about this place--being able to come and go so easily. I know I should try and link up with the family in France, but I think that I'm not going to do that.... It seems like a transition into too much opulence right now--I would feel a lot of
class guilt the whole time.

Class guilt notwithstanding, she is ready to go--but where? To her well-off con-nections in France? That way lies neo-Marxist sin. She indulges in a dreamy list: home to finish college, Egypt or Dubai for a year, Sweden for a month, South America, Mexico. Lacking all historical understanding--South America is for her a single undifferentiated mass--and abandoning all responsibility for the possible consequences of an ephemeral sojourn, she can dip in and out of these places at a
whim, and be off again to her middle-class American comforts. Succinctly, she advises herself: "Travel elsewhere."

here is an old-fashioned word for this mentality, the kind of earnest temporary do-goodism that is likely to do harm: the word is slumming. For a sheltered young woman from Olympia, Washington, the intifada, as furiously enacted by Palestinians in Gaza, and the deterring Israeli response, are a shocking and often frightening experience. In Olympia there are no guns and gunmen occupying households, and no rocket launchers concealed in the forsythia bushes. "This is another place," she describes it, "where progressive white people escaped a few decades ago--a place where hippie kids come after touring with jam bands." the salient term "progressive." Long out of use because of its Stalinist taint, it has reverted to the common idiom, frequently in its newest anti-Zionist clothing.

As it turned out, Rachel Corrie did not travel elsewhere. A tragic casualty of the war she chose to join, she was cut down--horribly--by an Israeli army bulldozer. Contrary to the reports of journalists, the house she was attempting to shield was not a target. The bulldozer was clearing brush to thwart cover for launchers, explosives, and ambush. A photo taken minutes before the event tells what happened: the big growling machine is perched on a great mound of earth; well below it, shut off from the driver's vision and hearing, stands a tiny figure with a bullhorn. A piteous, pointless, heartbreaking death.

The playscript includes an addendum by Tom Dale, one of the "internationals": the driver, he surmises, "knew absolutely that she was there." This version--a charge of plain murder--has, along with the notorious Mohammed al-Dura fabrication, entered the world's book of infamous fake facts. And for the opportunistic leaders of the ISM, which knows usable goods when it sees them, Rachel Corrie's death is neither piteous nor pointless: it is pure bonanza. A predatory organization that callously endangers its human shields by placing them before the hideouts of war, it purports to preach non-violence--except on its website, where it openly defends "armed struggle." Arafat, the warlord and terror chieftain who launched the intifada that was the ultimate ground of Rachel Corrie's death, lauded her as a "martyr"; for
Arafat too, in the enduring propaganda blitz against the life of the Jewish state, she was usable goods. Media-savvy herself, she understood, as we have seen, the notion of a usable death: "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen." Her grieving mother and father, seeking solidarity with their
daughter and her cause, journeyed to Gaza, where they were an immediate temptation to the armed kidnappers who prefer to seize Westerners; identified as the martyr's parents, they were left to themselves by the equally media-savvy gunmen.

In view of the play's manifestly political intent, and particularly in the lurid light of the editors' having concluded with an accusation of deliberate murder, the London audiences who jubilantly welcomed My Name Is Rachel Corrie, and the New York audiences who weepily do the same,should know at least this much: they have been spectators at a show trial. And there are Jews in the dock.

Cynthia Ozick is the author, most recently, of The Din in the Head
(Houghton Mifflin).

Rachel Corrie: Usable Goods

2006-12-15T20:04:00.000-08:00

Rachel Corrie: Usable Goods

http://www.seraphicpress.com/archives/2006/12/a_useful_commod.php
"Rachel Corrie's death is neither piteous nor pointless: it is pure bonanza. A predatory organization that callously endangers its human shields by placing them before the hideouts of war, it purports to preach non-violence -- except on its website, where it openly defends "armed struggle." Arafat, the warlord and terror chieftain who launched the intifada that was the ultimate ground of Rachel Corrie's death, lauded her as a "martyr"; for Arafat too, in the enduring propaganda blitz against the life of the Jewish state, she was usable goods. Media-savvy herself, she understood, as we have seen, the notion of a usable death: "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen."

You must read Cynthia Ozick's review of My Name is Rachel Corrie.

And of course you must read Yehudit's face to face with Rachel Corrie's American Gothic parents at the always invaluable blog, Kesher.

Umkahlil lies

2006-12-03T18:49:00.000-08:00

Umkahlil lies

December 03, 2006
Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

The staged legacy of Rachel Corrie. Girlish Figure

by James Kirchick

Only at TNR Online | Post date 11.22.06

Of all the subjects for a 90-minute, one-woman show, Rachel Corrie ought to have been at the bottom of the list. Corrie was the 23-year-old Evergreen State College student crushed in March 2003 by an Israeli bulldozer that was either set to raze a Palestinian home or clear brush that could conceal explsovies, depending on whom you believe. She trekked all the way from Olympia, Washington, to the Gaza Strip with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM)--which, despite claiming the mantle of a "peace" movement, has nonetheless abetted Palestinian suicide bombers. And now, New York's Minetta Lane Theater is telling her story in "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which brought the largest advance for any show ever performed there. It is based on Corrie's e-mails and diary entries, and it paints her as a saint who died for a worthy cause by eliding all of the intricacies of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In locales from Corrie's dorm room to the streets of the Rafah refugee camp, "My Name is Rachel Corrie" takes us into the mind of its namesake. But there is hardly any mention of the Palestinian people she was so committed to. Corrie looks either like one of the upper-middle- class kids who take Latin American latrine-digging vacations to buff up their college resumes, or one of the "political pilgrims"--to use Paul Hollander's phrase--of the cold war (Paul Robeson, Ramsey Clark, Susan Sontag) who ventured to totalitarian lands and returned to boast of slumming it with the liberated natives. The selection of Corrie's writings on display never adequately explains why she would so determinedly seek out a dangerous place she knew little about, other than that she had a deep antipathy toward "injustice." A telling indicator not in the play was a photo circulated after her death; in it (and in her diary), Corrie flaunts her hatred of the United States by burning a mock American flag while Palestinian children crowd around her.

If the Palestinians in this play are props, the Israelis are sound effects. As this is a one-woman show, we obviously do not see either the Palestinians or the Israelis, but we sense the latter more than the former. We hear machine guns, helicopter blades, and tanks (though never the sounds of suicide bombs). If you watched "My Name is Rachel Corrie" knowing little about this decades-long crisis, you would leave thinking that Israelis are sadistic monsters who kill Palestinians at random, destroy olive groves, and harass women and children for the sheer thrill of it. The few mentions of terrorism or suicide bombing are vague, and only in reference to "the right of people to legitimate armed struggle." Never is it suggested that these acts take place against civilian targets, not soldiers (though, in her diary, Corrie excuses that, too).

In prostrating herself before an Israeli bulldozer, Corrie actually became that which she was (unwittingly, perhaps) protecting: the Palestinian suicide martyr. She received the martyr treatment--in both Palestinian propaganda and far-left protest circles--becoming a pieta of the anti-Israel movement. Or, as her ex-boyfriend put it, "she has become her death."

The actress Megan Dodds, who plays Corrie, does so accurately. She alternates between two personas in the play: on the one hand, an exuberant girl we see at the beginning (jumping about her messy room, perkily talking about boys) and, on the other, a self-righteous college activist espousing platitudes about the state of the world and the evils of U.S. foreign policy. Dodds, to her credit, is an honest
performer: She does not bend to the (no doubt difficult) temptation to make Corrie less grating or sanctimonious than her diaries make her seem.

For a one-person show to sustain itself, its subject must either be humorous (think Elaine Stritch), possess some sort of intellectual severity (Spalding Gray), or both (Hal Holbrooke as Mark Twain). Rachel Corrie did not have any of these. Corrie's bouts of moral indignation overshadow a few moments of humor, which are nothing more than girlish flightiness anyway. She was a simpleton when it came to world politics,
and yet the play sanctifies her as some sort of sage witness to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In part, due to the epistolary basis of "My Name is Rachel Corrie," comparisons have been made to "The Diary of Anne Frank." This is partly true. The villains in both plays are heard from but, for the most part, not seen; they are nevertheless omnipresent and threatening. But the comparison ends there: With Corrie, the bad guys are Israelis; with Frank, they are Nazis--hardly equal purveyors of horror. And Anne Frank was a probing character whose blameless observations of fascist Europe
demonstrated the cruelty of a period in which children were perfunctorily murdered. Rachel Corrie was a know-it-all who deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. What's more, there is an issue of moral culpability among antagonists. Obviously, Frank's murderers had it. But Corrie died, accidentally,
after giving intellectual (and actual) cover to those who are, essentially, the heirs of Frank's killers.

Bereft of gravity, a sympathetic character, or a compelling story, "My Name is Rachel Corrie" ignominiously turns to emotional blackmail. The image on the playbill is of a pre-pubescent Corrie smiling with wispy blond hair blowing across her face. Much of what the editors selected from Corrie's diaries reflect upon her childhood innocence. (Those editors are the venerable British actor Alan Rickman and, less shockingly, Katharine Viner, a writer and editor for The Guardian.) The last segment in the play is a video, taken when Corrie was in the fifth grade, decrying the state of world poverty and declaring her intent to personally "save" the poor. "I'm here because I care," she says in the video, and no doubt she was in Gaza because she cared. (What exactly she cared about is something the play, and Corrie herself, obfuscates.) But this adorable video is meant to convert your sympathy for Corrie into sympathy for her cause. How dare we ridicule such an precocious and idealistic young girl who now lies dead because of her devotion to world peace? What right do any of us have to question the cause for which Corrie gave her life? This is Cindy Sheehan politics.

But what the video unwittingly reveals is that Corrie never outgrew the naive little schoolgirl. Corrie at 23 was just like Corrie at ten. And that is what's so tragic and so telling about those who wish to change the world without really trying to understand it.

James Kirchick is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Rachel Corrie is still dead.

2006-11-28T19:11:00.000-08:00

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!

2006-11-28T18:49:00.000-08:00

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.

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

2006-11-27T20:32:00.000-08:00

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?

RACHEL CORRIE: A SAD "SOLIDARITY" STORY

2006-11-26T15:13:00.000-08:00

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."

2006-11-26T08:56:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-11-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

"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.

2006-11-24T19:22:00.000-08:00

: "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.

peacepalestine

2006-10-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

Who killed Rachel Corrie?

Or did she actually commit suicide? There are rumors to the affect that she was pregnant by a married Palestinian. Did she risk death to prove to her man that he should leave his wife for her?

Posted: March 25, 20031:00 a.m.
Rachel Corrie, the Olympia, Wash., college student killed trying to protect a Palestinian house – a house, remember, not even a human being – against an Israeli bulldozer, will probably not merit a footnote in history books. That's too bad, because her life and death, the way she has been portrayed in some media, and the reactions of her college are powerful examples of an America with many morally confused individuals.
A Seattle Times columnist described her as a martyr. Her hometown paper, the Olympian, published numerous pictures of a sweet-looking woman from childhood on. It omitted the one photo of Rachel Corrie that USA Today, to its credit, published – Corrie screaming anti-American invective while burning an American flag in Gaza.
Anyone with a heart must extend the deepest condolences to Rachel Corrie's parents. But anyone with a conscience must regard Rachel Corrie's activities with contempt. One hopes that it is not asking too much of people to entertain simultaneously two conflicting emotions – grief for the parents and contempt for the daughter.
Rachel Corrie chose to side with a society that breeds some of the cruelest murderers of innocent people in the world. Rachel Corrie gave her life trying to protect people whose declared aim is to annihilate another country. In the name of saving children's lives, Rachel Corrie chose to defend a society that teaches its young children to blow themselves up and which deliberately targets children for death. And Rachel Corrie went to America's enemies to burn her country's flag.
She was one of the many fools our colleges annually produce. Evergreen State College is reputed to excel in such production. Is anyone aware of a single student or faculty member who repudiated her activities?
We are told repeatedly that Rachel was idealistic – as if that matters. Virtually every person who commits great evil – the Nazi, the communist, the Islamic terrorist – is idealistic. Idealism is morally neutral. It is good only when directed to good ends. But in young people, idealism is at least as likely to lead to bad as to good because few young people are wise – and idealism without wisdom is very dangerous.
We are told ad nauseam that Rachel Corrie was a "peace activist." So let it be said once and for all that most of these people are moral frauds. Why? Because "peace activists" routinely protest only against peaceful countries. Has there been one Evergreen State or other "peace activist" in Sudan during its Islamic government's slaughter and enslavement of millions of blacks? Are there any "peace activists" in Tibet to protect its unique culture from being eradicated by the Communist Chinese? Did you notice any "peace activists" trying to save the millions of North Koreans dying at the hands of their lunatic government? Of course not. Rachel Corrie and other "peace activists" only target peace-loving Israel and America.
Why do they do so?
Here is one answer.
The world is filled with evil, and young idealists like Rachel Corrie don't like it. Which is lovely. But they don't confront real evil because they know they will get hurt. That's one reason there are no "peace activists" or "human shields" confronting Islamic terror, North Korean totalitarianism, or Chinese Communist despotism.
So, what's an idealist to do if she refuses to confront real evil but wants to feel good about herself? Ironically, confront those who fight real evil. That's why Rachel Corrie and the millions marching to protect Saddam Hussein's Iraq have never uttered a peep against Palestinian terror, Iraqi totalitarianism or North Korean gulags. Instead, they focus their animosity at the countries that confront these evils – the United States and Israel.
So, Olympia, grieve for Rachel Corrie's parents, but spare us the hagiography. Rachel Corrie died fighting for the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian group dedicated – in its own words – to "armed struggle" against Israel. She ended up being a useful idiot for, and one more victim of, Palestinian terror.

peacepalestine

2006-10-26T18:28:00.000-07:00

Who killed Rachel Corrie?

Or did she actually commit suicide? There are rumors to the affect that she was pregnant by a married Palestinian. Did she risk death to prove to her man that he should leave his wife for her?

Posted: March 25, 20031:00 a.m. EasternBook Antiqua, Times New Roman, Georgia, Times">
Rachel Corrie, the Olympia, Wash., college student killed trying to protect a Palestinian house – a house, remember, not even a human being – against an Israeli bulldozer, will probably not merit a footnote in history books. That's too bad, because her life and death, the way she has been portrayed in some media, and the reactions of her college are powerful examples of an America with many morally confused individuals.
A Seattle Times columnist described her as a martyr. Her hometown paper, the Olympian, published numerous pictures of a sweet-looking woman from childhood on. It omitted the one photo of Rachel Corrie that USA Today, to its credit, published – Corrie screaming anti-American invective while burning an American flag in Gaza.
Anyone with a heart must extend the deepest condolences to Rachel Corrie's parents. But anyone with a conscience must regard Rachel Corrie's activities with contempt. One hopes that it is not asking too much of people to entertain simultaneously two conflicting emotions – grief for the parents and contempt for the daughter.
Rachel Corrie chose to side with a society that breeds some of the cruelest murderers of innocent people in the world. Rachel Corrie gave her life trying to protect people whose declared aim is to annihilate another country. In the name of saving children's lives, Rachel Corrie chose to defend a society that teaches its young children to blow themselves up and which deliberately targets children for death. And Rachel Corrie went to America's enemies to burn her country's flag.
She was one of the many fools our colleges annually produce. Evergreen State College is reputed to excel in such production. Is anyone aware of a single student or faculty member who repudiated her activities?
We are told repeatedly that Rachel was idealistic – as if that matters. Virtually every person who commits great evil – the Nazi, the communist, the Islamic terrorist – is idealistic. Idealism is morally neutral. It is good only when directed to good ends. But in young people, idealism is at least as likely to lead to bad as to good because few young people are wise – and idealism without wisdom is very dangerous.
We are told ad nauseam that Rachel Corrie was a "peace activist." So let it be said once and for all that most of these people are moral frauds. Why? Because "peace activists" routinely protest only against peaceful countries. Has there been one Evergreen State or other "peace activist" in Sudan during its Islamic government's slaughter and enslavement of millions of blacks? Are there any "peace activists" in Tibet to protect its unique culture from being eradicated by the Communist Chinese? Did you notice any "peace activists" trying to save the millions of North Koreans dying at the hands of their lunatic government? Of course not. Rachel Corrie and other "peace activists" only target peace-loving Israel and America.
Why do they do so?
Here is one answer.
The world is filled with evil, and young idealists like Rachel Corrie don't like it. Which is lovely. But they don't confront real evil because they know they will get hurt. That's one reason there are no "peace activists" or "human shields" confronting Islamic terror, North Korean totalitarianism, or Chinese Communist despotism.
So, what's an idealist to do if she refuses to confront real evil but wants to feel good about herself? Ironically, confront those who fight real evil. That's why Rachel Corrie and the millions marching to protect Saddam Hussein's Iraq have never uttered a peep against Palestinian terror, Iraqi totalitarianism or North Korean gulags. Instead, they focus their animosity at the countries that confront these evils – the United States and Israel.
So, Olympia, grieve for Rachel Corrie's parents, but spare us the hagiography. Rachel Corrie died fighting for the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian group dedicated – in its own words – to "armed struggle" against Israel. She ended up being a useful idiot for, and one more victim of, Palestinian terror.

umkahlil

2006-10-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

umkahlil: "Abed El-Fatah climbed over the Apartheid Wall in order to get to Al-Makkassed Hospital in Jerusalem for his open-heart surgery. The Israelis, who control every aspect of Palestinians’ lives, denied him a permit to go to the hospital."

This is a riot! A man who needed 'open-heart surgery' had the ability to scale a 25-foot wall? And who paid for the surgery? Perhaps he didn't need the surgery? Perhaps he just had a nose job?

Red Tulips tells the truth about Corrie!

2006-10-22T14:39:00.000-07:00

: "Summing up why those who support the Palestinians are actually the Palestinians' worst enemy
I wrote this on Twosret's blog, but I fear she will delete it, and hence, I am pasting it here. I know much of this is repetitive, but I feel this all cannot be said enough. (here is a link to the blog which will not add to the number of people who link to twosret: (http://cheztwosret.blogspot.com/)

It started out as a follow up to my Rachel Corrie post. I wrote the following:

ISM absolutely is committed to the destruction of Israel by any means necessary, including terrorism. Rachel Corrie was a member of this organization.

This is a picture of Rachel Corrie that rarely gets distributed by the press.

The ISM absolutely is a pro-terrorist, anti-peace, pro-jihadist organization.
See the proof here and here.
It is clear as day for the world to see that Rachel Corrie and the ISM advocated terrorism. Twosret's support of these organizations shows she too supports terrorism.

---------------
Twosret replied with the following:
Redtulips,
Let me just point out one thing seriously wrong with Israel political structure and why we call it a terrorist, Invader, aggressor state.
When someone objects peacefully a military bulldozer in civil countries they get arrested, In Israel they get crushed under the bulldozer blade. This is how Israel started as a state. Their terrorists built it and their younger terrorist generation (including rapists, "corrupt judges etc...) is ruling it. The streets of Israel are named after terrorists that killed British envoy and they claim them heros.

Crushing someone with a bulldozer is a criminal act and a horrifying, cold blood murder. I'm sure this bulldozer killed many others and we never got to hear about them because they are not American.

The current Administration should call it an act of war on Israel. Isn't Rachel Corrie an American citizen?, after all Rachel Corrie is a citizen not a soldier like Jilad and the other Prisoners of war that they are still alive.

Rachel Corrie was never a terrorist nor she was pro-Jihadi. You need to pick new terms.
Since you justify a murder next time you hear of a sucicide bomber killing innocents you should praise him because you are advocating for violence and the killings of innocent people.
Do you understand now why the owner of this blog is not a pro-terrorism and you are? Do you understand now why you promote hate and murder?
I doubt it!12:25 PM

Twosret said...If Red tulips is an American citizen she should be on trial for treason.
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I replied to this with the following:Let me add that Rachel Corrie was not "murdered." She purposely stood in front of a bulldozer, in its blind spot. She purposely decided to die. That was her CHOICE.Anyone who stands for Hamas and the Palestinian 'cause' stands for genocide. It is written right in the Hamas charter that they seek to elliminate Israel off the face of the earth (in its entirety), and it quotes from the Protocols of Zion.This goes beyond Israel and America. Yes, Hamas has cells in the US, and yes, it is also linked to anti-US terror. So yes, supporting the Palestinian 'cause' is anti-American for that reason alone. But there is more to this.

Standing with this 'cause' means standing against all that is good and decent in the world. It means standing for genocide. It means standing for the degradation of women's rights. It means standing against minorities (as the Palestinians horribly mistreat minorities within the Territories - a dirty little secret). It means standing against gay people (who flee the Territories to live under house arrest in Israel). It means standing for Islamofascist hatred. That is what standing for the Palestinian 'cause' as defined by Hamas/Fatah/PRC/Islamic Jihad define it.

In contrast, I actually stand for Palestinian rights. I believe that the only way for peace is for them to give up terror and make a real pledge towards cooperation and egalitarianism. If the Palestinians hope to have a state, and one worth living in, they have to get their act together. Israel will NOT give up the territories at this point unless Olmert decides to be suicidally incompetant. Why? Because the Palestinian terrorism ensures they are too much of a threat to be given a state. I do not pander to the worst, most base instincts of the Palestinians. And in that way, I am pro-Palestinian, and you, Rachel Corrie, and her ilk, are the most virulently anti-Palestinian people out there.

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!

2006-10-15T18:06:00.000-07:00

Rachel Corrie died for her sins!
Will the real Rachel Corrie stand up?

Shortly after her death, columnist Dennis Prager wrote to Corrie's native Washingtonian parents: "So, Olympia, grieve for Rachel Corrie's parents, but spare us the hagiography. Rachel Corrie died fighting for . . . a Palestinian group dedicated, in its own words, to "armed struggle" against Israel. She ended up being a useful idiot for, and one more victim of, Palestinian terror." Nothing could sum things up better.

Rachel's Words start off with lies.

2006-10-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

They have a "Myth and Fact" sheet on the website.

The only problem is that they were already posting misinformation everywhere.

They say that Rachel died trying to prevent a bulldoer from destroying the house of a drug dealer while he was still in the house. yet the source they use is that he was a doctor. What was he? A pusher or proscriber?

If they can't even get that simple fact straight, why should we believe anything they post?

From http://www.rachelswords.org/2006/10/14/rachel-corrie-myths-and-facts/
Rachel was standing in front of the home of friends - pharmacist Samir Nasrallah

But from their source: http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=1866&CategoryId=23
Peace activist Rachel Corrie, 23, is a student at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. She died Sunday, March 16, 2003, in the southern Gaza city of Rafah while trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from tearing down a Palestinian physician's home.

Which was it? Pharmacist or physician? As the only witnesses for Corrie's antisemitic side are the 7 Palestinian Solidarity members, and we know what their agenda is, then there were no objective witnesses. And we know what kind of liars the 7 are.