I doubt there are any people who are not aware of the fact that Rachel Corrie committed suicide as part of her campaign for the “right” of Palestinian terrorists to murder Jewish civilians in Israel.  Corrie was part of a team sent to Gaza by the openly pro-terror International Solidarity Movement (ISM).  There they assisted terrorists, stored weapons for them, hosted and hid them, and attempted to interfere with Israeli military anti-terrorist operations.  In one such incident Corrie herself decided to play “chicken” with a massive military earth mover.  The driver of the bulldozer could not see her and struck her as she was trying to stop his destruction of hidden terrorist smuggling tunnels.  She was taken by a Palestinian ambulance to a Gaza Hamas medical facility, where she died of her injuries, possibly as a result of medical incompetence.

Rachel herself was an America-hating, flag-burning, anti-Jewish extremist.  Her death was clearly an ideologically-motivated suicide, a bit like someone running in the center lanes of the 405 freeway in Los Angeles as a protest against global warming who gets struck down by an 18-wheeler.  Corrie and her ISM comrades want to protect the right of Hamas terrorists to infiltrate Israel and blow up school buses and cafes.  As a result Corrie became the matron saint of the pro-terror Left.  She is celebrated by David Duke and the neo-Nazis, as well as neo-Stalinists.   Corrie’s own parents went on a jihad against Israel, publishing bash-Israel materials on the worst jihadist anti-Semitic web sites on earth. They also tried to file a civil suit for damages against the Israeli government, but their suit was tossed out as frivolous.

As part of the beatification of Corrie, an idiotic “play” was staged, “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” which attempted to deconstruct the young terrorist as a golden-haired lover of peace and poetry, striving for love and beauty in a world beset with pain.  It was first performed in the UK in 2005, after two Londoners, actor/director Alan Rickman and journalist Katherine Viner, edited Rachel’s “diaries” into a 70-minute propaganda play.  The play’s pro-jihad agitprop was about as morally compelling as would be a similar play about Horst Wessel.  Can a play entitled “My Name is Osama” be far behind?  One that protests the criminal execution of Bin Laden, the peace activist?  How about a play about the sufferings and moral ponderings of the bloke who shot up the school in Newton, Connecticut?

The “Rachel play” then metastasized to other countries.  In New York and in some other cities, protests against the pro-terror and anti-Semitic theme of the “play” resulted in cancellations.
All of the above just makes the newest development even more mind boggling.  After all the years of exposing the true nature of ISM, the Corries, and the “play” that promotes them, along comes the Israeli radical Left and stages a performance of “My Name is Rachel Corrie,” smack in the holy city of Jerusalem in a national theater, one funded by taxpayers.

Let me step back for a moment.  The radical leftist fringe in Israel might as well call itself the Jews for a Second Holocaust.  These are leftist extremists who simply hate their own country and seek its annihilation.  Some of them cheer on Arab terror attacks against Jews.  Some of them endorse the so-called “Palestinian right of return,” meaning the right to annihilate Israel in a deluge of millions of Arabs from various countries pretending to be “returning Palestinian refugees.”  Some of them collaborate with open anti-Semites. Almost all of them oppose freedom of speech for critics of the Left.

The radical Left in Israel is led by the daily newspaper Haaretz, which I consider to be a Palestinian newspaper published in Hebrew.  It is anti-Zionist and only uses the word “terrorist” to refer to Jewish teenage vandals who write anti-Arab graffiti on walls, while Arab suicide bombers are “activists.”  Hamas rockets fired at Jews are symbolic protests.  A few days ago Haaretz insisted that imprisoned Palestinian mass murderers were the moral equivalents of Nelson Mandela when he was on Robben Island.   MSNBC in the US is a balanced professional news agency when compared with Haaretz.  Sure, MSNBC makes “Rev Al” Sharpton into one of its regular correspondents, but he is a towering intellectual and moral giant compared to most of the columnists at Haaretz.
Israel has long wrestled with what to do with anti-Israel and anti-Jewish manifestations in the “arts.”  Leftist film producers regularly churn out bash-Israel movies in Israel, some that accuse Jews of being the new Nazis, and these are seen by almost no one while the films get made thanks to governmental subsidization.  The anti-Israel agitprop gets funded even when the conservative Likud is in office and in charge.

Bash-Israel propaganda is of course protected speech in Israel, even when it is openly treasonous.  Unlike criticism of leftist traitors, which is libel.  The matter becomes a question of public policy the moment the arts use public funds.   You can stand on a corner in Israel and scream all you want that Israel is an apartheid regime in need of annihilation.   But the moment my taxes are used to pay for your doing so, I want heads to roll.

In a very different controversy, but one having some lessons for us here, there has long been harsh opposition in Israel to performances of the works of composer Richard Wagner.  The problem is not their musical quality or even the fact that Wagner was an anti-Semite.  Almost all musical and literary figures in Germany were anti-Semites.  But Wagner was the grand promoter of racialist anti-Semitism, claiming that Jews were racially sub-human and deserving of extermination as vermin.  And for that reason he was the inspiration of Adolf Hitler.

Ever since its independence, the music of Wagner has not been performed or broadcast in Israel by state-supported institutions.  The world-class Israel Philharmonic Orchestra does not play Wagner, and his music is not played on state-run radio and television channels.  Anyone who wants to listen to Wagner in the privacy of his home or car can do so, and music stores have plenty of Wagner disks and records for sale, as do some bootleggers.  But national institutions deny Wagner the legitimacy he does not deserve.  Only a leftist moron would consider this “censorship.”

Now along comes the radical Left in Israel and stages an Israeli theater presentation (in Hebrew) of “My Name is Rachel Corrie.”  That play is to be performed in the Jerusalem Khan Theater, a sort of national theater owned by the Jerusalem Municipality.   Note the caveat on the page of the theater that reads: “The Khan Theatre is supported by the Ministry of Culture and Sport, The Jerusalem Municipality.” This means Israeli tax money is being used to pay for the propaganda.  For its poster, the producers of the theatrical atrocity even use the now-notorious photoshopped hoax photo that shows Rachel in her orange vest standing in clear sight in front of the bulldozer (see it here).  The problem is that it is not a real photo of Corrie but an ISM fabrication.

The “star” of the theater performance is an airheaded Israeli bimbette named Sivan Krechner, who has been active in a lesbian-homosexual theater in Tel Aviv (she says she is straight).    She denies with a straight face that the show has a political message at all.  “I am innocent just like Rachel was innocent,” she bleats, and she openly identifies with Corrie’s persona and “mission.”  She sees nothing wrong with prettifying a pro-terror activist, while at the same time she insists she would never be part of any theatrical production that presented in a positive light the “Price Tag” vandals, that small group of Jewish teenagers who paint anti-Arab graffiti on buildings we mentioned above, the kids dubbed “terrorists” by Haaretz.   After all, they are evil.  Krechner tells about how flattered she is that her friends in Gaza support the staging of the play.  She is very critical of the Israeli court for tossing out the lawsuit by the Corrie parents.

As Israelis learn that their taxes are being hijacked to finance pro-terror agitprop in Jerusalem, increasing demands are being heard to defund the show.  Members of parliament, the Jerusalem mayor, and some journalists are livid with anger and demanding that Israel’s Minister of Culture, who is from the Likud party, stop national funding for the “play” immediately.   Jerusalem’s Deputy Mayor called for a consumer boycott of the theater if it stages the “show,” the same theater his own municipality props up.

And predictably, the fascist Left, which has never met a non-leftist it believes should be allowed to exercise freedom of speech, is running around the globe screaming about this new round of Israeli censorship and suppression of democracy.  A far-leftist website in Israel funded by European anti-Israel forces denounced the “censorship,” moaning that “Hatred for Rachel Corrie knows no limits, as a Jerusalem municipal official demonstrates by trying to ban a play about the ‘Israel-hater tourist.’”

In Israel, like most other places, the self-proclaimed cultural elite is predominantly leftist.  And in Israel, like other places, ordinary consumers cannot go to see any play that commemorates any of those other Rachels, the Israeli Jewish women named Rachel who were brutally murdered by the Palestinian genocidal terrorists so beloved by Rachel Corrie, the ISM, and the radical Left.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/celebrating-rachel-corrie-israeli-tax-dollars-at-work/

Rachel Corrie Died for Her Parents’ Sins

(From PJ Media)

By Abraham H. Miller

          After a lengthy trial, an Israeli court found that the death of International Solidarity Movement activist Rachel Corrie was an accident. Rachel Corrie’s death was an accident, but it was not a tragedy. The tragedy is to be seen in the deaths of all the other Rachels — there are about a dozen of them — and the hundreds of other innocents who died at the hands of the people Rachel Corrie was trying to protect. Rachel Corrie was a willing and active accomplice helping people bent on committing mass murder. If her intended victims were not Jews, the world would not be beatifying her as some sort of saintly peace activist.

          The entire Rachel Corrie episode is an encounter with the absurd. Corrie joined the anarchist International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which takes naïve leftists like Corrie and puts them in dangerous situations with the hope that their death or injury will make them poster children for the Palestinian cause. The ISM does not support a two-state solution. The only outcome it envisages to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is the destruction of the Jewish state and, of course, with it, the Jews. The ISM makes no secret of its goals and aspirations. When Corrie signed on to go to the war zone known as Gaza and stand in front of Israeli bulldozers that were destroying tunnels and homes being used to smuggle and store arms and munitions designed to kill Jews, she knew she was helping mass murderers.

          Corrie stood in front of a bulldozer whose uplifted blade made it impossible for the driver to see her. She was simply too close to the bulldozer to be in the field of vision, like being too close to an SUV backing up in reverse.  By the time Corrie realized that the bulldozer was not going to stop, she started moving backward and fell into a trench, which the bulldozer drove over causing her to be crushed by the falling dirt. Her death was exactly the kind of event the ISM wanted: an American student dying at the hands of a bulldozer operated by the Israeli Defense Forces.

          Since her death, Corrie’s activist, militant, and Israeli-bashing parents have transformed her death into a cottage industry. The Corries can be seen making the rounds of the liberal churches talking about the Palestinian cause and how the Israelis maliciously killed their daughter. For audiences predisposed to hate Israel and support the Palestinians as an oppressed people, the Corries and their “martyred” daughter comprise a saga that reinforces their jaundiced views.

          It is not just the liberal churches that venerate the Corries. Yasser Arafat, too, showered them with adulation for donating their daughter to the cause. Just as their daughter put her life at risk to help mass murderers, the parents stand for photo ops with people who speak of past crimes against Jews and openly boast of those they are about to commit.

          The Corries have learned nothing from their daughter’s experience. Mrs. Corrie openly brags of two nieces who are active members of the ISM, and she hopes their activism will emulate her daughter’s.
Clearly, the Corries are trying to expiate their own guilt. What parents encourage their daughter to go into a war zone to stand before bulldozers that are trying to protect innocent people by destroying tunnels and buildings used to transfer munitions for suicide bombers?  What parents encourage their child to join an anarchist organization that thrives on placing the naïve in harm’s way while lusting after the inevitable and ensuing propaganda benefit from their death and injury? Did the Corries hate Jews more than they loved their child?

          It is as if through speaking engagements and appearance at cinema and stage performances about their daughter, the Corries have not only helped perpetuate the myth of Saint Rachel, the peace activist, but also absolved themselves of any responsibility for their daughter’s death.

           Rachel’s parents filed a suit in Israeli court against the Israeli Defense Forces for being responsible for their daughter’s death. Now, let’s think a moment about this picture. Is there any other country in the Middle East, or in the world for that matter, where your daughter can stand in a war zone and have no expectation that harm will come to her?  The ISM has sent no one to Syria to protect its citizens from the murderous Bashar Assad. The ISM has sent no one to Egypt to protect Christians and secularists from the murderous zealotry of the Muslim Brotherhood. The ISM does not stand in the streets of Saudi Arabia and campaign for an end to gender apartheid. The ISM is not standing in the streets of Tehran demonstrating against Iran’s nuclear program. Only in Israel does the ISM believe it has a right to enter a war zone and interfere with a country’s military operations.  And only in Israel does it somehow have a right to go into court and sue the state for conduct that would earn it a bullet in most Middle East countries. To add insult to injury, it is Hillary Clinton’s State Department that is assisting the Corries in this exercise in the absurd.

          I doubt if the Corries ever thought they had a case. The trial and the verdict were merely a means for the Corries to do what they do best — to mobilize the Israel-bashing left and its sycophants in the press to further attack the Jewish state. If an Israeli court ruled against the IDF, which it indeed has done in some cases, then that would have been a further testimony to the beatification of Rachel Corrie. And if, as predicted, the court ruled against the Corries, that would have provided a means to further push Saint Rachel into the headlines and for such rags as the Guardian to spill their anti-Semitic bile. Indeed, the Guardian condemned the verdict, calling it a further whitewash of the tragedy. The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood brought to her analysis the fatuous, progressive cliché about the cycle of violence, as if destroying a house that stores weapons and munitions for killing civilians is the moral equivalent of using those weapons and munitions to blow up a pizza parlor.
It would seem to me that if you go out in a combat zone and stand in front of a bulldozer, especially one with its blade raised, maybe you’re responsible for your own stupidity and the harm that comes to you. And, perhaps, the militant and activist parents who encouraged you to be there are also responsible.

          What are the Corries due?  They’re due the same concern and compassion they have shown to the victims of the suicide bombers their daughter was enabling. To date, that has been nothing, not so much as an iota of regret, compassion, or condolence. And of the dozen or so Jewish Rachels that have been killed by suicide bombers, the leftist media has not found one worthy of the adulation that it has conferred on the naïve girl who stood in front of a bulldozer to enable mass murderers to carry out their operations.

          If the Corries want to comprehend who really is responsible for their daughter’s death, they should start by first looking in the mirror and then convincing their nieces not to follow in Rachel’s footsteps.  Of course, we know that would be terribly unlike the Corries, for it would deny them the veneration they have discovered for themselves and which they so desperately need to give some meaning to the death of a daughter who sought to enable mass murderers.

 http://pjmedia.com/blog/rachel-corrie-died-for-her-parents%E2%80%99-sins/2/

Who killed Rachel Corrie? ((One guess - Rachel Corrie herself, an accidental suicide)

By Lenny Ben-David (copied from his blog)

The parents of Rachel Corrie deserve Israel’s condolences and sympathy for the loss of their daughter on March 16, 2003. But, like their daughter, they misdirected their anger and crusade for justice against Israel.

Their anger is now focused on Israel’s judicial system. But Israel’s courts are known as independent and liberal (to a fault, in my opinion), and the Israeli court found the Israeli army and government blameless for Corrie’s death.

So who is to blame? Rachel Corrie herself, for her presence and carelessness on a volatile battlefield? Maybe, and maybe not. There may be other culprits lurking.

I’m troubled by several elements of the Corrie case:

1. We’re all shocked by the horrifying pictures of Corrie lying on the ground, broken and bleeding. But has anyone ever asked what kind of ghoul would snap pictures rather than rush to her aid or run to get help?
2. Numerous pictures of Corrie standing defiantly in front of an Israeli bulldozer appeared in the media, but upon investigation it transpired that not a single one was from the incident that killed her. Some were taken hours before the fatal incident with a different bulldozer; others were sloppy photoshopped forgeries. Why were there photos after she was injured and not before?
3. Corrie was not the only member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) who was nearly crushed beneath the bulldozer’s maw that day. Indeed, at least two – “Will and Jenny” – were pulled away by their colleagues at the last second.
4. Immediately after Corrie’s death, several leaders of ISM were interviewed. They didn’t express horror or even sorrow. They spoke of peace soldiers’ sacrifices in battle and the PR benefits of an American woman dying at hands of Israel’s army.

The ghoulish photographer was an ISM member who went by the name of “Joe Smith.” His real name: Joseph Carr, a self-proclaimed anarchist who apparently used aliases to travel in and out of Israel and anti-American hotspots like Fallujah, Iraq. His March 17 affidavit immediately after Corrie’s death suggests a narcissist who speaks more about his trauma than Corrie’s death, and an agitprop specialist who had all of the press contacts and numbers readily at hand to launch a press campaign just 30 minutes after her death. Here is an excerpt, as the affidavit appeared on Electronic Intifada:

I was doing interviews non-stop starting 30 min. after her death, all the way until midnight, and then starting again at 6am and continuing all day today. I literally would never hang up the phone, just switch to an incoming call on call waiting. When I did finally get a second to breathe, I’d have like 30 missed calls.

Anyway, it was a bit therapeutic I think, telling the story over and over, and interviews make me feel [as if I was doing something] important [in the aftermath]. All this thing is a media event now, so we must continue a campaign as hard as possible before the new and bigger tragedy, the Iraq war, begins. The few hours I had off last night between midnight and 4am, was spent organizing today’s events, press conferences, live TV/radio interviews, a demonstration and the beginnings of the traditional Palestinian 3-day ceremony…

(By the way, I took the pictures you may have seen of her, standing with the megaphone in front of the bulldozer, and the ones of her friends helping her.)

Was Corrie some cast member for an ISM production directed by Joe Smith/Carr (who incidentally also showed up several weeks later at the scene of the shooting death of another ISM pawn in Gaza)?

Rachel Corrie is portrayed as a brave fighter who defiantly stood in front of the Israeli destruction machine, and some of her colleagues testified to that fact subsequently. But the first accounts and affidavits after the accidental death state that Corrie was sitting or kneeling on the ground, not standing. Of course it was difficult for the tractor driver to see her; her profile was very low among the rubble, and the view from the armored tractor was limited.

“When the bulldozer approached a house today,” wrote The New York Times in its report of the accident, “Ms. Corrie, who was wearing a bright orange jacket, dropped to her knees.” Dale stated then that she was kneeling and “began to rise.”

“The bulldozer drove toward Rachel slowly, gathering earth in its scoop as it went,” an ISM friend of Corrie’s stated in 2003. “She knelt there, she did not move.”

Another colleague related: “She did not ‘trip and fall’ in front of the bulldozer. She sat down in front of it, well in advance.‎“ He added: “Corrie dropped her bullhorn and sat down in front of one of the bulldozers.”

Corrie apparently couldn’t even be seen by Carr/Smith, the photographer who couldn’t — or wouldn’t — take her picture sitting on the ground in the bulldozer’s path.

Corrie’s colleagues gave affidavits and told Newsweek’s Joshua Hammer in a 2003 Mother Jones article that two of them, Jennie and Will, also found themselves under the 50-ton behemoth and were pulled out at the last second. These bulldozers crawled at a snail’s pace of one to five kilometers per hour, certainly enough time for someone to avoid the machine if they wanted to.

“For two hours we attempted at great risk to ourselves to obstruct and frustrate the bulldozers in their work,” said one.

“Our group began to stand in front of these bulldozers in an attempt to stop them,” said another. “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.… At one point, Will from the United States was nearly crushed.”

Why would the “internationals” risk their lives in such a way? And was Corrie a partner to this treacherous game? Reporter Joshua Hammer explained that on that fateful day the ISM members decided to take their confrontation with the IDF up a notch. They needed to prove themselves to the local population:

An anonymous letter was circulating which referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as “nasty foreign bitches” whom “our Palestinian young men are following around.”

That morning [of Corrie’s death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter’s effects. “We all had a feeling that our role was too passive,” said one ISM member. “We talked about how to engage the Israeli military.” That morning, team members made a number of proposals that seemed designed only to aggravate the problem. …“The idea was to more directly challenge the Israeli military dominance using our international status,” said the ISMer.

One of the ISM founders, Thom Saffold, admitted to The Washington Post the day after Corrie’s death that “it’s possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked.”

Saffold continued with astounding callousness: “But we’re like a peace army. Generals send young men and women off to operations, and some die.”

That wasn’t the only statement indicating that Corrie was cannon fodder for the ISM. Another of ISM’s founders, George Rishmawi, told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2004:

When Palestinians get shot by Israeli soldiers, no one is interested anymore. But if some of these foreign volunteers get shot or even killed, then the international media will sit up and take notice.

Another ISMer in Gaza committed to writing similar sentiments in a letter home in February 2003:

You just can’t imagine it unless you see it, and even then you are always well aware that your experience is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen.” (emphasis added)

The author was Rachel Corrie, one month before she died. Did she believe that she should be that unarmed US citizen? Did the Gaza ISM cadre believe that they had to prove to the Palestinian locals that they were as committed to the cause as the Palestinian shihads blowing themselves up on Israeli buses? In April, one month after her death, the ISM office in Gaza was visited by two British Muslims who went on to lay flowers at the site where Corrie died. Five days later they blew themselves up in a Tel Aviv bar, killing three and wounding dozens.

Did Corrie and her ISM colleagues decide to play Russian roulette with the bulldozer on that fateful day? Did she fail to escape death, while the others pulled away in time? Was Joseph Carr/Smith there to produce another blame-Israel production as powerful as the 2000 video of the shooting of Gaza boy Mohammed Dura – ostensibly by Israeli soldiers?

The Hollywood film “The Life of David Gale” tells the tale of fanatic anti-capital punishment advocate who commits suicide. But first she stages a crime scene to make her final act looks like murder, so that an innocent man is executed as her killer. After her death, a video is discovered and the terrible injustice of capital punishment is revealed. Her crusade against the death penalty finally receives national attention.

The movie came out in February 2003. Corrie died one month later.

So was it murder or suicide? And at whose hand?

 

The opinions and facts here are presented solely by the author, and The Times of Israel assumes no responsibility for them. In case of abuse, click here to report this post.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/who-killed-rachel-corrie/

Justice, finally!!! Corrie's death an accidental suicide!

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/middleeast/la-fg-israel-corrie-verdict-20120829,0,4476903.story

Israel judge rules Rachel Corrie responsible for her own death

Parents of American activist Rachel Corrie fail in their attempt to place blame on Israel after their daughter was killed by a bulldozer in Gaza at a protest.

By Edmund Sanders, Los Angeles Times

August 29, 2012

JERUSALEM — Nine years after their daughter was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Gaza Strip, the parents of American activist Rachel Corrie lost their legal bid Tuesday to hold Israel responsible for her death and force authorities to reopen the investigation.
A Haifa judge rejected the parent's negligence lawsuit, calling Corrie's death an accident that she brought upon herself by refusing to leave what had been declared a closed military zone. "It was a very regrettable accident and not a deliberate act," said Judge Oded Gershon.
Family members vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court and accused the Israeli government of covering up the truth.
"I believe this was a bad day not only for our family, but for human rights, for humanity, for the rule of law, and also for the country of Israel," said Cindy Corrie, Rachel's mother, after the verdict was announced.
The court rejected the family's request for a symbolic $1 in damages and legal expenses.
Members of the Corrie family, who live in Olympia, Wash., have traveled to Israel for sporadic hearings over the last two years, listening to graphic testimony about how Rachel Corrie, then 23, was run over by a slow-moving bulldozer in Rafah near the border with Egypt.
Corrie, a college student, traveled to Gaza with the group International Solidarity Movement to act as a human shield to prevent Israeli soldiers from demolishing Palestinian homes and farms.
During the trial, the Israeli bulldozer driver, who was never identified, testified that he did not see Corrie standing in front of his vehicle. He ran over the young woman, than backed up and drove over her a second time, witnesses said.
Activists testified that the driver must have seen Corrie, who was wearing a fluorescent orange jacket and standing just a few feet away. They said it appeared Corrie became trapped in the dirt and debris and was unable to escape at the last moment.
The court agreed with an Israeli military investigation that concluded that the driver's field of vision was limited, and blamed Corrie and other activists for putting themselves in harm's way.
"She did not move away as any reasonable person would have done," Gershon ruled. "But she chose to endanger herself ... and thus found her death."
Sarah Corrie Simpson, a sister, said Rachel was exercising her civil rights to observe and protest against Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories.
"Rachel was a non-violent peace activist protecting a home with a family in it from being destroyed," Simpson said. "That's a right protected under international law. Our family is very proud of Rachel for standing up for rights of that family."
The Corries, who filed suit in 2005, argued in court that the military should have suspended the bulldozing operations until the civilian protesters had been removed from the area.
They called the initial military inquiry a "whitewash" and accused the Israeli government of withholding key video evidence during the trial. The parents suspect their daughter was deliberately run over, but say even if it was an accident, they wanted to call upon the Israeli government to accept some responsibility and apologize.
No charges or disciplinary actions were brought against anyone involved.
A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv declined to comment in response to the court ruling Tuesday.
Civil rights groups say Palestinians and their supporters often face legal hurdles in cases brought against Israeli soldiers. According to a report last year by the Israeli civil-rights group Yesh Din, only 3.5% of complaints alleging crimes committed against Palestinians by Israeli security forces end with an indictment.
Bill Van Esveld, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the ruling sets a worrisome precedent that suggests soldiers are immune from responsibility for harming civilians in a war zone.
"There are civilians in every conflict and the military needs to take precautions to protect them," he said.

A Chutzpa to Corrie's memory

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?

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

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?

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.