The Rachel Corrie crowd is still pursuing their ridiculous “progressive” jihad against Caterpillar, Incorporated. The Chicago Tribune has a report on the recent shareholder meeting, featuring Rachel’s parents: Palestinian issue dominates Caterpillar meeting.

Caterpillar Inc. Chairman and Chief Executive Jim Owens told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting Wednesday that because the heavy-equipment giant has “strong economic winds at our back,” prospects for continued growth appear promising.

Owens clearly wanted to discuss the record earnings the Peoria-based company has recorded in each of the past two years because of a worldwide surge in commodity prices and the company’s strategy for coming years. To his obvious frustration, however, with the exception of his prepared remarks the stockholder meeting held in downtown Chicago was devoted almost entirely to a discussion about geopolitics.

Although Caterpillar’s earthmoving equipment, mining trucks and other products are made for peaceful applications, opponents of Israel’s Palestinian policies have focused on the fact that Caterpillar sells bulldozers to Israel and that Israeli military forces use them to demolish Palestinian homes and property. For more than two years, those opponents have made Caterpillar the focus of a high-profile public relations campaign. [Good for the Chicago Tribune (something I rarely write) for identifying this as exactly what it is. —ed.] …

The issue is a hot button only for a small minority: At last year’s meeting, 97 percent of shareholders voted down a proposal that called for the company to review its sale of bulldozers to the Israeli government. There was no similar proposal on this year’s agenda, but the topic dominated the meeting nonetheless.

More than a dozen people stepped to the microphone to call the company to task for selling equipment to Israel.

The first up was Craig Corrie, a Washington state resident whose daughter Rachel died in 2003 after being crushed by an Israeli bulldozer as she sought to prevent the destruction of a Palestinian home. “Maybe you don’t want to choose sides,” Corrie argued quietly while Owens listened from the podium, but by selling the equipment to Israel, he said, “you’re choosing the side that uses these machines as a weapon.”

Before the meeting ended, many more people, including Rachel Corrie’s mother, took the floor to send the same message.

At one point, a representative from a pro-Israel group addressed the restless stockholders, saying, “We knew this meeting would be used as a platform for politics,” and urging the crowd to “get both sides of the story” on the issue.

Another stockholder complained that the meeting was being “hijacked” by people with a non-business agenda.

Someone should have had security politely escort these people out of the room.

UPDATE at 6/17/06 6:34:14 pm:

This is the organization responsible for the web site of this campaign targeting Caterpillar: Jewish Voice for Peace.