The Corrie Canonization Continues
Sun, May 4, 2003 at 10:48:11 am PDT
Aarrrggghhh. It just never stops.
Here’s yet another shameful, dishonest attempt to canonize terrorist supporter Rachel Corrie by Rekha Basu, in the Des Moines Register: The bold, tragic, and too-brief journey of Rachel Corrie.
While most of us wring our hands at the endless cycle of repression and terror and retaliation in the Middle East, with its expansions and demolitions and suicide bombers and flares of anti-Semitic hatred, Rachel Corrie tried to do something.
This is true. She tried to stop an IDF bulldozer from clearing brush that concealed tunnels used for smuggling drugs, prostitutes, weapons, and terrorists from Egypt into the disputed territories.
Rachel Corrie grew up far from want, war or deprivation, in Olympia, Wash., where she danced, drew, sang, acted, wrote poems, raised pets and nurtured an irrepressible drive to make the world right. Her parents were hardly radicals. Both grew up in Iowa (her mother in Denison) and attended Drake. Her father is an insurance actuary. Yet, as early as age 11, Rachel stared into a video camera and said, "We have got to understand that people in Third World countries think and care and smile and cry just like us."
Excuse me while I stage my own personal vomit-in. So we’re supposed to believe that Saint Rachel developed this astounding social conscience by the age of 11, with absolutely no influence from her parents? Perhaps she was hearing voices, like Joan of Arc?
She made the mistaken assumption that, as an American, she had protection. In a letter home in January, she wrote: "You just can't imagine it unless you see it - and then you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen . . . ."
In other words, she arrogantly believed her US citizenship and white skin conferred invulnerability upon her saintly corpus?
News reports and her grandmother say she was wearing a bright orange jacket and talking to the bulldozer driver through a bullhorn before he plowed her down. Israeli officials called it "a regrettable accident" and said the driver didn't see her. No charges were filed against him. But Doris Corrie says the driver is looking Rachel in the eye in a photo taken right before. "He ran over her and backed out and went back over her again," she said, "and never got out or said anything."
Blatant, ugly Palestinian propaganda, repeated for the Nth time. Rachel Corrie died under a pile of gravel and dirt. The driver never saw her. And the bulldozer did not run over her even once, much less twice. If this had happened, her body would have been unrecognizable as a human being; the photos taken that day show her quite intact, and even able to speak.
It's certainly safer to do nothing. To not be looking when soldiers shoot at unarmed civilians or tanks rumble over innocent people's homes. To not speak out when bombs fall on places where people live and shop.
The standard litany of the terror apologist, once again. Of course, Basu can’t muster up a single word about the reason for these military actions: Palestinian Arab terrorism that deliberately targets little girls crossing the street with their grandmothers, babies sleeping in their cribs, and musicians playing in a blues band in Tel Aviv. Instead Basu disgorges the standard rants about unarmed civilians and innocent people; “innocent people” who overwhelmingly support the murderous actions of the killers hiding in their midst.
In a picture her grandmother showed me this week, Rachel as a blond 13-year-old stands by a Polk Boulevard flower patch smiling, in a polka-dotted skirt. It was taken outside the Des Moines home where Doris Corrie raised Rachel's father, and still lives - a long way from where Rachel was killed in Israeli-occupied Gaza on March 16, while trying to stop a bulldozer from demolishing a Palestinian doctor's home.
And that photo of a blond, smiling 13-year old Rachel Corrie was light years away from this:
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