The Movie That Won’t Go Away: ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’
A playhouse in Tucson, Arizona will be showing “My name is Rachel Corrie” starting this Thursday, January 27. Rachel Corrie was accidentally killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. This was the height of the intifada, where 100s of innocent Israelis lost their lives while eating in pizza parlors and riding on public buses. The International Solidarity Movement, a known terrorist organization of which Rachel was a member at the time of her death, chose sides with Hamas to try to stop the IDF from killing or capturing terrorists and demolishing their homes. Beneath those homes, tunnels were built to smuggle weapons into Gaza. Rachel and other ISM members were repeatedly told to leave the area - a military operation. She did not.
Writer Lee Kaplan tells us that the actions of the members of ISM, in fact, helped start the war in Gaza which lead to missiles being fired into Israel and further on to the Gaza flotilla raid.
In 2003 the International Solidarity Movement began a campaign on behalf of Arab terrorist groups by interfering. The constant hammering and lies about Corrie’s death in the worldwide media ultimately convinced the Israeli government to open the Rafah border with IDF operations in Rafah and the Philadelphi Corridor. They launched an international propaganda campaign accusing Israel of demolishing the homes of innocent Palestinian Arabs for no reason at all.
Part of this program resulted in a coup for the ISM or, as one ISM activist, Joseph Carr, stated: an event occurred that was “well worth the price of the revolution.” A young anarchist girl named Rachel Corrie was killed when she sat down in front of an IDF bulldozer clearing an area that contained a weapons smuggling tunnel. Corrie had written home to her mother only two weeks earlier that she had been in one of the tunnels helping to retrieve the dead body of an Arab terrorist who had been killed by Israeli forces, probably the Bedouin Scouts who cleared the tunnels back then one at a time, much as was done by US forces in Vietnam. Just as today, back then the tunnels were being used to smuggle arms and missiles to be used to shoot at the Israeli population of Sderot. The ISM even set up their own blog on the Internet for their members running around there to interfere with the IDF; it was called “Rafah Kids”.
Most people may not realize it, but the constant hammering and lies about Corrie’s death in the worldwide media ultimately convinced the Israeli government to open the Rafah border and Philadelphi Corridor to international and Egyptian control.
Rachel Corrie’s story is charged with emotion. Not only myself, but many in the LGF community do not believe she deserved what happened to her. It was a tragedy, no matter how wrong or misguided she may have been. What is a travesty is the exploitation of her terrorist actions, and that of the ISM, in movies like “My name is Rachel Corrie.” These people are the real obstacles to peace.
Why don’t we talk about the Forgotten Rachels and all of the innocent Israelis blown up just by going about their business? Where are the movies for them?
Please read Tom Gross’ column on their story. And if you have a moment, please call the movie theater in Tucson and politely tell them that this movie exploits Palestinian terror against Israel, one of our closest allies.