Rachel Corrie: Endless Martyr for Anti-Israel Hatred
Dear Mr. Herendeen:
I have read the article in the May issue of the Shepherdstown Observer, as well as the announcement on the CATF website about the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie. I wish to tell you why I am not only attending, but am boycotting the Festival in its entirety. My wife and I moved to this area last year. Not only did we purchase tickets for the entire series in 2006, we invited friends from the metropolitan DC area to come here for the Festival.
Your comments as quoted in the newspaper article are, first of all, rather disingenuous. You say you connected to this play “because of Rachel’s idealistic voice,” and that it connected you to your “youth and [your] idealism.” On the website, the blurb refers to Corrie’s “eye-opening Middle East reports,” which are said to be “powerfully direct.” It refers to her would-be “passionate commitment” and her quest to understand “one of the most turbulent conflicts on earth.”
All the above, I must say, is utter nonsense. I have read the script, which as you know, was published by the Theatre Communications Group. The one thing this play will not do is promote dialogue about the Middle East… If it does anything, the only thing it will promote is hatred of Israel, and sympathy for the terrorist groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah that are seeking to destroy the beleaguered nation….
I write this letter as Hamas, a group pledged to destroy Israel, has resumed its barrage of Quassam missiles from Gaza into the town of Sderot. They have sent over 160 missiles this past week alone, and are threatening to use longer range missiles which could hit the next nearby town, which has a few hundred thousand people living in it. One of its leaders, Osama al-Muzaini, said yesterday that “it’s only a matter of time” before Hamas resumes suicide bombings within Israel. Rachel Corrie went to the area not to seek understanding, but as a committed militant of a front group of these Palestinian terrorists, The International Solidarity Movement. It proudly proclaims on its website that the victimized Palestinians have a right to resort to violence against their oppressors, while Israel, of course, has no right to defend itself. One of its leaders, interviewed on Al-Jazeera, put it this way: “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.” One of the activities those would-be noble ISM militants do is organize riots at Israel’s security fence, built to deter infiltration from suicide bombers. Yet Corrie has the nerve to write “I’m really new to talking about Israel-Palestine, so I don’t always know the political implications of my words,” written at a time she was in fact a complicit enthusiast of and supporter of an American group that backs Hamas …and which also protects and cooperates with Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa fighters.
Corrie claimed to be engaging in action by ISM militants meant to prevent “Israeli demolition of civilian homes,” as she says in the play. Actually, her Hamas and Fatah recruiters used her and her innocent and gullible comrades as human shields to deter attacks on arms caches and hidden shooters, and on homes that in reality are depots for weapons. The Palestinian terrorists, as we know, have no compunction on using civilian homes as repositories for guns and missiles, hoping that this realization will prevent Israel from acting to stop them. Corrie knew her role. She wrote that she imagines “the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen.” In other words, she saw herself as a potential propaganda figure for the terrorists.
When she is tragically killed by an Israeli bulldozer operator, she was participating in a demonstration in front of one of the homes they thought was scheduled to be targeted by Israel. As it turns out, what Israel was trying to do was to cover up one of the tunnels they found dug by the terrorists used to smuggle guns, rocket launchers and other explosives, meant to be used to kill innocent Israeli citizens. She was knowingly demonstrating in a war zone, hoping that her presence would work to enable the Hamas and Fatah soldiers to get away with their actions.
Corrie is no innocent. As the play itself reveals, she was fully aware of her militant role. I enclose with this article a copy of the photo of her that appeared in USA Today. It is not the smiling cheery American girl theatergoers will see photos of. Instead, it shows Corrie smirking and obviously screaming, as she burns an American flag in front of Hamas-Fatah militants. She leaves a message on the voice mail telling her parents to understand that the conflict is not a balanced one, but that of “a largely unarmed people against the fourth most powerful military in the world.” These are the words of a propagandist for Hamas, not a girl seeking the truth. Corrie knows nothing of the background or of Middle East history, of how, as the late Abba Eban once said, that “the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity,” turning down offers that would have led to peace and a two state solution.
She probably does not even know of how when Israeli statehood was proclaimed, Arab armies waged aggressive war meant to defeat it at the beginning. These are not, as she claims, “unarmed people.” Where does she think they get the rockets and launchers whose use she is supporting? She even has the nerve to say that the “vast majority of Palestinians…are engaging in Ghandian non-violent resistance.” Poor Ghandi would turn over in his grave if he saw this play and heard these words.
Let us return to her death. Corrie was at the site of a bulldozer that was clearing bush to prevent covers for a tunnel that would hold heavy weaponry. We have all seen the famous photo: Corrie standing on a mound of earth, well below the bulldozer, yelling on a bullhorn for the Israeli driver to stop. Next are the photos of Corrie lying near death, as her fellow militants surround her in horror. The play…includes the words of Tom Dale, one of her comrades who was there, who says the Israeli driver “knew absolutely that she was there;” in effect, he is charging Israel and the driver with purposeful intentional murder. And this death is then to be used by the ISM as a tool for gaining further recruits, and for establishing greater hatred of Israel and support for the Hamas-Fatah terrorists. As the late Yassir Arafat put it, Corrie “is a martyr.”
What is the truth about her death? The play leaves audiences with the impression that she was murdered by Israel, which could not permit peaceful protest in Gaza. But Corrie was anything but a martyr. And to make her into one, they lie about how she died. I suggest you read the article in the very left-wing Mother Jones by Joshua Hammer. (Sept.-Oct.2003). Hammer, a man sympathetic to the Palestinians, went to investigate on his own. He noted first that the intention of her ISM team a day before her death was “to engage the Israeli military.” When they got word the bulldozers were coming, they moved to the house it was heading towards, megaphones in hand. Corrie put herself between the wall and the Israeli D-9 bulldozer. Her death, according to ISM militant Tom Dale, took place in six or seven seconds.
The ISM, as the play asserts, says her death was murder. Eyewitness Joe “Smith,” signed an affidavit asserting that it was the “intentional crushing of a human being,” Five other ISM activists said the same thing. They released the photo taken by Reuters of her standing before the bulldozer seconds before being crushed. As it turns out, journalist Hammer revealed that the “infamous photo series” and the “megaphone photo was taken hours before Corrie’s death.” She had given it to a fellow militant and was kneeling, not standing in front of the bulldozer when she was killed.
The IDF (Israeli army) carried out its own investigation. The operator of the machine said he had a limited field of vision, and saw no one in front of the bulldozer. “You can’t hear, you can’t see well. You can go over something and you’ll never know.” The IDF had videos taken from the cockpit when she was killed. Hammer saw them. He writes: “It makes a credible case that the operators, peering out through the narrow, double-glazed, bulletproof windows, their view obscured behind pistons and the giant scooper, might not have seen Corrie kneeling behind them.” Is this going to be added to the end of the play, instead of Tom Dale’s charge of intentional murder?
As for the ISM, they are acting as accomplices of terrorist groups that refuse negotiation with Israel, desiring only to destroy it, as their own charter says. In March of 2003, Israeli soldiers arrested an Islamic Jihad guerrilla who was hiding with two ISM activists, who were protecting him. In April of 2003, two Pakistani born British citizens stopped for tea at the ISM’s Gaza office. Five days later one of them set off the bomb at Mike’s Place, the popular Tel Aviv bar. Ironically, an American documentary filmmaker was there making a film about the possibilities of Arab and Israeli cooperation. He was critically injured and almost died. As Hammer writes, she is an iconic figure “to foolish idealism…to the bittersweet conviction of youth,” involved in a cause that “appears to be one of futility.”
You talk, Mr.Herendeen, of the tribute to “youthful idealism.” Do you not realize that all those who have made evil acts- Stalin’s cadre, Pol Pot’s associates, Hitler’s SS—claim idealism as their motive? Idealism, as in Corrie’s case, led her to engage in evil ends and bad acts. She was acting to protect cadres who goals were to annihilate and destroy Israel. She was defending militants who urge children and now women to become suicide martyrs, and who honor them as martyrs after a successful mission. She was anything but a heroic peace activist portrayed by her defenders. She died for a political group that supports by its own words “armed struggle” against Israel. As a Wall Street Journal editorial put it one day after her death: “It’s a shame that Rachel Corrie died the way she did. It’s shameful that she lived the way she did.”
The play you are putting on in Shepherdstown is nothing but an agit-prop vehicle meant to perpetrate a big lie. As the play ends and the audience hears Tom Dale’s lies about her “murder,” it ends with a home video of a ten year old Corrie talking about the horror of world hunger. How sweet. How manipulative. How phony. One wonders, did Rachel Corrie ever consider how the jihad she supported was viewed by young women her own age, who were Israeli Jews? Did she ever see the effects of the suicide bombings and rockets that her ISM comrades helped promote?
Let me end this letter quoting the powerful words of the noted Jewish author, Cynthia Ozick. Writing in The New Republic (Dec.11, 2006) she concludes: “In view of the play’s manifestly political intent, and particularly in the lurid light of the editors’ (Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner) having concluded with an accusation of deliberate murder, the …audiences who jubilantly welcomed My Name is Rachel Corrie, (and I add the Shepherdstown 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.”
Ronald Radosh, Adjunct Fellow, The Hudson Institute, Washington DC
How sad that those putting the Jews in the dock today are some American Jews, who feature Hamas propaganda at a Jewish film festival.
Ron,
This was a nice article, well written. But you missed some painful points that you could have driven home with the sledge-hammer. You are not going to like them.
How sad that those putting the Jews in the dock today are some American Jews, who feature Hamas propaganda at a Jewish film festival.
This evening begins the 9th of Av – that annual day of disaster when the Children of Israel lost faith in G-d and rejected His gift of the Land. After some hundreds of years living in the Land, a Babylonian army sacked Jerusalem (beginning on the 17th of Tammuz, three weeks ago) and destroyed the Temple of Solomon. The 9th of Av is a fast day to mourn that destruction.
Apparently there is a G-d – several more disasters happened on 9 Av.
The Romans destroyed the Temple of Herod, the city of Beitar (the last outpost of the Bar Kochba Rebellion) fell six decades later, Jews were expelled from several countries, (England, France and Spain) on this day several centuries apart, and finally, and most importantly, the Great War began on Tisha b’Av 5674, 1 August 1914. This was the war that set the stage for the German extermination of European Jewry – as well as the war that set the stage for the creation of the country where I live – Israel.
Jews in America, particularly the idiots who support the Arabs, the so-called “Palestinians”, have not yet figured out the Sin of the Spies committed by their own ancestors ove three millennia ago. These fools who put Hamas propaganda in a Jewish film festival are just an example. So, they will suffer for own their lack of faith, pig-headedness and stupidity – just like their ancestors did three millennia ago.
As a Jew, Ron, you might want to discuss with your loved ones the idea of getting out the the way of the nasty Tide of History about to overtake American Jews. These things get sloppy and ugly and it is not always true that the righteous escape the punishment allotted to the guilty.
If you fast for Tish’a b’Av, I wish you an easy fast.
Blessings from Samaria,
Ruvy
“Cynthia Ozick. Writing in The New Republic (Dec.11, 2006)”
A little less than two years later Cynthia Ozick probably voted for Barack Obama—just like Marty Peretz and Alan Dershowitz. It was obvious to any clear thinking individual that the newest occupant of the White House was going to slam Jews good and hard. And yet, they still voted for him. Moreover, Dershowitz is still make a fool of himself over Obama. Jews are not the only secular Uncle Toms. The same is true of their left-wing Catholic and Protestant counterparts. Unfortunately, there are just not that many Jews in the world. They represent maybe two percent of the total population. That means they simply cannot afford to commit a lot of stupid mistakes.
The bottom line is that not only wasn’t Corrie an innocent activist, but she was an accomplice to murderous terrorists. This is a fact.
In any case, the propaganda film about her ‘martyrdom’ is akin to the propaganda photo which was used to electrify the world, (thus vilifying Israel) through the (staged) clips of the child ‘martyr’ Al-Dura.
The very fact that Jews are involved with crucifying their own is odious, but nothing new under the sun.
They need to de dealt with in the sammer manner as one would deal with ones enemies.
Ron Radosh is not helping the image of the Israel-first crowd. I think he recognizes the power of the documentary, and the fact that the Israeli government covered-up the circumstances of Rachel’s death. It amazes me that any progressive Jewish American can stand by and defend the ethnic cleansing of Palestine while claiming to be a victim. Shame on Ron, and the entire hasbara brigade. Your side is losing, and losing big time.
I actually considered making a short Rachel Corrie film at one point. Remember the “Mr. Bill” skits from the old SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE?
I conceptualized a little claymation Corrie in her headscarf being run over by a full-sized tractor. Oh Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!
Meander, what amazes me are people like you, who romanticize and apologize for a violent jihadist culture like the Palestinians (proof of which is instantly available on Youtube and sites like memri.org) and who apparently think that if Israel ceased to exist, the Muslims and Jews would all get along splendiferously and that Hamas and Hezbollah wouldn’t make good on their promise to annihilate every Jew they could get their hands on. Also, the claim that Palestinians are being “ethnically cleansed” is, as any sane person would have to admit after reviewing the historical facts, an outrageous lie. If Israel wanted to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian population they could do so quite handily. The fact of the matter is that under “Zionazi” administration the West Bank and Gaza have seen sizable drops in infant mortality rates and an INCREASE of the total population.
What is happening to the Palestinians is the direct fault of their leadership and their culture, which prizes martyrdom and jihad more than peace. Whatever transgressions the Israeli government might commit, they can be excused by the fact that they are constantly under attack by Islamic terrorists and their nihilistic leftist and rightist enablers.
Meander:
You’re agitprop bullsh*t doesn’t work anymore. Al-Dura and fauxtography, among other things, have shown it to be the lie it is. Rachel Corrie was a naive, foolish girl who placed herself in harm’s way and paid the price.
If the Israelis were actually intent on genocide, they would take a leaf from your hero’s book (Stalin) and remove all the (surviving) Palestinians to Jordan.
“Your side is losing, and losing big time.”
No, zionology is losing. No appeal to the younger generation who can access information for themselves.
Though in its death throes it is over-acting out loudly, because the denial stage is not the last death stage of an ideology.
“If the Israelis were actually intent on genocide, they would take a leaf from your hero’s book (Stalin) and remove all the (surviving) Palestinians to Jordan.”
Which is exactly what Øbama and his FatHamas want to do with the Jews. First remove of the Jews from Judea and Samaria and half of Yerushalyaim, and then eventually (see “phased plan”) take the rest of Israel.
Meander: On the contrary, kind Stalinist sir, YOUR side is losing. Big time! There is a global populist awakening to the toxic reality of islamofascism. Nobody’s fooled any longer by the “Palestinians” except those who chose to be hoodwinked. However, similar to the Thirties, our Western liberal overlords still dance their impotent jig and prostate toward Mecca. But the tide has massively turned.
Comment #4 is another example why the world frowns at Israel as they continue to feed and water the so-called Palestinians while Egypt and the rest continue to supply the weapons.
Unlike the so-called Palestinians, who glory in suppling their little ones to the killing machine of Islam, Israel mourns one of their own, lost to the propaganda machine of the Islamic World, who relish playing the victim seething and stewing at the idea that one grain of sand in the Middle East does not belong to Allah.
How they long for the day when the rocks and the trees call out to them; Here is a Jew! Here is a Jew! Come and kill the Jew!
Bleck! I can taste the lukewarm porridge of mediation, always looking toward Israel to capitulate to the longing of their neighbors to wipe the Jewish People and the memory of Israel from the face of the earth.
I saw the original London production of “My Name is Rachel Corrie” at The Royal Court Theater in Sloane Square in April, 2005. Interestingly, Bloomberg News sponsored the plays at The Royal Court Theater at that time including that one and gave away tickets to “My Name……” to its London office employees. How ironic that a Jewish American billionaire and current mayor of New York has sponsored an orignal play about a pro-terrorist, anti-Israel Marxist radical.
Ron.. What is it about Rachel Corrie that so disturbs you? Is it less offensive to you that a nonviolent protestor was mashed into the rubble while holding a sign of protest than it is that someone might want to keep her memory alive?
Most of us believe in free speech. If your response to Rachel’s death is to want to forcibly muzzle any memory of her, rather than to devise some alternative interpretation of the shameful incident that made her famous, I would submit that you’re going down the wrong path.
I write from Rachel Corrie’s hometown. “Nonviolent protestor”? What a laugh. She was a useful idiot for a viciously terrorist front group. She represented a group and teachers who hate Israel and hate Jews.
Not many people can say this on this topic, but I knew her. This was a depressive twentysomething woman from an upscale WASP family whose slumming went terribly wrong. Despite having all the privileges, she couldn’t hold down a job. Couldn’t maintain relationships. Couldn’t graduate from an ungraded college after six years. She complained of maternal domination and when it got too uncomfortable she’d blow town. She’d sit in internet cafes smoking and fancied herself a journalist. She knew nothing about what she was writing about. She enthused and emoted and that was about it. You can get a degree for doing that at Evergreen. Just find professors who agree. Or just agree with the ones who stroke you when you comply with their views.
She found an organization happy to give her narcissistic strokes like her professors offered in smaller measure. She felt important and involved. She wrote emails back home to a bunch of us, full of what I saw as propaganda but it didn’t seem all that bad. Another idealistic kid of boomers on a mission to save people from their own and others complicated nuanced history. What arrogance, but that’s how it is.
And then she got a working class Jew to achieve her suicide for her by acting clearly suicidally. She gave her parents a post-retirement career by letting them convert her suicide into a scapegoat/salvation myth. In her family’s, college’s and community’s secular culture anybody’s assertion of emotion or narcissism is equal to the lived experience and reason of entire nations or peoples.
This is the real danger of the Rachel Corrie myth. It is a front for anti Semitism and indeed for the lived experience of anyone. It substitutes jet set slumming and calls terror tourist superior to those who live in an area. It lets us know that Craig and Cindy Corrie are our global masters who are superior to us b ecause they can come in at any time and tell us our own history and experience even when they know nothing more than propaganda.
So Michael that’s what disturbs me. She wasnt a nonviolent protestor. Her form of violence is refined and well heeled. It says “we know better than you do.”