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Rachel Corrie Is The Figurehead For Anti-Apartheid Activists Across The US |
Current rating: 6 |
by Anti-Apartheid Activist
(No verified email address) |
17 Dec 2003
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Rachel Corrie died for the sins of the US government, as dominated by the narrow agenda of the neocons & weapons industry. Therefore, she is the natural figurehead for the US movement calling for an end to all US support of apartheid Israel. |
We do a lot of work about the issue of apartheid in Israel in Connecticut. Please see our Corrie banner at http://www.thestruggle.org <http://www.thestruggle.org> and our site about the Corrie Resolution at http://www.corrie-ct.8k.com <http://www.corrie-ct.8k.com>
We are hoping to co-ordinate our work with you and other groups on this issue.
PALESTINE WILL BE FREE.
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Comments
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Hmmmm: Bad Analogy |
by knows history
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 1
17 Dec 2003
Modified: 10:27:30 AM |
Apartheid?
Wrong country
Wrong decade
Wrong political system
Calling what is going on between Palestine and Israel apartheid does a disservice to both. And invoking Rachel Corrie's memory to do so does a disservice to her.
Inaccurate sophistry may make you feel better, but it is a distraction when it is as far off the mark as your comparison. In sum, it is bad politics.
Starting with the fact that non-Jewish citizens of Israel can vote and are represented in its legislature and ending with the fact that the most extreme Palestinian elements desire to purge Jews with all the passion that white South Africans wanted to do to blacks, your analogy breaks down across the board on close examination.
This is not to say that the conflict is somehow not based on the fundamental injustice of Israel preventing the emergence of the sovereign state of Palestine. It is and this must be rectified to bring juctice and, hopefully, peace.
If you seek to coordinate your work with others sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, you should choose a less divisive and inaccurate premise for your work. |
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Re: Rachel Corrie Is The Figurehead For Anti-Apartheid Activists Across The US |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 1
17 Dec 2003
Modified: 10:51:58 AM |
From a September _Mother Jones_ article, "The Death of Rachel Corrie":
Just before five o’clock, one of the D9s rumbled lazily toward a high cinder-block wall near Nasrallah’s house. Corrie swiftly positioned herself between the wall and the bulldozer, then about 30 yards from her. Crouching on the earth, almost like a supplicant in prayer, she placed her right foot behind her left and rested her right knee on the ground. Looking toward the bulletproof windows, she could probably see the silhouettes of two Israeli operators. The steel blade began pushing a huge pile of debris and sandy soil toward her, so close that the scent of the moist earth permeated her nostrils. The ground began to shift beneath her feet. Tom Dale was standing a few yards from Corrie as the bulldozer got close. “The bulldozer built up earth in front of it. Its blade was slightly dug into the earth,” he told me. “She began to stand up. The earth was pushed over her feet. She tried to climb on top of the earth, to avoid being overwhelmed. She climbed to the point where her shoulders were above the top lip of the blade. She was standing on this pile of earth. As the bulldozer continued, she lost her footing, and she turned and fell down this pile of earth. Then it seemed like she got her foot caught under the blade. She was helpless, pushed prostrate, and looked absolutely panicked, with her arms out, and the earth was piling itself over her. The bulldozer continued so that the place where she fell down was directly beneath the cockpit. I think she would have been between the treads. The whole [incident] took place in about six or seven seconds.”
Dale looked on, stunned, as the D9 slowly reversed and dragged its blade along the ground—back over Corrie’s body. Then he and the six other activists rushed to her aid. A photograph an activist took of the moment captures the tragedy with painful clarity: Corrie sprawls on the ground, face contorted in pain, her legs twisted pitifully, her lip split open, blood trickling down her cheek. In the background the bulldozer’s blade looms over her crumpled body like a wall of steel. A British activist named Alice cradled her head and assured her an ambulance was on its way. “My back is broken,” Corrie gasped. Then she lapsed into unconsciousness.
At 5:04, the bulldozer driver’s voice crackled over Israeli military radio. Speaking Hebrew with a thick Russian accent, the soldier blandly announced, “I hit someone.”
A soldier monitoring the conversation relayed the report to base, assuming the activist was a man. “He was too close to Dooby [the code name of the operator] and he hit him.”
“Somebody from the foreigners?” asked a female soldier.
“Yes.”
“Are they evacuating him?”
“Yes, they’re taking him now.”
At 5:03, a Palestinian Red Crescent ambulance received a call and arrived at the scene four minutes later. Corrie still lay half buried in sand. “She had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing, her eyes were dilated,” paramedic Ashraf Shafeeq al-Khateeb told me. “We used a neck collar and a board to stabilize the body, cleared an airway, and used CPR with suction.” The ambulance delivered her to the Abu Yusuf al-Najjar Hospital at 5:15 “as a dead body,” according to the medical report. Corrie had “one seven-centimeter cut on the left side of her upper lip, hematoma, and severe cyanosis of the full face, neck, and upper body indicative of suffocation.” Her lungs had been crushed, her left clavicle and ribs were fractured, vital organs had ruptured. According to Dr. Ali Moussa, the hospital director, Corrie probably died from a combination of three causes: the damage to her lungs, blockage of her respiratory tract, and severe internal hemorrhaging. It would likely have been, he said, an extremely painful death. “We tried to resuscitate her for half an hour using artificial respiration, cardiac massage,” he says. “But it’s difficult for a doctor to return respiration. The heart we can revive, but not the lungs.” She was pronounced dead at 6:30 p.m.
Was it murder? Corrie’s colleagues believe that it was. “I never dreamed it’d be like this, the intentional crushing of a human being,” ISM eyewitness Joe “Smith” wrote in an affidavit filed with Palestinian human-rights attorneys. “I do believe it was intentional. I saw it, and I know he saw her, I know he did, and I know he knew she was still under the bulldozer when it backed up without raising its blade. I don’t know if he wanted to kill her, or if he was just focused on doing his work and didn’t care if he killed her or not, I don’t know which is scarier.” Five other activists testified that the driver must have seen Corrie before mowing her down. A damning sequence of photographs shot by ISM activists and almost immediately released by Reuters appears to show Corrie standing before the bulldozer and addressing the soldiers with her megaphone seconds before being crushed.
Yet “Smith” later gave an interview in which he acknowledged that the bulldozer operator could well have lost sight of Corrie after she tumbled down the dirt pile. And the infamous photo series turned out to be misleading. In fact, the megaphone photo was taken hours before Corrie’s death; she had handed the loudspeaker to a colleague some time before she was run over, and she was kneeling, not standing, in front of the machine when she was killed. As newspapers ran corrections, the activists claimed that Reuters had “miscaptioned” the photographs. The episode probably did more to mute anger over Corrie’s death than anything else. The ISM activists were widely dismissed as frauds. In reality, they were probably just too young and inexperienced to know that if the media feels burned, it’ll turn on you, or worse, ignore you.
“Dooby,” the army reservist who ran Corrie down, is a Russian immigrant with long experience as a bulldozer operator. On Israeli TV he insisted that his field of vision was limited inside the D9 cabin and that he had no idea Corrie was in front of the machine. “You can’t hear, you can’t see well. You can go over something and you’ll never know,” he said. “I scooped up some earth, I couldn’t see anything. I pushed the earth, and I didn’t see her at all. Maybe she was hiding in there.” The IDF compiled a video about the Corrie incident that includes footage taken from inside the cockpit of a D9. It makes a credible case that the operators, peering out through narrow, double-glazed, bulletproof windows, their view obscured behind pistons and the giant scooper, might not have seen Corrie kneeling in front of them.
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My comment: there's a reason why Rachel Corrie has faded from the headlines, and it isn't some Zionist press conspiracy. The death simply failed to be the wedge issue the ISM hoped it would be. It turns out that playing the "look at how anti-American Israel is, it just murdered an American citizen" card is a little awkward when it was Rachel who was photographed burning an American flag. Even a sad song from David Rovics couldn't change the facts.
There are far more useful things that anti-Sharon activists can do than try to turn Corrie's death into a murder case. That path will turn out to be the same energy-sapping, divisive dead end that the divest-from-Israel movement turned out to be. If you want to put some useful pressure on the Sharon government, write your Senators and Congressman and tell them you support Senate Resolution 276 or House Resolution 479 in support of the Geneva Accord.
More info at http://www.btvshalom.org/geneva
@%< |
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Israeli Thugs Murdered Rachel Corrie Along With Thousands Of Other Innocent PeopleAcross The US |
by James
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 6
17 Dec 2003
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The BBC has released a remarkable film about the Murder of three international peace activists by the Israeli army thugs in the occupied Palesttine. Documentary evidence provided in the film Proves that the Rachel Corrie - and two British activists - were murdered.
Last spring, within a period of seven weeks, one British and one American peace activist were Murdered by the Israeli army Thugs in Rafah, a Palestinian town at the southern end of the occupied Gaza Strip. A second Briton was shot in the head leaving him brain-dead. In two of the cases the Israeli army is being blamed for murder; the third is considered ?attempted murder.¦
An Israeli military bulldozer crushed the 23-year-old American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was the first to die on March 16, as she tried to prevent it from demolishing a Palestinian doctor-s home.
British photographer Tom Hurndall, 22, was left brain dead after being shot in the head by an Israeli soldier on April 11. British cameraman James Miller, 34, was shot by an Israeli sniper as he left a house with two other journalists on May 2.
A recently released 50-minute ?hard-hitting¦ program produced by the British Broadcasting Corp. (BBC) investigated the three killings and provides crucial video evidence. ?That-s murder,¦ an Israeli soldier said after viewing footage from the film, When Killing is Easy.
When Killing is Easy¦ was shown 4 times to a worldwide audience on the commercial BBC World television network on November 22 and 23. Some cable television viewers in the United States would have been able to view the program.
The three international observers died, or nearly died, at the hands of the Israeli military between the middle of March and the first week of May. Hurndall was shot in the head as he took a Palestinian toddler, who had frozen under Israeli fire, into his arms. Today, Hurndall is brain-dead and is kept alive on life-support equipment.
Tom-s father, Anthony, is a lawyer in the City of London. After six weeks of investigation, Hurndall has come to the conclusion that the shooting of his son by Israeli forces is ?a case of attempted murder. If Tom dies, and that is a likelihood, then it will be murder,¦ he said.
Jocelyn Hurndall wrote to The Guardian after an Israeli government check for about $12,000, sent to the Hurndall family to pay for ?a fraction of the expenses incurred,¦ bounced. When the check finally arrived after five months of negotiations with the Hurndall family, the Israeli government check was not ?honored¦ by the Bank of Israel, Hurndall wrote. ?Insufficient funds¦ was the reason given.
According to evidence provided in Sweeney-s film, the IDF report on the shooting of Hurndall is completely wrong about where he was, what he was wearing, and what he was doing when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head.
?It is a mind-numbing task to understand the morality and to use the logic of the Israeli government,¦ Hurndall wrote. ?What hope do Palestinians have when such profound disregard and disrespect is shown to humanity, collectively and individually?¦
SILENCED WITNESSES
The BBC film was produced by John Sweeney, whose article on the killings, ?Silenced Witnesses,¦ was published in The Independent (UK) on Oct. 30.
?Making our film, When Killing is Easy, has been the most harrowing ordeal of my professional life,¦ Sweeney wrote. ?But it is vital that it is evidential - and that is really tough when the Israeli government and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have refused to speak to us.¦
Rachel Corrie, the first of the three to die, was using her body to defend the home of Dr. Samir Nasser Allah from an American-made bulldozer used by the Israeli army to demolish the homes of Palestinians. Corrie was a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). ISM members stand between the Israeli bulldozers and the homes that the IDF wants to flatten.
Israeli bulldozers have razed thousands of Palestinian homes in the occupied Gaza Strip and the West Bank. The bulldozers are primarily made by the Illinois-based Caterpillar company.
Tom Dale, an ISM eyewitness, had a clear view of the incident: ?He [the driver] knew absolutely she was there. The bulldozer waited for a few seconds over her body and it then reversed, leaving its scoop down so that if she had been under the bulldozer, it would have crushed her a second time. Only later when it was much more clear of her body did it raise its scoop.¦
?MY BACK IS BROKEN¦
?My back is broken,¦ Rachel told Alice Coy, a fellow ISM activist who was with her.
An Israeli pathologist, Dr. Yehudah Hiss, noted that Rachel appeared to have been run over by the bulldozer, Sweeney wrote. Hiss found the cause of death to be ?pressure to the chest.¦ Her shoulder blades had been crushed; her spine was broken in five places and six ribs broken. Her face was apparently slashed by the bulldozer blade.
The IDF produced a report that says, ?Corrie was not run over by an engineering vehicle.¦ It added, ?for good measure¦ Sweeney says, that Corrie was ?hidden from view of the vehicle-s operator.¦
The footage seen in the BBC film proves these statements to be false. The family of Rachel Corrie believes the IDF report to ?be a blatant fabrication,¦ Sweeney wrote.
The British cameraman James Miller was shot dead by an Israeli sniper as he left a house in Rafah with two other journalists on the night of May 2. An Associated Press TV News (APTN) cameraman filmed the entire scene.
One of the three journalists held a white flag; Miller was shining a light on the flag and a third journalist held up her British passport. There was no shooting and the area was quiet as the audio track of the film clearly proves.
The three had walked about 60 feet toward an Israeli armed personnel carrier to request safe passage to leave the area when the first shot was fired. ?We are British journalists,¦ Saira Shah cried out into the darkness.
?Then comes the second shot, which killed James,¦ Sweeney wrote. ?He was shot in the front of his neck. The bullet was Israeli issue, fired, according to a forensic expert, from less than 200 meters [600 feet] away.¦
The IDF maintains that Miller was shot during crossfire, although no shooting is heard on the APTN tape apart from the two shots fired from the Israeli military vehicle.
When the APTN tape was shown to an Israeli soldier, who is shown in the film, he said the television team did not look like Islamic terrorists and concluded: ?That-s murder.¦
http://www.rachelcorrie.org/
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Glad That's Posted As A Comment |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 1
17 Dec 2003
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Since this site has already been spammed with several hundred copies of this same article on the BBC film (check out the Hidden Articles file), I'm really glad that it has just been posted as a comment here this time. Actions like the previous spamming of our website with it certainly don't help the cause, whatever it might be, and reflect poorly on those who hold such opinions, however justified they might feel in doing so.
My guess is the original article here, along with the additional comment on the BBC film, were probably all posted by the erstwhile IMC-network spammer, DAN. Since, if it is him, he's behaving today in somewhat of a civilized fashion, at least so that it doesn't trip our filters, they will remain for now. |
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