CAMERA continues Smear campaign of Rachel Corrie on pages of Seattle Post Intelligencer:
Tom Wallace and Jen Marlowe respond to CAMERA’s Gilead Ini’s guest column, “Idealist Rachel Corrie was misled,” published in the Seattle Post Intelligencer, April 4th, 2006.
Gilead Ini of CAMERA writes,
All can agree that the death of a young woman is tragic. Like the hundreds of young lives lost as the target of Palestinian suicide bombers, and like those unintentionally killed during Israeli counter-terror operations, the loss of Rachel Corrie undoubtedly has affected many in a painful way.
As the official line of the Israel Lobby (of which CAMERA is a part) goes, Israelis kill Palestinians by accident, or as collateral damage, and Palestinians kill Israelis deliberately. A cursory glance at the statistics of children killed and how they are killed paints a very different picture. See Remember These Children or the respected Israeli human rights organization B’tselem’s study “Trigger Happy – Unjustified Gunfire and the IDF’s Open-Fire Regulations during the al-Aqsa Intifada”.
Christopher Hedges, former bureau chief for the New York Times actually described the situation this way in a diary he wrote for Harpers Magazine in October, 2001:
Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.
Ini continues his smear of Corrie and of ISM:
Corrie was an idealist; but as fate had it, her idealism ended up channeled through the radical International Solidarity Movement, an organization that not only puts at risk the lives of Israeli civilians but also the lives of its members.”
In reality, The “radical” practices of ISM include walking children to school to protect them from attack by settlers, riding in ambulances to prevent attacks by the army, supporting non-violent protest of the wall and trying to prevent house demolition by the Israeli military. Any Israeli civilians injured due to ISM activities have been Israeli members of the ISM that were shot or otherwise injured by the Israeli Army.
CAMERA propagandists usually then go on to say that bulldozers are used in the occupied territories to demolish houses which conceal tunnels or house terrorists. Having made that argument, they can then claim that anyone who tries to prevent such house demolitions are supporting terrorists. Hence, “radicals” such as Rachel Corrie and other members of the (ISM) support terrorism. In fact, Ini writes:
Perhaps ISM’s activists would be less likely to throw themselves before Israeli bulldozers if they were told that the bulldozers are used to search for very real smuggling tunnels that bring weapons and explosives used against Israeli children.
According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: “since 1967 Israel has demolished almost 12,000 Palestinian homes, leaving some 70,000 without shelter and traumatized” and is described as collective punishment. House demolition for the purpose of “collective punishment” or for land confiscation is illegal under international law. Rachel Corrie was protecting such a home. In truth, there was no tunnel under the home she died protecting. The Israeli army knows it and the Israel lobby knows it and the American media knows it. Most certainly, we believe that the editors of the Seattle PI know it.
As for the family of the pharmacist who lived in the house and who was in the house at the time Rachel was protecting it, they were given a visa in Tel Aviv to travel to and around the United States. Does anyone believe that the US or Israeli government would give suspected terrorists a visa to travel around the United States and allow travel around Tel Aviv? No, they were never suspected of anything nor were they ever charged with anything. So why was their house demolished and why was there never any compensation?
The remainder of the Seattle PI piece continues the unsubstantiated smear of Rachel Corrie, the ISM and of Palestinians. It has all of the usual misinformation, mischaracterizations and lies, including the horrifying implication that Rachel dove under the bulldozer. The Palestinian and international witnesses to Rachel’s death all state that the bulldozer driver could see Rachel and that he continued forward, sucking her under the bulldozer by unearthing the ground before her.
Where is the source for that claim? The witnesses who were there signed affidavits stating that the bulldozer driver could see Rachel and that he continued forward, sucking her under the bulldozer by unearthing the ground before her. The bulldozer driver himself in an interview on Israel’s channel 2 made no such claim about Rachel diving under the bulldozer. He said that he was normally ordered to stop, but in this instance no such order came. So who is making the claim that Rachel dove under the bulldozer? CAMERA and the Israel lobby.
The bigger question is; why does US media continue to allow these statements to be printed? Over and over, these same lines appear in the editorial pages of US newspapers. In the words of Rachel Corrie herself, “this has to stop”. She was referring of course to the occupation by the Israeli military of Palestinian people. But until we can stop the US media from publishing what they know to be false, the smear campaign will continue.
Please send letters to:
General: readerrep@seattlepi.com
Op-ed Editor: kimberlymills@seattlepi.com
Editorial Page Editor: marktrahant@seattlepi.com
