Rachel’s Words

Due to the opening of the play in NYC, the much discredited article written by Joshua Hammer (former Middle East Bureau Chief for Newsweek Magazine) is once again rearing its ugly head.

Mother Jones itself reposted it yesterday on its website. Below is an article by Phan Ngyuen which deconstructs the Joshua Hammer article. Please read it in its entirety and forward to anyone who references the Mother Jones article.

September 20, 2003

Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Specious Journalism in Defense of Killers
By PHAN NGUYEN

Originally published in Counterpunch, Sept. 20, 2003

Mother Jones demonstrated how low it could set its standards for investigative journalism when it hired Newsweek reporter Joshua Hammer to surf the web and write a 7000-word feature story on Rachel Corrie and the International Solidarity Movement (“The Death of Rachel Corrie”, Sept/Oct 2003). It appears that fact-checking and verification was not a priority in the production of this article. Before I had even finished reading the Hammer’s smear job I had already discovered that the writer had no shame in culling information from indiscriminate websurfing. Take, for instance, Hammer’s description of a memorial service held for Corrie in Rafah soon after she was killed:

Gaza’s darkness
Ha’aretz, Israel Sept. 3
By Gideon Levy

Gaza has been reoccupied. The world must know this and Israelis must know it, too. It is in its worst condition, ever. Since the abduction of Gilad Shalit, and more so since the outbreak of the Lebanon war, the Israel Defense Forces has been rampaging through Gaza – there’s no other word to describe it – killing and demolishing, bombing and shelling, indiscriminately.

Nobody thinks about setting up a commission of inquiry; the issue isn’t even on the agenda. Nobody asks why it is being done and who decided to do it. But under the cover of the darkness of the Lebanon war, the IDF returned to its old practices in Gaza as if there had been no disengagement. So it must be said forthrightly, the disengagement is dead. Aside from the settlements that remain piles of rubble, nothing is left of the disengagement and its promises. How contemptible all the sublime and nonsensical talk about ‘the end of the occupation’ and ‘partitioning the land? now appears. Gaza is occupied, and with greater brutality than before. The fact that it is more convenient for the occupier to control it from outside has nothing to do with the intolerable living conditions of the occupied.