The crushing to death of US peace activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli tank suggests the world is still full of admirers of Hitler and Himmler who practice their art with enviable efficiency and zeal. For the US media, however, it was a non-event, which says much about their professionalism
HITLER and Himmler both must be happy in heaven or hell — wherever they are — for they still have dedicated followers who practice their blood-curdling art with enviable efficiency.
Last Sunday, an Israeli bulldozer ran over Rachel Corrie, an American peace activists, in Refah in the Gaza strip on the Egyptian-Palestinian border. She was flattened carpet-thin.
Twenty-three-year-old Rachel from Washington D.C. was standing in the path of the bulldozer and was protesting against the demolition of a Palestinian home when the bulldozer kept advancing — as if she was not a human being but a lifeless stone that had to be crushed into dust.
Did Rachel fall victim to an accident? Or was it a cold blooded murder? Eyewitnesses — Americans, Britons, Palestinians — say the driver’s view was clear and he had seen her in a fluorescent orange jacket. In fact, she was standing on a rubble in front of the house of a Palestinian doctor (a “terrorist”) that was to be destroyed.
Fellow American Smith from Missouri said the bulldozer’s driver “absolutely knew” she was there in front of his vehicle. An Arab doctor at the Refah hospital said the driver saw her “and ran over her.” She ended up, he said, “completely underneath.”
Greg Schnabel, Rachel’s colleague in the International Solidarity Movement, said she was at one point looking into the driver’s eyes.
Admirable must indeed be the Israeli driver’s dedication to Zionism and the sacred zeal with which he followed such noble souls as Menachim Begin and Ariel Sharon: indeed, he must have been deeply inspired by the trail-blazing deeds performed at the King David Hotel, Deir Yassin, Sabra-Chatilla, Caan, Jenin ... the list is endless.
Himmler once said, “If 500 Jews are killed digging a ditch for Germany, my only concern will be whether the ditch has been dug” (not the exact English translation from German).
Sharon might as well say, “If an American woman gets crushed under an Israeli bulldozer while a Palestinian home is being blown up, my only concern will be whether the Palestinian home has been blown up!” A true follower of Hitler and Himmler!
No one will agree with this Butcher of Beirut more than those who run US Congress; and those who drive America’s diplomatic and military machine for Israel’s benefit — those Wolfowitzs, those Perles, those Roves, those Fleischers.
They get paid out of the US tax-payers’ money, but it is Israeli interests they live and work for — even if that means ditching America and making it appear enemy to the billion plus people from Indonesia to Morocco.
American blood is a cheap commodity, cheaper than the oil which George and Dick and Condi are going to have in plenty after the Iraqi war is over. What matters is Israeli blood. It alone is sacred. Long live the chairmen of Senate and House foreign relations committees! Holy kosher has such faithful servants!
Robert Fisk, who chronicled Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, tells us something of the way Israelis killed Lebanese and Palestinians as a matter of policy. As an eyewitness, he repudiates the Israeli claims that civilian deaths were due to collateral damage.
The Israeli pilots were “demolishing whole apartments in their raids, their bombs exploding deep inside the buildings ... and pancaking thousands of tons of concrete floors, balconies and stairways onto their inhabitants” (Pity the Nation), page 211) and, again, “they were killing thousands of civilians, smashing families between the walls, floors and furniture of their homes with such total violence that their corpses often emerged from the rubble flattened into huge shadows, their bodies only an inch or two thick, their heads broken open like eggs..” (p 306).
Rachel shared her horrors with her mother on the emails she sent from the occupied territory. Her messages, alas, aren’t that many, for they could have made an excellent book, except it is doubtful if her parents would find any publisher.
In one of her messages she writes, “An eight-year-old was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here, and many of the children murmur his name to me — Ali — or point at the posters of him on the walls. The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me ‘Kaif Sharon? Kaif Bush?’ and they laugh when I say, ‘Bush majnoon,’‘Sharon majnoon’ back in my limited Arabic...
“No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You just can’t imagine it unless you see it — even though you are always well aware that your experience of it is not at all the reality: what with the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed US citizen, and with the fact that I have money to buy water when the army destroys wells...
“Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature...
“Nidal’s English gets better every day. He’s the one who calls me, ‘My sister’. He started teaching Grandmother how to say, ‘Hello. How are you?’ in English. You can always hear the bulldozers passing by, but all of these people are genuinely cheerful with each other, and with me. When I am with Palestinian friends I tend to be somewhat less horrified than when I am trying to act in a role of human rights observer, documenter, or direct-action resister. They are a good example of how to be in it for the long haul. I know that the situation gets to them — and may ultimately get them — on all kinds of levels, but I am nevertheless amazed at their strength in being able to defend such a large degree of their humanity — laughter, generosity, family-time — against the incredible horror occurring in their lives and against the constant presence of death. I felt much better after this morning. I spent a lot of time writing about the disappointment of discovering, somewhat first-hand, the degree of evil of which we are still capable. I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances — which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will...”
Fox, CNN, Post, NYT — for them Rachel’s death is a non-event. On the altar of securing a second term for Bush, and second or third or fourth terms for those senators and congressmen, many more Rachels can be put through the Israeli sawing machine or flattened and buried under bulldozers. For them, it was Rachel who was guilty, for it was she who must take the blame for creating problems for Sharon’s man doing such a noble job as blowing up a home which a Palestinian had the temerity to build in Palestine!
The crushing to death of US peace activist Rachel Corrie by an Israeli tank suggests the world is still full of admirers of Hitler and Himmler who practice their art with enviable efficiency and zeal. For the US media, however, it was a non-event, which says much about their professionalism 
