Posted on 01/26/2004 4:49:51 AM PST by PeaceCorpsGuy
Still No Justice for Rachel Corrie - Smith --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, January 23 2004 @ 12:57 PM EST
"It is an insult to the human heart to have to force government officials to do their jobs properly while digesting the fact your child has been brutally killed .."
By WENDY SMITH
Tom Hurndall, a 22-year-old British peace activist, died last week in a London hospital. He was shot in the head by Israeli sniper fire nine months ago while shepherding Palestinian children in the Gaza Strip out of the line of fire. He had been in a coma since his injury. Hours before Hurndall died, the soldier who shot him was charged with aggravated assault. The charge is now likely to be revised to manslaughter or murder; British police are participating in an official investigation of his death.
Rachel Corrie from Olympia was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer in the Rafah refugee camp about a month before Hurndall was shot there. Like Hurndall, Corrie was a volunteer with the Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement to End the Occupation of Palestine (ISM). Like Hurndall, she was killed by an identifiable Israeli soldier. As in Hurndall's case, the Israeli government initially released a report on Corrie's killing, stating that nobody connected with the Israeli military was culpable and that further investigation was not required.
So, why has Hurndall's killer been charged when nothing has happened to Corrie's killer?
According to the Hurndall family, the only reason the soldier who shot him has been charged is because of pressure applied by the family. Hurndall's father is an attorney. He went to Rafah shortly after the shooting and compiled an extensive dossier of eyewitness affidavits, forensics reports, photographs and other relevant information. This dossier was put before the British foreign secretary in a way that made it very difficult to ignore. Ultimately, the British government went to bat for Hurndall, an unarmed British civilian killed by an Israeli soldier under the impression that he could shoot with impunity.
Indeed, the soldier had good reason to believe this. More than 2,000 unarmed Palestinian civilians, many of them children, have been killed in the occupied territories since the current intifada began in September 2000. Only 10 Israeli soldiers have been indicted and none has been convicted. A culture of impunity permeates the Israeli military, which is well known for its non-investigations of itself. For this reason, the Hurndall family would like to see the investigation of his death extend all the way up the chain of command.
Corrie's parents are not lawyers. In addition, they were told by members of the Washington state congressional delegation and State Department officials that if they quietly played along, justice for their daughter would ultimately be achieved. So far, all that has emerged is a non-credible Israeli military report claiming that 1) Corrie was not run over by a bulldozer and 2) even if she had been, the driver could not have seen her. These statements are contradicted respectively by the autopsy report and multiple eyewitness reports.
It is an insult to the human heart to have to force government officials to do their jobs properly while digesting the fact your child has been brutally killed.
Somehow the Hurndall family was able to take the necessary steps in the timeframe required. Believing what their congressman, senators and State Department officials told them, the Corries have been left to swallow lies.
Is this the best our members of Congress can do for a citizen killed abroad? Plenty of them made pretty speeches but real action is a question of political will.
About the author: Wendy Smith of Seattle is an activist with the Seattle Palestine Solidarity Committee.
Source: The Seattle PI
"Perhaps she felt personally her sacrifice was worth the risk..."
Should read: Perhaps she felt her cause was worth the risk, and ultimately her sacrifice...
Have you seen photographs of the highly-modified, armored bulldozers used to raze terrorist houses in that region? They are MASSIVE with attendant large blindspots. The operator of the bulldozer likely never saw her step in front of the blade.
This situation doesn't need lots of analysis. She gambled while playing a dangerous game and lost. Calling her a "peaceful" person is especially absurd....
Taxpayers did save a little bit of money because her remains were shipped back to the United States using flat-rate postage.
~ Blue Jays ~
You mean, American tourists like Goldie Taubenfeld and her 5-month-old infant who were blown up on the #2 bus?
Its a bogus link.
Where it really takes you is to the: Palestine Chronicle Weekly Journal !!!!!!
Ahhhh, just as I suspected. You expose your prejudice at last. I see you're using your "blessed are the protestors and terrorists so long as they're my protestors and terrorists" logic. According to you, Palestinian terrorists should be allowed to kill Jews with impunity. There should be no Palestinian price to pay when Israelis are killed. Israel doesn't have the right to strike back.
The Palestinians declared this war . . . this intifada. No one should be surprised when people die in wartime. And no one should expect Israel to contain her activities inside lines drawn on a map by bureaucrats with IQ's of a tadpole.
One question . . . you're saying it would've been okay with you if Rachel Corrie had been run over by a bulldozer in Tel Aviv but since she was in Gaza that makes it unacceptable. Is that right?
If that's not right, just what is your point?
Do you also weep for the innocent Israelis killed? Palestinians and their supporters are by-and-large killed by accident . . . and this draws all manners of concern from you. What of the innocent Israeli women and children who are TARGETED by Palestinian terrorists? If you have no prejudice in your heart, shouldn't they draw even more concern from you?
This more equivalency exercise is important. I don't have a dog in the Mid East hunt. I'm not Jewish, I'm not Muslim, I don't have friends or family who are either. I just look at it like this . . . one side of innocents die by accident while the innocents on the opposite side are deliberately targeted.
Professional hand-wringers and peaceniks seem to miss this vital point. They raise hell with Israel and give a life-long terrorist like Arafat a pass.
No, Rachel Corrie deserves no sympathy. As a matter of fact, her parents should be charged with a crime for raising a Pet Rock.
Posted by bluester in another forum regarding the "massacre" in Jenin:
http://forum.sharereactor.com/viewtopic.php?t=67039
Suttonian it doesn't end there:
by Caoimhe Butterly:
In today's reinvasion of Jenin Refugee Camp, the Israeli Occupation Forces made the bottom section of the camp into a closed military zone in the morning, using about twelve tanks, ten jeeps, and at least two Apache helicopter gunships. I had been trying to get between the unarmed children and the tanks, when I received a call from a friend who wanted me to evacuate her sick daughter as the Army would not let any ambulances through. I went with a friend who is a Palestinian journalist, and we were immediately arrested, along with another international volunteer, and taken to a place where about twenty Palestinian men were being held. They were blindfolded, handcuffed, stripped to their trousers or underwear, and beaten severely. After I was detained for two hours and interrogated briefly, the Israeli soldiers said that I was free to go. I asked permission to remain with the men, hoping to minimise the violence, but the soldiers refused, saying it was not allowed. When I refused to leave, I was forcibly dragged away, pulled down the road, and told that if I returned to the area I would be shot.
I went back the way I had come, past the United Nations compound. There I spoke briefly with Iain Hook, Project Manager of UNRWA [United Nations Relief Works Agency] in Jenin, who said he was trying to negotiate with the soldiers for women and children to go home. He came out of the UN compound waving a blue UN flag, and the soldiers' only response was to broadcast with their microphone in English, "We don't care if you are the United Nations or who you are. Fuck off and go home!" They were trying to go home. Iain said that things were not going well. He insisted that he wanted to provide safe passage for his forty Palestinian workers and himself using legal means, i.e., official coordination with the Army. Some worried parents had begun to knock a hole in the wall at the back of the compound to evacuate children who were there for a vaccination programme. We accompanied some of the children home.
After this, I headed again to the sick girl's house. On the way I met a group of children who told me that a ten-year-old friend of mine, Muhammad Bilalo, had been killed and three children had been wounded by tank fire, one of whom sustained brain damage. So I went to where the children were gathered, and the tanks were firing on them erratically. I walked down the road between the children and the tanks until I was fifty meters from the tank, where I tried to dialogue with the soldiers. I implored them not to shoot live ammunition at unarmed children. At that point, they stopped their shooting. A few moments later, an APC drove up to the tank [an armed personnel carrier, like a tank with all the armour except a cannon]. I could see their faces very clearly and I imagine they could see mine also. I had seen both of these tanks earlier in the day. A soldier raised his upper body and his gun out of the hatch of the second vehicle and began shooting. At first he shot into the air, and most of the children dispersed, running into an alley on the left side of the street. About three small children remained, however, and I tried physically to get them to the alley, dragging and pushing them. I looked back over my shoulder and could see the soldier in the APC pointing his gun at me from about one hundred meters. Near the entrance to the alley, I was shot in the thigh. When I fell they continued shooting in my direction. I crawled part of the way up the alley, and then some of the youngsters dragged me up the rest of the way. No ambulances were allowed into the camp, so I was carried on a makeshift stretcher to where a Red Crescent ambulance could reach me near the entrance of the camp. While I was in the Emergency Room of Jenin Hospital, Iain Hook of UNRWA was brought in. He died a few minutes later.
We have been told that when he was shot, the Israeli Army prohibited a clearly marked UN ambulance from evacuating him and transporting him for nearly an hour, during which time he lost much blood. Finally the ambulance crew evacuated him by taking him out by the back wall that employees had broken down earlier.
Having been present in the Camp all morning, I can testify that any Palestinian fighters had stopped shooting a good two hours before either of us was wounded. When I passed the UN compound in the morning, it was surrounded by Israeli Army snipers and soldiers who were shooting erratically into the Camp. Two people were killed and six wounded. All but one were shot by tank fire outside what the Army deemed a closed military zone. I was not caught up in any kind of crossfire as the Israeli Occupation Forces are falsely stating, and I don't believe that Iain was either.
The massacre has not stopped. Human rights violations and war crimes seen so blatantly across the world in April of this year continue on a daily basis in Jenin. Yesterday, with the casual killings that marked it, was not an unusual day in Jenin. It has become a potentially suicidal act to engage in the most basic acts of survival. The Israeli Occupation Forces engage again and again in a shoot-to-kill policy without regard as to whether its targets are civilians or armed fighters. Israelis have been shown in April that they can get away with a massacre, and that all the international condemnation in the world cannot get one ambulance in to evacuate a wounded person.
Thus the lack of accountability on Israel's part has become bolder as the events witnessed yesterday become almost standard. These are not military campaigns. They are acts of terror designed to humiliate, brutalise, and bully Palestinians into subjugation. They are being denied not only the right to resist, but to exist.
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