Its high time I spoke out about the attempts to turn Rachel Corrie into some kind of Mother Teresa martyr to the cause of fighting injustice. Firstly, the media coverage has been a monstrous and reprehensible display of blatently racist bias and favoritism. If the media lavished half this attention on just one of the victims of the last suicide bombing in Israel I might think different, but they haven't, and this speaks volumes. The truth is, the Leftists who report for the mainstream media see themselves in Rachel Corrie. Or rather, they see their other self, the self they might have been had they had the courage to follow their fanatical beliefs instead of getting a cushy job at the BBC or the NY Times. They admire her courage and the strength of her convictions and they believe she dies fighting for a noble cause out of good intentions.
The problem is, this is all a pack of lies. Corrie was a lunatic, an ideological fanatic who despised Israel with every fiber of her being. The organization to which she belonged, the ISM, absolutely and unequivocally denies Israel's right to exist. I repeat, this is not about inducing an end ot Israeli "occupation", this is about ending the existence of the state itself. In other words: genocide. All of her efforts were directed towards this end, one which by any objective definition is a racist, murderous, despicable ambition. The bulldozer that ran her over was not demolishing houses but tunnels used by terrorist groups like Hamas to smuggle weapons and explosives into Gaza for use against innocent Israeli civilians, often children. She was, by any legal definition, aiding and abetting in the terrorist murder of innocent Jews. Her fellow travelers who eulogize her name do so because, in the final analysis, they admire for doing this, and the destruction of Israel is a goal which thy too believe to be noble and worth sacrificing for.
Her image as a peace loving, at worst naive believer in justice and reconciliation is belied by the photo of her burning the American and Israeli flags. Indeed, the photo was so inflammatory many of her supporters at first claimed the Mossad fabricated it (the dastardly Jews at work again) until the Palestinian who took the photo came forward to confirm its genuineness. What struck me most, however, was not the burning flags, or the violent, hate-filled expression on Corrie's face, but the young children encircling her on the lower left and right corners. They are recoiling in fear, as if from a wild, snarling animal, as if instinctively repelled by the twisted, shrieking creature before them. In their expression, in their wide eyed repellance from such a manifestation of hatred, I see what may be the only glimmerof hope for this troubled region.