Posted on 04/24/2024 7:43:00 AM PDT by Judge Bean
An Israeli-owned bulldozer kills 23-year-old American woman Rachel Corrie on March 16, 2003, as she protests a demolition campaign that destroyed over a thousand homes in the Gaza Strip.
Following the death of their daughter, Corrie’s parents filed a civil lawsuit against the state of Israel, asserting she had been intentionally killed—or that the soldier driving the Israel Defense Forces bulldozer had shown criminal negligence. That lawsuit was rejected by a Haifa judge in 2012, who found that the driver had not seen Corrie as she stood in the bulldozer’s path at the village of Rafah. The ensuing internal Israeli military investigation cleared the bulldozer driver of any fault, and the ruling judge decided that Israel could not be held liable because the bulldozer was engaged in a “combat operation.”
In the meantime, Corrie became a martyr and symbol of resistance throughout Gaza. In 2010, Palestinians launched an annual sports championship in Corrie’s memory. Corrie’s story has been told and interpreted in a variety of mediums over the past two decades, including in poetry, documentaries and a series of plays. Her parents launched the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice, a non-profit supporting “grassroots efforts in pursuit of human rights and social, economic and environmental justice,” emphasizing efforts to end Israeli apartheid.
In a letter sent to her family from Gaza, Corrie described the Palestinian suffering she had witnessed shortly before she was killed:
"No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word-of-mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here," she wrote. "You just can't imagine it unless you see it."
Hamas ‘loves’ American Students.
She was off track
Let’s see a bulldozer versus a human, physics is a bitch sometimes.
In before the picture of the iHop rachel corrie special!
Her ego was flattened.
Too soon?
The evidence against the IDF in the lawsuit was pretty thin...
And Bruce W. Klunder (July 12, 1937 - April 7, 1964) was crushed to death in the US back then. He made the mistake of protesting by laying down BEHIND the bulldozer which backed up over him. I remember seeing the photos of him pressed into the mud, back when the news media actually showed news photos.
It’s also National Pigs in A Blanket Day!
What a coincidence....................
Protesting is one thing but too stupid to get out of the way of a bulldozer is another
Dang! That was 2003?
23-year-old peace activist Rachel Corrie is crushed to death by Israeli bulldozer, earning her the St. Pancake award.
IHOP here I come!
I remember a little about this case. It seemed that the Palestinians wouldn’t allow the Israeli hospital to take and treat her. Had they done so, she would likely have survived.
“Physics is misogynist and racist!”
- Rachel Corrie
:-P
In this case maybe she’s right it crushed an innocent protester who figured she could stop it
Excerpt:
"The bulldozer pushed a tall pile of dirt. With regard to the field of view that the bulldozer's operator had, the decedent was in the "blind spot". The decedent was behind the bulldozer's blade and behind a pile of dirt and therefore the bulldozer's operator could not have seen her.
The bulldozer moved very slowly, at a speed of one kilometer per hour.
When the decedent saw the pile of dirt moving towards her, she did not move, as any reasonable person would have. She began to climb the pile of dirt. Therefore, both because the pile of dirt continued to move as a result of the pushing of the bulldozer, and because the dirt was loose, the decedent was trapped in the pile of dirt and fell.
At this stage, the decedent's legs were buried in the pile of dirt, and when her colleagues saw from where they stood that the decedent was trapped in the pile of dirt, they ran towards the bulldozer and gestured towards its operator and yelled at him to stop. By the time the bulldozer's operator and his commander noticed the decedent's colleagues and stopped the bulldozer, a significant portion of the decedent's body was already covered in dirt.
The decedent's entire body was not covered in dirt. In fact, when the bulldozer backed up, the decedent's body was seen to free herself from the pile of dirt and the decedent was still alive.
The decedent was evacuated to the hospital and after 20 minutes, her death was declared."
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Rachel Corrie - article by David Bedein, posted to FreeRepublic.com on 03/08/2010
Excerpt:
Shaik and Clausen sent me to speak with Corrie's friends who were with her at the time she was crushed. Corrie's friend Joe Smith described me how Corrie sat on a mound of dirt facing the IDF bulldozer making its way to the house it was about to demolish.
"Rachel had two options", Smith says. "When the bulldozer started to dig in the dirt pile, the pile started to move, and she could have rolled sideways quickly or fallen backwards to avoid being hit. But Rachel leaned forward to climb to the top of the dirt pile. The bulldozer's digging drew her downward, and its driver could not see her anymore. So without lifting the scoop, he turned backward and she was already underneath the blade."
Smith's description is very important, since the picture published by Reuters shows Corrie standing to the left of the bulldozer, in a location where the driver can see her very clearly, as she holds a megaphone in her hand. Beneath the picture's caption is written: "Photographed before Rachel Corrie was run over by an IDF bulldozer."
Everyone who looks at the picture and the text understands that the driver, who sees the American civilian standing in front of him, just kept on going, crushing her to death. But Joe Smith says that the picture was taken hours before she was run over, which happened at 5:00 p.m., and not a few minutes beforehand. Smith emphasizes that at the time of the incident and during it, there were no photographers in the area.
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Rachel Corrie was not innocent. She was one of those people who made the world a better place by leaving it.
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