Parents mourn children killed during protests

The unique pain that comes from losing a child is still fresh on the faces of Cindy and Craig Corrie.

And although it's been five years since environmental activist David Nathan "Gypsy" Chain was killed, his mother, Cindy Allsbrooks, still lives daily with her pain.

She lost her son, and the Corries lost their daughter, in separate incidents of what is called confrontational, nonviolent activism -- placing oneself in harm's way in fervent defense of a cause.

That level of commitment led to the death of Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist killed in March after she stood in front of an Israeli army bulldozer in an effort to protect a Palestinian home.

And it spurred Chain, a 24-year-old Pasadena resident, to confront loggers in California, where he was crushed by a tree felled by a logger working for a Maxxam Corp. subsidiary.

The Corries are in Houston for a series of events that local activists are holding to honor their daughter, who was a member of a nonviolent, pro-Palestinian peace group called the International Solidarity Movement.

At some point during the visit, they will sit down with Allsbrooks to talk about the most devastating event that can happen to a parent.

"These young people do go out and put themselves on the front lines," Allsbrooks said this week from her home in Coldspring, in San Jacinto County north of Houston. "But because they are nonviolent activists, they don't look for violence to happen to them."

The Corries are traveling the nation, telling their daughter's story, in hopes of gathering enough grass-roots and political support to pressure the Bush administration into conducting an independent investigation into her death.

They are as dissatisfied with the Israeli army review as Allsbrooks was with the police investigation into her son's 1998 death. The accused in both incidents were absolved, although eyewitnesses said they had purposefully killed the young activists.

"Rachel admitted to me that she was frightened, but she wanted to do it," said Craig Corrie, 56, as he and his wife toured an art exhibit. "She needed to do it."

Walking around the Station, at 1502 Alabama, the Corries listened as a curator explained why a refugee tent was pitched in the front room of the cavernous art space.

The names embroidered on the tent -- in heavy, black thread that forms stark block letters -- are those of the 418 Palestinian villages destroyed, depopulated or occupied by Israel since 1948, the curator said.

The oatmeal-colored tent would have been familiar to Rachel Corrie, who put her life at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., on hold to be a peace volunteer in the West Bank and Gaza.

Many Americans don't even know about her death, local activists said, because it was overshadowed by the start of the Iraqi war three days later.

"I want people to know that Rachel was making the world safer for Israelis, Palestinians and Americans," Cindy Corrie said.

Her husband recalled that, when Rachel told them of her plans, he wished she would work at a soup kitchen instead.

"You really can't ask your child to be less than they are capable of being," Craig Corrie said.

Witnesses said Rachel Corrie was wearing a neon orange jacket as she stood on a mound of dirt in front of a Palestinian house that was marked for destruction in an Israeli effort to block arms smuggling. They said she was clearly visible to the soldier in the Israeli army bulldozer when it rolled over her and backed up.

The Israeli army cleared the soldier of wrongdoing, concluding that he had not seen Corrie.

Nathan Chain was the peacemaker in his family, so much so that his aunts loved to take him on road trips because he kept his cousins from fighting. Allsbrooks said she wasn't surprised when her son joined Earth First to protest the destruction of old-growth redwood forests.

Chain was killed while he and other Earth First protesters were trespassing on Pacific Lumber Co. property near Eureka, Calif. Their tactics included blocking trucks, camping in trees to prevent them from being cut down and putting themselves in front of trees chosen to be logged.

California authorities concluded there wasn't enough evidence to file charges against the logger. They found that while he had threatened the protesters, he wasn't aware that Chain was in the path of his falling tree.

The company settled with Allsbrooks out of court. She said she had no idea how much danger her son was in because he was participating in nonviolent protests.

"I would never try to stop Nathan from following his heart," Allsbrooks said. "But if I had known that I was going to lose my son to that, I would have intervened in any way possible."

Excerpted from Hillary Clinton and the Radical Left By David Horowitz - Hillary Clinton and the Third Way***The first truth about leftist missionaries, about believing progressives, is that they are liars. But they are not liars in the ordinary way, which is to say by choice. They are liars by necessity-often without even realizing that they are. Because they also lie to themselves. It is the political lie that gives their cause its life.

Why, for example, if you were one of them, would you tell the truth? If you were serious about your role in humanity's vanguard, if you had the knowledge (which others did not), that you were certain would lead them to a better world, why would you tell them a truth that they could not "understand" and that would hold them back?

If others could understand your truth, you would not think of yourself as a "vanguard." You would no longer inhabit the morally charmed world of an elite, whose members alone can see the light and whose mission is to lead the unenlightened towards it. If everybody could see the promised horizon and knew the path to reach it, the future would already have happened and there would be no need for the vanguard of the saints.

That is both the ethical core and psychological heart of what it means to be a part of the left. That is where the gratification comes from. To see yourself as a social redeemer. To feel anointed. In other words: To be progressive is itself the most satisfying narcissism.

That is why it is of little concern to them that their socialist schemes have run aground, burying millions of human beings in their wake. That is why they don't care that their panaceas have caused more human suffering than all the injustices they have ever challenged. That is why they never learn from their "mistakes." That is why the continuance of Them is more important than any truth.

If you were active in the so-called "peace" movement or in the radical wing of the civil rights causes, why would you tell the truth? Why would you tell people that no, you weren't really a "peace activist," except in the sense that you were against America's war. Why would you draw attention to the fact that while you called yourselves "peace activists," you didn't oppose the Communists' war, and were gratified when America's enemies won?

What you were really against was not war at all, but American "imperialism" and American capitalism. What you truly hated was America's democracy, which you knew to be a "sham" because it was controlled by money in the end. That's why you wanted to "Bring the Troops Home," as your slogan said. Because if America's troops came home, America would lose and the Communists would win. And the progressive future would be one step closer.

But you never had the honesty-then or now-to admit that. You told the lie then to maintain your influence and increase your power to do good (as only the Chosen can). And you keep on telling the lie for the same reason.

Why would you admit that, despite your tactical support for civil rights, you weren't really committed to civil rights as Americans understand rights? What you really wanted was to overthrow the very Constitution that guaranteed those rights, based as it is on private property and the individual-both of which you despise.

It is because America is a democracy and the people endorse it, that the left's anti-American, but "progressive" agendas can only be achieved by deceiving the people. This is the cross the left has to bear: The better world is only achievable by lying to the very people they propose to redeem.

Despite the homage contemporary leftists pay to post-modernist conceits, despite their belated and half-hearted display of critical sentiment towards Communist regimes, they are very much the ideological heirs of Stalinist progressives, who supported the greatest mass murders in human history, but who remember themselves as civil libertarian opponents of McCarthy and victims of a political witch-hunt. (Only the dialectically gifted can even begin to follow the logic involved.)***

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