Posted on 06/14/2003 11:45:18 AM PDT by OriginalV
Now, she is being held up as a martyr for Middle East injustices, a hero in Arab countries, a poster child for peace. Hers is perhaps the first mock casket ever carried in Gaza City with an American flag covering it. Photos of her have been made into banners and are unfurled at rallies from New York to Tel Aviv.
Evergreen professor Simona Sharoni named her daughter after Rachel Corrie. Beirut did the same with a street there.
In Rafah, a preschool, a youth center and a woman's empowerment center now bear the name of Rachel Aliene Corrie.
"Rachel has become larger than life," said Phan Nguyen, a friend from the International Solidarity Movement. "She wouldn't have wanted to become like that. ... She would've been like, 'Why am I getting all of this attention and the Palestinians don't?' "
Craig and Cindy Corrie said that before their daughter immersed herself in the politics of the Middle East, they viewed the conflict as much of the rest of the world does: white noise of the subconscious.
"That issue has been out there all of our lives," said Cindy Corrie, 55, who grew up on a farm in Denison, Iowa. "But once Rachel told us she was going there, that changed everything. We had a personal connection to it."
Craig Corrie had been a reluctant Vietnam War hero. His many medals, including a Purple Heart and Bronze Star, were long ago hidden in a plastic grocery bag in his mother's basement in Des Moines, Iowa. When he returned from war to Des Moines in 1971, he told the Army not to notify the local news media about his medals.
(Excerpt) Read more at theolympian.com ...
Really, Phan? Is that really what she would've been like? Are you sure she wouldn't have been like something else?
That is similar to what I thought as I read this article of the Corrie parents: their anti-semitism is not well-hidden. The Corries would have been good Nazis in the 30's and early 40's (or good Frenchmen of today)---by that I mean easily led and easily influenced to join a crusade to exterminate Jews.
Well there would be the problem. At no point should you ever question whether or not you messed her up, because the minute you accept any blame for helping to turn her into a raving activist - who dumbed herself into an early death by espousing the cause of some of the most intractable people on the planet - you would have to stop blaming the rest of the world.
Personal feelings aside, any real introspection would be negative public relations for the cause. After all, as a dead "victim," she's of inestimably greater value than a live "protestor" to whatever group can successfully prop her corpse up for the cameras (metaphorically speaking). The ends justify the means, the ends justify the means, the ends justify the means...
Notice that Rachel did not go to Eastern Europe to help the recently freed peoples there to build their nations. She didn't go to Appalachia to help impoverished Southerners. She didn't go to Zimbabwe to rescue white farmers who are victims of a pogrom at the hands of Mugabe.
She went to Gaza. She went to help a non-Western people fight a tribal war...losing her life in the process.
For several decades now, Western civilization has been in the grips of intense self-doubt and self-hatred (which have given rise to political correctness, multi-culturalism, etc). One of the manifestations of this behavior is that altruistic efforts only receive social status when they are performed for out-group, non-Western recipients (hence the messiah complex that american white liberals have towards blacks). As someone who is proud of my Western culture and heritage, I find this behavior to be incomprehensible and somewhat repugnant.
She doesn't look so peaceful to me
-------------Sorta Simon and Garfunkel
Nice words. The reality is she has been used by the Jew-murdering propagandists of the Gaza City ghetto. Big deal. Considering the anti-war and anti-American sentiments of her father, her parents sending her to an ultraliberal school, and their encouragement of her activism, it's no wonder she ended up dead for a really stupid cause. I wonder how much guilt they are trying to make up for by pushing this "our daughter is a martyr" crap; they are just trying to atone for the parenting disaster that they are.
Christine Bustany, Amnesty Internation USA's Advocacy Director for the Middle East. ``US-made bulldozers have been 'weaponized' and their transfer to Israel must be suspended.''
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