Q: Can a mainstream Israeli newspaper write a story about Rachel Corrie without mentioning that she was guarding a “tunnel,” as in “arms smuggling tunnel”?
A: Yes.
While Little Green Footballs undoubtedly has the right idea in refusing to individually address and debunk all of the articles that are going to come out this week about Rachel Corrie, the fact that Ha’aretz has a fawning celebration of her terrorist-enabling requires specific notice. In his article, which slips from random unconnected but vaguely relevant anecdote to random unconnected but probably irrelevant quote, Bradley Burston does a good job performing the kind of sneering pieces we’re likely to see. He sneers at the IDF claim that the bulldozer driver couldn’t see her (which he couldn’t – those peaceful ISM people hang out with those other peaceful heavily armed Palestinian terrorists, who necessitate heavily armored bulldozers with minimum lines of vision). He insinuates rather than outright states the usual claim that Corrie was protecting homes (she wasn’t – she was protecting an arms smuggling tunnel).
But again, picking apart Rachel Corrie canards is a tired practice. These articles are more valuable as indexes to how the Left thinks. And it’s not pretty.
In fact, I think Leftist would be better off entirely avoiding emotional issues like the Rachel Corrie death – it causes them to let their “moderate” mask slip, and what’s underneath is revealing. Consider just this graph:
Last year, the Israeli campaign to curb foreign activism received reinforcement from an unexpected source. Among those who attended an ISM memorial for Rachel Corrie on the fortieth day after her death, it later developed, were two British nationals who, shortly thereafter, traveled to Tel Aviv to carry out a Hamas-launched suicide bombing at the seaside Mike’s Place bar.
There’s a lot going on in this paragraph:
(1) The most obvious is the not to subtle refusal to just come out and say that these two murderers were ISM members (“but I said they went to her funeral…” Yeah, whatever).
(2) The shift from “activist” to “national” when talking about the suicide bombers – a denial both that the British suicide bombers were members of the ISM like Rachel Corrie but also that members of the ISM like Rachel Corrie only differ in means not desired ends from the suicide bombers.
(3) The infuriating rhetorical move of denying that there even was a suicide bombing – “traveled to Tel Aviv to carry out a… suicide bomb” is not the same thing as “traveled to Tel Aviv and carried out a.. suicide bombing.” You may think that this is nit-picking, but there is an overwhelming refusal on the Left to recognize the suffering of Israelis, and this mental block that Burston seems to have is a symptom of it.
There’re also some subtle throwaway lines that are infuriating for their smugness:
Israel has also resisted international diplomatic pressure for independent inquiries.
I can’t imagine why Israel doesn’t trust international inquiries. And the funniest part of the article…
Cited by some as a Joan of Arc facing danger shorn of arms and armor, her portrait appears on a wall mural in San Francisco beside that of Che Guevara.
Burston doesn’t mention the other people on that mural – the cop killer from Philly.
* There is actually a mention to tunnels in this piece, it’s just completely opaque, literally parenthetical, and left totally unconnected to Corrie:
The deaths of ISM activists, that of Rachel Corrie and of Britons Tom Hurndall and James Miller, both fatally injured by IDF fire, along with the wounding of Brian Avery of New Mexico, shot in the face, brought world attention to the focus of their protests – the IDF drive to raze Palestinian houses overlooking the Philadelphi Route, the army patrol highway built on the narrow border that divides the southeastern base of the Gaza Strip from the Egyptian Sinai peninsula. (Militants have also dug tunnels in this area that run from Rafah in southern Gaza to the Egyptian side of the border, and which are used to smuggle weapons into the Strip.)
He only mentions tunnels so that people can’t say things like “he literally does not mention tunnels a single time in his article.” He doesn’t even imply that smuggling tunnels had anything to do with her death – he just states offhand that there are some tunnels under the Philadelphi Route.
UPDATE: The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler has a touching memorial to Ms. Corrie.
