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Dead Jews aren’t news
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Comments
1
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A Forgotten Rachel
said:
Thank you for writing this!! It's a shame when the world sensationalizes deaths to terrorist sympathizers, however when the innocent die they are forgotten. Rachel Corrie turned her back on her country and does not deserve to have the martyr status that she's been given. She was a terrorist, and because of her, the people who attacked the US on 9/11 had the means to do so. I hope her money grubbing family is very proud of her now.
Posted by: A Forgotten Rachel on October 20, 2005 08:40 PM
2
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georg von mecklenburg
said:
Israel did admit her into the country. In fact, all of the ISM personalities entered Israel legally... Why all of the fuss right now?
Posted by: georg von mecklenburg on October 21, 2005 01:53 AM
3
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An Educated Voice
said:
It's bullshit to say that the play is falsely portraying her. Especially since the writer of this story has most likely not seen the play. (Believe it or not there was more to that young girls life than the way she spent her last six weeks.) - It's also incredibly low and pointless to bring up the fact that so many other Rachel's have died and not have plays written about them. Blame the media for not printing all of the facts, but don't blame artists for trying to tell an story about an incredibly brave woman.
Posted by: An Educated Voice on October 21, 2005 03:19 AM
4
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t
said:
Alan Rickman, you should be ashamed of this !!! YOU traitor they will throw you in the ovens like they did my ncousins!!!!! How dare you! People are being murdered in Israel, if you didn t notice!!!!!!! Go back to your rich anti-jewish stance!!!!!!
Posted by: t on October 21, 2005 03:58 AM
5
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t
said:
To an "Educated voice" Yes it is tragic but however not in the cosmic way of things! She had an embarrissing way no distorted way at looking at this! There were many children murdered for just doing there thing! I have very little sympathy for them when our children, our people are murdered!
Posted by: t on October 21, 2005 04:10 AM
6
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t
said:
You are not I repeat not an educated voice MORON!!!!!!!!! Have you had children killed or murdered no so f off !!!!!!
Posted by: t on October 21, 2005 04:36 AM
7
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Marlina
said:
Dear t,
You must be out of your mind! Who said Alan Rickman is an anti-jewish? Have you seen the play? I don't even think that poor guy you had cruely blamed even know there's a Jewish British born girl name Rachel Tharel was killed since the MEDIA haven't published anything about it!
Please, be reasonable when you blamed people.
Anyway, Rachel Tharel didn't protect anything when she was blown up in Israel, did she? The same can't be said to Corrie who made herself as a human shield.
Best Regards,
Marlina.
Posted by: Marlina on October 21, 2005 05:40 AM
8
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An Educated Voice
said:
So since my children haven't been murdered, I'm uneducated? Well, if that isn't the voice of reason, I don't know what is. (Please, detect the sarcasm in that comment.) So is it Rachel Corrie's fault these children died? I think not. (Nor is it the director/writer's faults.) This was just one of many stories that could be told.
It wasn't an embarrassing or distorted why of looking at things. It was a different point of view, you swine! Imagine that. No one's asking you to have sympathy for anyone. Killing is wrong, it doesn't matter how it happens. It's simply wrong. This girl was killed defending people. She didn't die in vain or to spite dying Israeli children. Hardly. Do you even know who Rachel Corrie is or are you just going off of MEDIA snippets alone?
And the next time you'd like to insult me, if you can't find it in your heart to use proper grammar, PLEASE attempt to use punctuation.
Posted by: An Educated Voice on October 21, 2005 12:07 PM
9
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BobW
said:
Rachael Thaler (Z"L) was murdered. We must ask if she died in vain. The question I pose is why GOI allows members of ISM into Israel.
A tangent question is whether the ISM's operation within the US make it a terrorist support organization.
Haven't watched television in about 30 years. I do listen to shortwave radio. As bad as antiSemitism is in the States, it is much worse in the UK. The BBC is a highly polished broadcast medium but it is just pure anti-Jewish.
Kol tuv,
BobW
Posted by: BobW on October 21, 2005 01:59 PM
10
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Leonard
said:
Before the July 7th tube bombings in London - Islamic terrorists held at Guatanomo Bay or Belmarsh Prison - regardless of their place of birth were always referred to as Britons in the British media, and British citizens murdered in Israel were simply referred to as settlors. There is a whole bevy of anti-Israel hate groups in the UK many funded at public expense. Ken Livingstone the anti-semitic Mayor of London recently funded an anti-Israel hate fest called the European Social Forum at Alexandra Palace where thousands of particpants from Europe were put up for free in the Dome.
There's an article in todays Jewish Chronicle about the UK providing £9.2 million to the Palestinian negotiations affairs department ie lawyers for Palestine to deal with "Israels violations of signed agreements, Israel's colonisation and refugees2. The UK funded the action against the Security barrier at the Hague, and recently tried to execute an arrest warrant on September 11th on trumped up charges against Almog a visiting former Israeli reservist. The Guardian is known to be a rabidly anti-Israel paper which became a mouth piece for those who sought to impose an academic boycott of Israel that was successfully fought off.
Posted by: Leonard on October 21, 2005 05:31 PM
Dead Jews aren’t news
By Tom Gross at The Spectator:
Rachel Thaler, aged 16, was blown up at a pizzeria in an Israeli shopping mall. She died after an 11-day struggle for life following a suicide bomb attack on a crowd of teenagers on 16 February 2002.
Even though Thaler was a British citizen, born in London, where her grandparents still live, her death has never been mentioned in a British newspaper.
Rachel Corrie, on the other hand, an American radical who died in 2003 while acting as a human shield during an Israeli anti-terror operation in Gaza, has been widely featured in the British press. According to the Guardian website, she has been written about or referred to on 57 separate occasions in the Guardian alone, including three articles the Saturday before last.
The cult of Rachel Corrie doesn’t stop there. Last week the play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, reopened at the larger downstairs auditorium at the Royal Court Theatre (a venue which the New York Times recently described as ‘the most important theatre in Europe’). It previously played to sold-out audiences at the upstairs theatre when it opened in April. (It is very rare to revive a play so quickly.)
On 1 November the ‘Cantata concert for Rachel Corrie’ — co-sponsored by the Arts Council — has its world premiere at the Hackney Empire.
But Rachel Thaler, unlike Rachel Corrie, was Jewish. And unlike Corrie, Jewish victims of Middle East violence have not become a cause célèbre in Britain. This lack of response is all the more disturbing at a time when an increasing number of British Jews feel that there has been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism.
Thaler is by no means the only Jewish Rachel whose violent death has been entirely ignored by the British media. Other victims of the Intifada include Rachel Levy (aged 17, blown up in a grocery store), Rachel Levi (19, shot while waiting for the bus), Rachel Gavish (killed with her husband, son and father while at home celebrating a Passover meal), Rachel Charhi (blown up while sitting in a Tel Aviv cafe, leaving three young children), Rachel Shabo (murdered with her three sons aged 5, 13 and 16 while at home) and Rachel Kol, 53, who worked at a Jerusalem hospital and was killed with her husband in a Palestinian terrorist attack in July a few days after the London bombs.
Corrie’s death was undoubtedly tragic but, unlike the death of these other Rachels, it was almost certainly an accident. She was killed when she was hit by an Israeli army bulldozer she was trying to stop from demolishing a structure suspected of concealing tunnels used for smuggling weapons.
Unfortunately for those who have sought to portray Corrie as a peaceful protester, photos of her burning a mock American flag and stirring up crowds in Gaza at a pro-Hamas rally were published by the Associated Press and on Yahoo News on 15 February 2003, a month before she died. (Those photos were not used in the British press.)
While Thaler’s parents, after donating their murdered daughter’s organs for transplant surgery, grieved quietly, Corrie’s parents embarked on a major publicity campaign with strong political overtones. They travelled to Ramallah to accept a plaque from Yasser Arafat on behalf of their daughter. They circulated her emails and diary entries to a world media eager to publicise them. They have written op-ed pieces, including a recent one in the Guardian.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the group with which Corrie was affiliated, is routinely described as a ‘peace group’ in the media. Few make any mention of the ISM’s meeting with the British suicide bombers Omar Khan Sharif and Asif Muhammad Hanif who, a few days later, blew up Mike’s Place, a Tel Aviv pub, killing three and injuring dozens, including British citizens. Or of the ISM’s sheltering in its office of Shadi Sukiya, a leading member of Islamic Jihad. Or of the fact that in its mission statement the ISM said ‘armed struggle’ is a Palestinian ‘right’.
According to the ‘media co-ordinator’ of the ISM, Flo Rosovski, ‘“Israel” is an illegal entity that should not exist’ — which at any rate clarifies the ISM’s idea of peace.
Indeed, partly because of the efforts of Corrie’s fellow activists in the ISM, the Israeli army was unable to stop the flow of weapons through the tunnels near where she was demonstrating. Those weapons were later used to kill Israeli children in the town of Sderot in southern Israel, and elsewhere.
However, in many hundreds of articles on Corrie published in the last two years, most papers have been careful to omit such details. So have actor Alan Rickman and Guardian journalist Katharine Viner, co-creators of My Name is Rachel Corrie, leaving almost all the critics who reviewed the play completely ignorant about the background to the events with which it deals.
So in April, when reviewers first wrote about the play, they tended to take it completely at face value. ‘Corrie was murdered after joining a non-violent Palestinian resistance organisation,’ wrote Emma Gosnell in the Sunday Telegraph. The Evening Standard, for example, described it as a ‘true-life tragedy’ in which Corrie’s ‘unselfish goodness shines through’.
Only one critic (Clive Davis in the Times) saw the play for the propaganda it is. At one point Corrie declares, ‘The vast majority of Palestinians right now, as far as I can tell, are engaging in Gandhian non-violent resistance.’ As Davis notes, ‘Even the late Yasser Arafat might have blushed at that one.’
But ultimately the play, and many of the articles about Corrie that have appeared, are not really about the young American activist who died in such tragic circumstances. They are about promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel.
Posted by Tim Dormain at October 20, 2005 04:50 PM