Making Murder Respectable
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
March 24, 2004
By MICHAEL DEMPSEY
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch through the
unjust lands,/
Through the night, through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the
oceans;/
They walked the passes; they came to present their lives./
To-day the inevitable increase in the chances of death; The walks by the
lake/
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the fact of murder.
W.H Auden, Spain 1937
In his essay, Politics and the English Language, Orwell writes that
"political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder
respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." In no
case has this statement been truer than that of the Israeli- Palestinian
dispute. For over a half a century, an entire people have been denied not
only the right of self-determination, but the more basic right of human
recognition.
It is ironic that a nation such as Palestine, with a rich history its best
defense, has been forced to defend against the scurrilous accusation that
it is without a history that it can call its own. Even stranger is the
ease with which this fact has been made to conform to the most
contradictory positions. For example, it is common to hear some glib
commentator talk about the danger posed to the state of Israel if the
Palestinians are granted the right of return, yet at the same time deny
that they were expelled from their homes in the first place. The same
creature is usually quick to decry the corruption of the Palestinian
Authority, without making any mention of the fact that it is the
Palestinian Authority, which, in the service of Israel and its political
pimp in Washington, has held back the movement for Palestinian
emancipation.
More recently, the line has caught on that the American ruling class has
committed itself to the implementation of what it calls the "road map" to
peace. Part of this alleged peace plan was a cease-fire which was supposed
to have taken place last August. I was in Palestine last August, and so
long as I was not totally overcome by sunstroke, I can tell you that there
was no cease-fire. How astonished I was then to return home and hear
people who had been thousands of miles away tell me how fortunate I was to
have been to able to visit the Holy Land during such a placid period.
Even more unnerving was the endless talk amongst the liberals about how
much the road map meant to them. Meanwhile, the only concrete results to
issue from the road map were 1) that it made it easier for the credulous
to sleep at night, and 2) it made it easier for the people of Israel to
sleep at night. No more, no less.
Most impressive, though, has been the way in which the "superstructure" of
capitalist America has failed to notice the one year anniversary of the
killing of Rachel Corrie, or indeed notice that she was killed to begin
with. The good American patriots have had nothing to say about the killing
of "one of their own" by an unknown member of another clan, forcing one to
ask: is jingoism really gone for good?
After all, it was to protect a handful of helpless American medical
students, we were told, that the United States military felt compelled to
invade the imposing Caribbean nation of Grenada, who at the time was
supposedly colluding with Cuba to launch an aerial assault on Miami.
Likewise, it was to head off a Sandinista sponsored invasion of
San-Antonio that the Reagan Administration financed a scorched earth proxy
war in Nicaragua. It was to preempt the incineration of Manhattan that the
heroic battle of Nassiriyah took place.
And, in a display of clairvoyance that only a conspiracy nut would mistake
for prior knowledge, the Pentagon recently dispatched a squadron of
American Marines to Haiti to protect a handful of already well guarded
diplomats from a frenzied mob of dark-skinned slum dwellers. If they
hadn't, we were told, the defenseless peninsula state of Florida would
have experienced a "blackout" of cataclysmic proportions. For if the year
2000 taught us anything, it was just how restive large numbers of black
people can be when they suspect that they've been burnt by the torch of
"democracy."
So, jingoism is doing fine.
The point is that had Rachel Corrie's killing squared nicely with some
higher propagandistic end, her name would be a national security cliché by
now. But then noticing that this didn't happen is another of way
recognizing that it never would.
Yet, considered obliquely Rachel's killing is significant for a less
obvious but more than compelling reason, regardless of whether or not this
reason is apparent to all: the killing of Rachel Corrie gives the lie to
one of the most cynical and most successful propaganda axioms of modern
history, namely, that the United States has been bleeding itself dry
trying to impose peace on a skeptical Israel and on an untrustworthy and
intransigent Palestine.
If this axiom were as solid as most politicians and pundits believe it to
be, or pretend it to be, then Rachel Corrie would be just as much of a
martyr in the United States as she is in Palestine.
Instead, she gets clumsily composed vitriol such as that printed on the
editorial page of The Wall Street Journal by Ruhama Shattan, in which Ms.
Shattan blames Rachel Corrie for the bombing death of the State Department
officials that occurred in Gaza last October. The officials killed were
supposedly on site to interview potential candidates for the Fulbright
scholarship.
Ms. Shattam is apparently so distressed by this that she laments, "There
will be no new crop of Palestinian Fulbright Scholars this year," implying
that she is a desperately committed proponent of higher education for
young Palestinians.
If this were the case, then, by induction, Shattam would have written
instead a column condemning the erection of Israel's Apartheid Barrier,
which threatens to prevent millions of young Palestinians from receiving a
remedial education by making it impossible for them to complete even the
commute to school.
What makes the appearance of this editorial so remarkable isn't the
disingenuousness of its author. Rather, it's that this same piece of
slanderous sludge was published in the Jerusalem Post a short while ago,
and was thought to be so repulsive by the American embassy in Tel Aviv
that a member of the embassy staff, Paul Patin, said so in a letter to the
editor.
Sir, - I want to pass on the US Embassy's reaction to the article "A
'tribute' to Rachel Corrie" (March 2). This article is nothing less than
hateful incitement. The author's disgusting abuse of the anniversary of
the death of this American citizen is inexcusable. The article reflects a
level of discourse unbefitting any serious newspaper.
We're disappointed that you chose to publish this article.
PAUL PATIN
US Embassy
Not only did the editors of The Wall Street Journal choose to publish a
column so vile and so vituperative that even the American embassy in Tel
Aviv- not known for its equanimity when it comes to choosing sides in the
Israel-Palestine conflict- felt obliged to protest, but they also colluded
in Ms. Shattan's subterfuge by prefacing her piece with a short "editor's
note" that reads:
On March 16, 2003, 23-year-old Rachel Corrie died in a bulldozer accident
[my emphasis] in the Gaza town of Rafah.
Died in a bulldozer accident? Are we to believe that she was killed while
installing a swimming pool?
No Accident
The only party claiming that Ms. Corrie's death was accidental is the
Israeli government. But then they also maintained that the house Rachel
Corrie was protecting was part of an underground gun smuggling operation,
a claim which was dispelled upon inspection after the house was destroyed
and no tunnels were discovered traveling beneath it.
Of course, the casuist would respond, "But how would the army have known
there were no tunnels unless they destroyed the house?" But then casuists
always try and justify the unjust after the fact.
But why not just admit, yes, there were indeed tunnels in Rafah. And they
were being used to smuggle aid to the Palestinian guerillas- aid to which
they are entitled. But, as was noted by former Israeli Colonel, now
retired, Yom Tov Samya, the practice of home demolitions in Rafah is not
the ancillary effect of a much broader military mission to discover and
destroy the underground catacombs of Rafah. Rather, the demolishing of
homes, he says, is commissioned so that Israel can plough out of rubble
the border it would like to establish (and is establishing) with Egypt.
"The IDF has to knock down all the houses along a strip of 300 to 400
meters. It doesn't matter what the future settlement will be, this will be
the border with Egypt."
But, to be sure, The Wall Street Journal is staffed by journalists, and
journalists, be it out of laziness or licentiousness, rarely tell the
truth. So it is no surprise that this unpleasant fact- that the Israeli
military destroys homes and levels neighborhood as a matter of policy- has
yet to be absorbed by a newspaper as widely read and respected as The Wall
Street Journal. But then only the superstitious would expect otherwise.
Not that the liberal flank of the media is any less mendacious. I was told
by someone closely connected to these affairs, that after agreeing to
publish an op-ed by Cindy Corrie, The New York Times insisted that it
contain some sentences about tunnels, and Mrs. Corrie was opposed. In
other words, the Times wasn't comfortable printing the piece without it
including the suggestion that although the Israeli's may have done
something "bad" in killing Rachel; they did so only accidentally while
attempting to carry on with a policy that was otherwise perfectly
permissible.
This is the same as a defense attorney arguing that his client, the
arsonist, is innocent of murder because he only meant to burn down the
house and not kill the owner sleeping inside.
This line of defense- if the Times in fact intended it as a defense, which
it wouldn't be egregious to suspect - is in fact no defense at all.
Rather, apart from not only failing to mitigate the accusation of murder,
it serves to aggravate it.
And if it is true, as I have been told it is, that Mrs. Corrie declined
the invitation to join in the insidious campaign of innuendo directed
against her beloved daughter, who, I wonder, aside from the Jerusalem Post
and The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times, could blame her?
Investigative Illusions
In an effort to uproot whatever illusions I may have sown, let me say that
I don't expect to see any serious investigation undertaken into the murder
of Rachel Corrie by the Executive Branch any time soon. Nor do I
anticipate the Congress to act with any great haste to rescue the Rachel
Corrie resolution from stagnation. Thus far the resolution introduced by
Congressman Brian Baird (H Con Res 111) calling for an investigation into
the death of Rachel Corrie has done nothing but languish in a somnambulist
House of Representatives.
I spoke with Congressman Baird's press secretary, Mr. Matthew Beck, (I was
told that Mr. Baird was unavailable for an interview, both now and in the
foreseeable future) who, while assuring me that Baird has been a stalwart
on behalf of the Corrie family- a dubious claim- explained to me that
unfortunately, due to the entrenched opposition of Tom Lantos and others,
the resolution has gone nowhere.
I attempted to provide the Congressman and his dutiful staff a way out of
this supposedly insuperable impasse by suggesting to his aide that in the
meantime Mr. Baird might want to visit Rafah and do some fact-finding of
his own. Such initiative is not without precedent, I reminded him. I
instanced the example of the late Congressman Joseph Moakley. Moakley,
under the influence of a suspicion that the Pentagon-then headed by Dick
Cheney- might have been obstructing the investigation into the murder of
six Jesuit priests by the American backed regime in El Salvador, traveled
to that hemispheric heart of darkness and elicited from the killers the
admission that when they shot to kill they did so only after being given
the order from on high.
And, concretely, the words "on high" describe the camarilla of military
compradors groomed and trained at the School of the Americas, in Fort
Benning, Georgia.
American military aid to the regime was temporarily arrested and the
Congress, at the behest of then Speaker of the House Tom Foley, convened a
full inquiry into the atrocities committed by Washington's clients. (The
civil war was formally ended in 1992, though, the class war that birthed
it, has continued unabated)
Mr. Beck did not respond well to my suggestion, if only because he didn't
respond at all. At one point I actually thought the phone line may have
been disconnected, or that maybe some other extraneous interference had
rendered him mute.
"Hello?"
"Yes."
"I thought I lost you."
"No, I'm here."
"Well, does Mr. Baird have any plans to do that?"
"To do what?"
"To travel to Gaza and investigate, like Joe Moakley did in El Salvador?"
"Don't know."
"What does he [Congressman Baird] think happened to Rachel Corrie? Does he
think her death was deliberate, as all the eyewitnesses present at the
time have testified?"
"He'd like more clarification."
When I asked if the Congressman had read the affidavits filed by the
witnesses, his response was that he was unaware that were any affidavits.
When I asked if the Congressman received any money from AIPAC, he
explained to me that fundraising did not fall under his purview.
It turns out that Baird has not received any money from AIPAC, but has
received a pithy $1, 454 from the National Jewish Democratic Council. No
crime in this, and certainly not an amount of money large enough to induce
a politician to adopt a particular position on a matter of policy.
However, it is worth noting that on its website, the NJDC condemns former
Representative Cynthia McKinney for stating that Jewish members of
congress have a conflict of interest when it comes to voting on Israel.
Then, on the same page, there is an article criticizing Ralph Nader for
his support for the Palestinian right of return in which it is mentioned
that Nader is "a first generation Lebanese American who speaks fluent
Arabic"
Alas, the hypocrite is never shy in showing his wares.
Guilt in the fact of Murder
As I write, the people of Gaza are erupting in anger. Sheik Ahmed Yassin,
the "spiritual" leader of Hamas, was assasinated in a missile attack
personally supervised by Ariel Sharon. The Palestinian Authority has
decried the assassination as deplorable and incendiary, while the
Palestinian people have vowed a campaign of revenge the likes of which no
Israeli government has ever seen. In an unprecedented move, spokesmen for
Hamas have called on Islamic militias throughout the world to attack
Israel and America in retaliation for the killing of Yassin.
I recall a conversation I had late one evening with a Palestinian man
named Saleeh. He and I were sitting atop his roof in the West Bank village
of Jayyous, sipping tea and chain smoking cigarettes, laughing profusely
about something I am now unable to recall. Saleeh had a good laugh. At
night, my apartment would become unbearably hot and the hordes of the most
vicious mosquitoes would come pouring in. I explained my ordeal to Saleeh,
and he suggested that I sleep with him on his roof, where there was a nice
breeze and where the mosquitoes never flew.
One night we were sipping tea and smoking Imperial cigarettes, and I heard
the sound of a helicopter in the distance. Due to the darkness I couldn't
see it, but it sounded as if it was coming closer and closer. "Apache",
Saleeh murmured.
I chuckled. "My father's company makes those you know," I said. "Really?"
asked Saleeh.
Saleeh inhaled a drag of his cigarette and held the smoke in his mouth.
Maybe he was thinking about my father. Maybe he was thinking about his
father. I don't know. A concerned frown then fell upon his face, and he
looked at me and said, "You know if things don't get better for us here, I
fear what will happen to America. I fear that."
So did Rachel - and that is what the Patriots will never understand.
Michael Dempsey, 23, is a contributor to the radical youth journal Left
Hook (http://www.lefthook.org), staff writer for The Raw Story, and member
of Boston to Palestine. He can be reached here: mikedem80@hotmail.com.
