The Forgotten Rachels

Updated: 29/August/2012.  Thanks for those who pointed out that the term "The Forgotten Rachels" was coined by Tom Gross (which I was unaware of). He wrote about some of the "Forgotten Rachels" in The Spectator magazine on October 22, 2005. [Credit: EG]

With Rachel Corrie in the news today and trending on Twitter, it's time to remember some of the other Rachels who were murdered by Palestinian Terrorists (you know, the friends of the ISM) who didn't get a day in court. You can read about each of them in the enclosed hyperlinks.

Some of the forgotten Rachels: 

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)

Rachel Ben Abu (16, blown up outside the entrance of a Netanya shopping mall)

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.

Rachel Sela, 82, murdered the day before Purim on March 4th, 1996 when an Palestinian suicide bomber exploded at Dizingoff Center, Tel Aviv.

Rachel Tajgatrio, 83, murdered while shopping in Jerusalem's "Machaneh Yehuda" market when 2 bombs went off on July 30th, 1997.

Rachel Thaler, 16 years old from Ginot Shomron died of her wounds on February 27 2002, after a Palestinian bomber exploded in a shopping mall's food court, killing 3, wounding 30.

Rachel Tamari,  65, murdered by a Palestinian bomb on the Dan #20 bus in Ramat Gan, on July 24, 1995.  6 Israelis died in that attack, and dozens were wounded.

Rachel Drouk, 35, mother of 7 from the Shilo community was murdered by Palestinian terrorist gunfire while on her way to a demonstration (October 28, 1991) -- that negotiating with Palestinian terrorists would be dangerous to Israel.  The driver of her car, Yitzchak Rofeh was also killed and 5 others wounded.

Rachel Weiss, 26, pregnant and mother of 3 small children (Rafael, Netanel and Efraim), were all murdered by Palestinian terrorists who threw a molotov cocktail at her car in the Jordan Valley (October 31, 1988)

Rachel Weiss, 69, stabbed to death by Palestinian terrorists who were sent by Sheikh Ahmed Yassin to as an "entrance test" to the Hamas organizations.  She was murdered in her home in Moshav Shapir, August 3rd, 1988.

Rachel Munk, 24, [married 6 weeks earlier] was murdered in a drive-by terror attack by on July 26, 1996, along with her husband Zeev Munk.  The attack took place on the Beit Shemesh - Kiryat Melachi road near Moshav Gefen.

Rachel Stern, 8 years old,  stabbed to death, along with her mother, while eating breakfast in their home in Kiryat Shmona, on April 11, 1974.  16 people were murdered that day by Palestinian terrorists in that attack.

Rachel Afita, 16, murdered by Palestinian terrorists in the Northern Israeli community of Maalot on May 15, 1974

Rachel Lev, 50, murdered by Palestinian terrorists when 5 bombs exploded throughout the Haifa area on October 23, 1969 and the following day.  7 people were killed in the attack, including her husband Eliyahu and son Avraham.

Rachel Mizrachi, 38, stabbed to death by Arab terrorists in her home in Tiberias, October 2, 1939.

May their memories be blessed.


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Israeli Court Rules: Useful Idiocy Not a Valid Legal Defense

Yesterday, the Haifa District Court rejected claims that Israel was at fault over the death of American Rachel Corrie.

Corrie, an ISM activist, was flattened and killed by an IDF armored bulldozer in 2003 while protesting Israel's right to defend itself of clearing terrorist minefields in the Gaza Strip near the Egyptian border.

Corrie's family accused Israel of intentionally and unlawfully killing their 23-year-old daughter, and launched a civil case after an IDF military investigation cleared the army's commanders and soldiers of wrong-doing. YNET reports:

In a ruling read out to the court, Judge Oded Gershon called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident", but said the state was not responsible because the incident had occurred during what he termed a war-time situation. At the time of her death, during a Palestinian uprising, Corrie was protesting against Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip.

"I reject the suit," the judge said. "There is no justification to demand the state pay any damages." He added that the soldiers had done their utmost to keep people away from the site. "

She (Corrie) did not distance herself from the area, as any thinking person would have done. He rejected a claim of negligence explaining that the bulldozer's driver had limited vision unlike Corrie. "She consciously put herself in harm's way," Gershon said. The accident had been self inflicted, he added. "

The Jewish Press adds:

The judge found that Corrie was in a closed military zone. Further, he ruled that, based upon the evidence, the driver of the bulldozer, whom the plaintiffs had claimed intentionally or negligently killed Corrie, could not have seen the International Solidarity Movement volunteer before she was struck. Corrie could have saved herself, the judge found, if she had removed herself from the situation. All claims of negligence against Israel in the death of Rachel Corrie have been dismissed. Corrie’s parents, the plaintiffs in the wrongful death case, will not be charged with court costs.

While my heart goes out to the Corrie family whose daughter was killed, it's tragic that the ISM used Rachel Corrie as a "Useful Idiot" in their war for the destruction of Israel. The Corrie family's anger and grief should be directed at the ISM which cynically used Corrie as a pawn against the IDF.

The Corrie family wrongly claims that was a plan to escalate the confrontation between the bulldozers and the "peace activists."  Apparently, there was a plan, but not the way the Corrie's have been led to believe...

But it was the ISM members who decided to escalate, as described by Newsweek writer Joshua Hammer in a lengthy article in Mother Jones. Why? One possible reason was because of the sexual tension that was hurting their relations with the local Palestinians.

"An anonymous letter was circulating," Hammer reported, "which referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as 'nasty foreign bitches' whom 'our Palestinian young men are following around.' That morning [of Corrie's death], the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter's effects.

'We all had a feeling that our role was too passive,' said one ISM member. 'We talked about how to engage the Israeli military.' That morning, team members made a number of proposals that seemed designed only to aggravate the problem. 'The idea was to more directly challenge the Israeli military dominance using our international status,' said the ISMer."

sourced from Lenny Ben-David's Research Blog

Years later, the picture is much clearer, as we know that ISM female activists are routinely harassed and sexually assaulted by Palestinians.

Reported by the Muqata, 2 years ago:

Back in July, Ha’aretz reported the story of a former Arab convict named Alladin who would find these young female peace activist staying in nearby villages, he would tell them he was on the run from the Shabak (Israel security), and ask them to hide him.

These young female dupes would of course be happy to help an Arab on the lam from the Israeli authorities and let him sleep in their rooms. So far one girl initially came forward about the attempted rape against her. She was found wandering the village of Umm Salmuna (near Bethlehem) in a state of shock, so who knows if the attempt actually failed.

But in the end retracted her story due to pressure to “not hurt the cause”. Pressure that came from the PA and the leftwing protest organizers. Haaretz had learned that representatives of both the popular protest movement and the PA have since applied pressure on the American peace activist as to prevent her from making the story public.

The story could have ended there, except that there’s more. Apparently, quite a number of female protesters have been sexually assaulted and molested by the Arabs they are protesting for.

If the Corrie family still needs an outlet to find meaning in their daughter's death, they should direct their pain at the ISM.   They could even champion the cause for other concerned parents to educate their children about why the ISM is a dangerous and irresponsible organization.

PostScript: I had to add this from a post entitled "The secular beatification of Rachel Corrie sums up everything that is wrong with modern solidarity with Palestine"

...The transformation of Corrie’s life and death into a black-and-white morality tale – featuring a well-off white American who was pure of heart, poor little brown people who have no hope, and a Zionist entity that is supremely evil – sums up the boneheadedness of modern-day Palestinian solidarity. There was a time when supporting Palestine meant looking upon Palestinians as a people capable of governing their own lives, even of running their own state, free from the meddling or bossing-about of outsiders. Now, Palestinian solidarity is all about treating Palestinians as the ultimate victims, as helpless, hapless, sad-eyed creatures who need decent Westerners, ideally well-educated ones brought up in Amnesty-supporting households, to come over and “save” them, in a not dissimilar way to how Bible-wielding white folk once tried to saved the savages of Africa.

Palestinian solidarity has become creepily anthropological. It increasingly treats Palestinians, not as a people who simply need more political independence, but as a threatened tribe that must be protected from further harm by “human shields” from the enlightened west. Decked out in Arafat-style keffiyehs (a PC form of blacking up), and possessed of a conviction that it falls to white-skinned, iPhone-armed westerners to expose Israel’s “genocidal” crimes to the world media, solidarity activists who travel to Palestinian territories are becoming more and more like secular versions of the crusaders of old. They are effectively going to Palestine to find themselves, to try to give meaning to their potentially shallow lives through imagining that they can “save” an entire people and halt a “genocide” by standing in front of a tank or writing some blog posts about how tragic are the lives of cute Palestinian children. It is a peculiar form of solidarity that reduces an entire foreign people to the level of child-like victims who need the likes of St Rachel to save them.

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St. Pancake's Propaganda Trial

(Every time the term "St. Pancake" gets posted, people get very annoyed. Please read, at the end of this post, Jameel's explanation for the origin of this nickname, if you're one of those that gets upset.)

If you weren't sure the Rachel Corrie (Saint Pancake) trial was nothing more than another propaganda attack on the legitimacy of Israel's right to self-defense against terrorism and its supporters, then Corrie's parents made it utterly clear with their latest antics (which I'll get to at the end of the post).

The NYTimes has an article about the current Rachel Corrie trial.

I’m going to discuss some of the important or interesting points of the article.

If you want more information on the Rachel Corrie lies and fraud (Pallywood), I recommend you read/view the following articles/site: StoptheISM, SmoothStone, Daled Amos (especially his part about the contradictory statements by the doctors in the Gaza hospital) and LennyBenDavid.


What's interesting are the partial pieces of information slipped in there provide a clear picture as to how these radicals (including Corrie's parents) try to delegitimize Israel and our right to defend ourselves.

The article discusses the lies that Rachel Corrie promoted in her letters. The NY Times excuses one of those lies because "Ms. Corrie was writing as an incensed activist, not an economist."

But the lies don't end there as the NY Times reports how misleading photos were sent out by the ISM activists.

"The day that Ms. Corrie was killed, her fellow activists sent two photographs of her to news agencies that were then transmitted around the world. The first one showed her standing in an orange jacket with a bullhorn addressing an approaching bulldozer, and the second showed her crumpled on the ground, near death. The clear implication was that the two pictures were sequential, whereas the first was shot hours earlier with a different bulldozer. "

But not only did the activist try to trick people into believing that the photos were connected, the NY Times leaves out is that there are photos that the ISMer are publishing about Rachel Corrie that were simply photoshopped.




The NY Times gives equal weight to the claim of Israel and Corrie regarding the homes in question...

"The Israelis say the houses in question were the source of sniper fire and arms-smuggling tunnels. Ms. Corrie, by contrast, wrote e-mails home saying that the families she met were gentle people whose houses had been shot at and whose children were harassed for no reason."

But since the last Gaza war, we all now know the undeniable truth now about the weapons smuggling tunnels that Rachel Corrie was helping protect.


Meanwhile, the Corries claim they have no connection with how the memory of their daughter it is being promoted.

"Asked what she thought of how her sister was viewed, she said her family did not consider itself anti-Israel and was not responsible for the way in which Ms. Corrie’s name had been used by groups and causes. "

Apparently the Corries have no problem with the way their daughter's memory has been "hijacked". Which is not surprising as they are doing the same.

Cindy Corrie, founder of Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace & Justice:

We at the Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice salute the Olympia Food Co-op Board of Directors for their recent decision to institute a boycott of Israeli goods. We also applaud community and co-op members who have advocated on behalf of this measure.

They aren’t out for justice or truth. First because they’ve been spending their time in court trying to “out” the drivers of the bulldozers, not because that will bring out “truth”, but apparently so that they (and the ISM) can then go after them personally.


But as I said in the beginning of the post, the Corries are complicit partners in these antics, as they too are pulling the same shtik.

The Corries’ lawyer is not trying to find the truth. He is fighting a propaganda battle for the Corries.

In court their lawyer pulled out a small toy bulldozer, a small piece of play dough, and a big Raggedy-Ann doll. His message, how could the driver of the small bulldozer have missed seeing such a big Rachel Corrie.



The truth is though that Rachel Corrie, not a tall girl, was standing kneeling or sitting in a trench. The bulldozer blades are around 8 feet high, and the driver sits another few feet above. There is no way he could have seen her where she was kneeling.





But that is not the message that Rachel Corrie’s parent want to project in their delegitimization war against Israel’s right to defend itself – in a war zone.

So they instruct their lawyer to continue the delegitimization tactics in court.

Rachel Corrie's mother wants to try to portray Rachel as a civilian in a combat zone. But that's not the case. Rachel Corrie acted as a non-uniformed combatant for terrorists. Which makes her a terrorist too.



Update: Jameel adds the following.

Every time the term "St. Pancake" gets posted, people get very annoyed. The term originates from the LGF website, when the ISM chapter of Victoria announced a memorial pancake breakfast, in the memory of Rachel Corrie!

After ISM realized that their joke at Corrie's expense, was also being used to make fun of the ISM, they removed the text.

The invitation read as follows:

The Rachel Corrie Memorial Committee of Victoria Invites you to a pancake breakfast at Denny’s Restaurant Sunday March 12 , 2006 10 am.

The Public is invited to a memorial pancake breakfast at Denny’s Restaurant on Douglas Street near Finlayson, 10 am, Sunday March 12, 2006 to celebrate the life and untimely death of Rachel Corrie, Peace Activist with the International Solidarity Movement.

There will be a reading of selections from Ms. Corrie’s letters and diary, followed by a ceremony at Topaz Park, where a stone cairn will be erected in her honour.

Attendees are encouraged to wear their keffiahs, and to dress in black.

No weapons, drugs, or alcohol please.

http://www.palsolidarity.org/main/

ISM offers many ways for you to get involved in the struggle for Palestinian freedom. Whether you’re thinking of traveling to Palestine to work with us, or you’d like to work to educate your community about the reality in Palestine, we welcome your involvement.

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Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד