Nadene Goldfoot
Victor Sharpe
A meeting was called for 2pm on November 30th at Portland, Oregon's City Hall to discuss the ramifications of calling a BDS against Caterpillar and others. The city has money to invest, something many places are doing. They are allowed to buy bonds but not to enter the stock market, so they appointed a committee for SOCIAL investment to see if a company was complying with their list of moral necessities. Evidently Caterpillar did not meet the bill since it is known to do business with Israel who uses their equipment. The IDF (Israel Defense Forces-thus Israel's army) buys from Caterpillar.
The committee is made up of many church people and a group called The Jewish Voice for Peace, and they are anything but not for peace for Israel unless it is a piece for the Palestinians, and that most likely means the whole state of Israel. This group is led by people such as Noam Chomsky, known dissident against Israel and her decisions. Some of these people may be very naive about what they have joined and its goals, and I hold them responsible for not looking into it further, for they are Jewish. I charge them with the need to know a group before joining and causing harm to our tiny country we have waited for for 2,000 years, when Israel is a highly moral country. Actually, Jews such as Moses wrote the book on our moral behaviors that we try to live up to.
There were hundreds there at the meeting, most wanting to "testify" against Israel which meant to get a chance to speak for a timed minute. I was #86 which meant I might have spoken around midnight since the meeting started with a lengthy explanation about the difficulties of finding a suitable company to be compliant with their qualifications, which were not the type from a financial advisor.
It finally was the Corrie family's turn to speak who came down from Olympia, Washington to "testify." (see article below from Victor Sharpe). Their bell rang implying their time was up to speak but they were given the nod to continue till finished.No one else was given such permission. Our speaker was cut off in the middle of an important sentence and he complied and stopped. What's fair for the goose is fair for the gander. The Corries went on and on and I walked out. I could not take the blasting against Israel from these people knowing the real facts, and anyway, I lived 20 miles away and it was getting late. Being most likely the only dual citizen of Israel-USA there, I wanted to speak and realized I could have said things no one else could have, but never realized how many would be there against our tiny state.
Victor Sharpe
 |
| Portland, Oregon City Hall |
The committee is made up of many church people and a group called The Jewish Voice for Peace, and they are anything but not for peace for Israel unless it is a piece for the Palestinians, and that most likely means the whole state of Israel. This group is led by people such as Noam Chomsky, known dissident against Israel and her decisions. Some of these people may be very naive about what they have joined and its goals, and I hold them responsible for not looking into it further, for they are Jewish. I charge them with the need to know a group before joining and causing harm to our tiny country we have waited for for 2,000 years, when Israel is a highly moral country. Actually, Jews such as Moses wrote the book on our moral behaviors that we try to live up to.
There were hundreds there at the meeting, most wanting to "testify" against Israel which meant to get a chance to speak for a timed minute. I was #86 which meant I might have spoken around midnight since the meeting started with a lengthy explanation about the difficulties of finding a suitable company to be compliant with their qualifications, which were not the type from a financial advisor.
It finally was the Corrie family's turn to speak who came down from Olympia, Washington to "testify." (see article below from Victor Sharpe). Their bell rang implying their time was up to speak but they were given the nod to continue till finished.No one else was given such permission. Our speaker was cut off in the middle of an important sentence and he complied and stopped. What's fair for the goose is fair for the gander. The Corries went on and on and I walked out. I could not take the blasting against Israel from these people knowing the real facts, and anyway, I lived 20 miles away and it was getting late. Being most likely the only dual citizen of Israel-USA there, I wanted to speak and realized I could have said things no one else could have, but never realized how many would be there against our tiny state.
Please read the article below penned by Jonathan Tobin as long ago as August 28, 2012 after the verdict handed by a Haifa court was heard.
His article was titled:
The verdict handed down today by a Haifa court in the lawsuit filed by the parents of Rachel Corrie will be denounced by Israel-bashers everywhere. For them, Corrie, a 23-year-old member of the International Solidarity Movement who was killed in 2003, is a martyr to the cause of peace and freedom for the Palestinians.
They continue to believe Corrie was deliberately run over by an Israeli bulldozer knocking down the homes of innocent Arabs. But, as the court rightly pointed out, the truth is that though her death was regrettable, it was an accident caused by her own rash behavior.
The structures that she was attempting to protect by lying down in front of a bulldozer were structures built to disguise tunnels along the border between Egypt and Gaza through which munitions and explosives intended to kill innocent Israelis were being smuggled.
Even more to the point, the idea that Corrie was in Gaza to promote peace is a myth. The purpose of the International Solidarity Movement’s activities in Gaza was to shield Hamas and Fatah terrorists and to prevent the Israel Defense Forces from carrying out measures intended to stop the flow of arms and terrorist activity.
If Corrie’s parents, who have pursued efforts to hold the state of Israel responsible for her death, should sue anyone it is the group that led the foolish American to Gaza and deliberately placed her in harm’s way.
Over the past decade, pro-Palestinian groups and activists have done their best to burnish Corrie’s legend as an American idealist whose death shone a spotlight on “Israeli evil.”
But the truth about the International Solidarity Movement is something very different than what has been depicted on stage. The group is opposed to the existence of the State of Israel and opposes all measures of self-defense on the part of the Jewish state.
What was going on in Gaza during Corrie’s time? There was a terrorist war of attrition in which Palestinian Arabs sought to bring Israel to its knees with a campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks which, over the course of the second intifada, took the lives of over 1,000 Israelis, overwhelmingly civilians.
You hear nothing about this in “My Name is Rachel Corrie” or any of the accounts of her activities by her fans. Nor do you see the Rachel Corrie captured in a photo of her at the time, face contorted by rage as she joins Palestinians in burning an American flag.
But, as British journalist Tom Gross memorably wrote back in 2005 in his piece, “The Forgotten Rachels,” those promoting the cult of Rachel Corrie don’t seem to care about the Jewish girls by the same name who were slaughtered by the Muslim terrorists the ISM activist sought to shield.
As for the particulars of the incident, Corrie’s death was an accident that occurred during “a military activity meant to prevent terrorist activity.”
The commander of the troops on the scene, an infantry major, testified last year that the activists had ignored repeated warnings to leave and were endangering his troops.
“It was a war zone,” he told the court. The judge repeated that description in Tuesday’s decision, saying that from the outbreak of violence in September, 2000, and until the day of Corrie’s death, Israeli forces counted some 6,000 hand grenades thrown at them in the area, as well as 1,400 shooting attacks, 150 explosive devices, 200 anti-tank rockets and more than 40 instances of mortar fire.
As the judge said in his verdict: “She chose to put herself in danger. She could have easily distanced herself from the danger like any reasonable person would.”
The Jewish Rachels who died at the hands of Ms. Corrie’s Palestinian friends had no such chance. They were blown up or shot by Palestinians with munitions like those smuggled in the same tunnels that Corrie was protecting. They were slaughtered while driving in a car, sitting in a pizza parlor, waiting for a bus, shopping in a grocery store or just sitting in their own home. But there are no plays about them.
Rachel Corrie should not have put herself in front of a bulldozer in the middle of the confusion of a military action in a war zone in which she was taking a side. Her death was as unnecessary as the intifada itself.
Had the Palestinians accepted Israel’s offers of an independent state in 2,000 and 2,001 (and repeated and turned down again and again), there would have been no need for any hostilities in Gaza. But they chose war instead of peace and were aided by Corrie in this futile endeavor.
Peace will never come to the Middle East so long as Palestinians, who remain devoted to destroying Israel, can count on the support of Western elites and those like Corrie to support their murderous activities.
------------------------------
In an article titled: “The truth about Rachel Corrie, point by point” Lee Kaplan, an investigative journalist, senior intelligence analyst and communications director for the Northeast Intelligence Network and contributor to Front Page Magazine and Israel National News, points out the following:
“On May 21st, 2008, Israel’s Supreme Court heard an appeal of the lower court in Haifa that heard the wrongful death lawsuit by the parents of Rachel Corrie. Three of Israel’s highest judges, at taxpayer expense, took their time to listen to an Arab lawyer named Hussein Abu Hussein who is a professional flack for the Muslim terrorist movements out to destroy Israel. The purpose, as always, is to accuse the IDF of murder and a cover up in a nonsensical trial over a tragically foolish American girl who was playing revolutionary in a combat zone and got herself killed in the process.
“Rachel’s parents could have stepped up after their daughter’s death and urged other parents to not encourage their children to act as human shields for terrorists like Rachel did. Instead, they chose to make a sinecure traveling the world and mythologizing their "useful idiot" child as a “human rights activist” who died protecting a Palestinian home with her body.
“Nothing could be further from the truth. Even after being kidnapped by Hamas operatives in Gaza, on their release they began the same lying campaign.
“Joseph Goebbels was the Nazi propagandist who created the Big Lie. The Big Lie held that if one repeated a story over and over people would come to believe it as true.
“This is the case with Rachel Corrie. Cindy and Craig Corrie, Rachel’s parents, have become spokespeople for a foundation put together by assorted anti-Semites and radical Arabs in the US to build a Big Lie around Rachel.
“A play was developed glorifying this foolish girl who was on a thrill ride as an anarchist in Gaza trying to interfere with the IDF.
“Joseph Carr, an ISM activist who was present that day when Rachel was, actually said that Rachel’s death was well worth the ‘price of the revolution’”.
These are just some of the Big Lies about Rachel Corrie:
“1) Rachel Corrie was protecting an Arab doctor’s house from demolition;
“Video tape of the incident when Rachel was killed clearly shows she was not protecting a house. She plunked herself down in front of a D9 caterpillar tractor that was clearing the entrance to a weapons smuggling tunnel and the driver did not see her. The video can be seen at StoptheISM.com on the home page.
“There was no “doctor” - the ISM found a pharmacist named Sami Masry to claim Rachel was protecting his home. For this, Masry got himself a new home paid for by the Rachel Corrie Foundation in the US, to perpetuate the Big Lie.
“2) Rachel Corrie was a pacifist concerned with “human rights.”
“Rachel Corrie was a self-avowed anarchist (this according to her boyfriend). She hated not only Israel but the US. She wrote to her mother calling the terrorists, who blew up Israeli women and children, “martyrs” and considered them noble.
“Rachel took her anarchism seriously. Two weeks before she died, she was in one of those Arab weapons smuggling tunnels helping to bring out the dead body of a Hamas terrorist the IDF had killed in an earlier operation. In another instance, shortly before her death she walked out into a hot combat zone with Fellow ISM activist Joseph Carr under orders of a Hamas supervisor to retrieve another dead body of a terrorist.
“According to a phone interview I made with Carr before the last lawsuit in the possession of government lawyers, Rachel did this because she knew Arab snipers would shoot any IDF soldiers who came out from cover to arrest them. The fact that Rachel was trying to draw fire upon IDF soldiers made her an enemy combatant.
“3) Rachel Corrie was acting on her own to aid the Palestinians.
“The ISM on its website openly boasts they are Palestinian-led and have Arab plainclothes supervisors at all demonstrations against the IDF. As such, Rachel was following orders that day in Rafah to interfere with IDF soldiers. That makes her a part of the terrorist network.
“4) Rachel was the victim of a negligent IDF.
“4) Rachel was the victim of a negligent IDF.
“Rachel Corrie’s ISM group leader, a non-Arab, admitted to the press the day she was killed that she was in a spot where she shouldn’t have been. Bored about waiting for directions, she left the group and plunked herself in front of the active bulldozer that was clearing a weapons smuggling tunnel.
“Rachel knew that the driver would not emerge to move her because Arab snipers would shoot him if he did. This was a deliberate act to harm IDF soldiers and she no doubt got this idea from the earlier episode removing dead bodies in combat zones. There were no homes being demolished that day in Rafah as the video showed.
“The IDF Captain, in charge of the detail that included the D9 and two vehicles, in an interview immediately after her death said the ISM activists would stand in front of his vehicles and point to their own chests and yell at the soldiers “Shoot me! Shoot me!” The IDF showed remarkable restraint that day.
“For those who ask why the army didn’t send soldiers out of their vehicles to arrest the ISM activists, the fact that Arab snipers were using the ISM activists to draw them into sight for just such a reason shows why they didn’t do this. And it also points out how Corrie and her ISM buddies were part of a combat scenario against the IDF.
“5) The tractor backed up over Rachel after she was run over.
“5) The tractor backed up over Rachel after she was run over.
“This was another canard started by Joseph Carr who was deported by Israel before but sneaked back into the country under false identities, was identifying himself as Joseph Smith that day, started the Big Lie that she was backed over by the bulldozer’s driver even after she was struck. This lie appears frequently on anti-Israel blogs on the Internet.
“In a radio interview Carr claimed he was running alongside the bulldozer telling them to stop before hitting her when he was nowhere near the scene of the accident. Carr even created fake photos of the incident in the preceding moments and that he tricked Reuters into posting it worldwide. Reuters later had to post a retraction. These photos can be seen also at StoptheISM.com.
“Carr was drawing a salary at that time from Christian Peacemaker Teams, an ISM affiliate. Carr expressed in an interview that Corrie’s death was a price well paid as it would advance “the revolution,” a true anarchist program.
“These are just a few of the salient details about the Rachel Corrie canard that the mainstream media doesn’t tell you and that is repeated again and again.”
My point exactly. Rachel Corrie was just like the people at this meeting. She thought she was morally right and the Israelis were morally wrong and she was going to bring about their salvation. Just like one of the testifiers in the meeting who got up and said that BDS is not harming Israel but helping them. What kind of thinking is that? What they are doing is bringing about anti-Semitism as sure as a game of dominoes where when one falls down it causes all the rest in a row to fall as well. The gripes these groups reflect have no facts to back them up. These people jump to the wrong conclusions in the anti-Semitic zeal to fault Jews.
