on 4/14/06 6:11 PM, pmmcooke at pmmcooke@xxxxxxxxx wrote: The Israelis have tried very hard not to harm > innocent people but that's difficult to do when grown men hide among > women and children. Remember Rachel Corrie? She tried to fight a bull dozer. The Lobby and the Bulldozer: Mearsheimer, Walt and Corrie By Norman Solomon t r u t h o u t | Perspective Thursday 13 April 2006 . . . For several decades, to the present moment, Israel's treatment of Palestinian people has amounted to methodical and despicable violations of human rights. Yet criticism of those policies from anyone (including American Jews such as myself) routinely results in accusations of anti-Jewish bigotry. . . . The Financial Times editorial noted: "Reflexes that ordinarily spring automatically to the defense of open debate and free enquiry shut down - at least among much of America's political elite - once the subject turns to Israel, and above all the pro-Israel lobby's role in shaping US foreign policy." But without open debate, no significant change in those policies can happen. That inertia - stultifying the blood of the body politic by constricting the flow of information and ideas - is antithetical to the kind of democratic discourse that we deserve. And few other American activists have been willing to expose themselves to the kind of risks that Rachel Corrie took when she sat between a Palestinian home and a Caterpillar bulldozer in Gaza three years ago. The bulldozer, driven by an Israeli army soldier on assignment to demolish the home, rolled over Corrie, who was 23 years old. She had taken a nonviolent position for human rights; she lost her life as a result. But she was rarely praised in the same US media outlets that had gone into raptures over the image of a solitary unarmed man standing in front of Chinese tanks at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In sharp contrast to the high-tech killers who run the Israeli military apparatus and the low-tech killers who engage in suicide bombings, Rachel Corrie put her beliefs into practice with militant nonviolence instead of carnage. She exemplified the best of the human spirit in action; she was killed with an American-brand bulldozer in the service of a US-backed government. As her parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, said in a statement on her birthday a few weeks after she died: "Rachel wanted to bring attention to the plight of the Palestinian people in the Occupied Territories, a people she felt were largely invisible to most Americans." In the United States, the non-stop pro-Israel media siege aims to keep them scarcely visible. New Pacifica Working Group http://www.egroups.com/group/NewPacifica 'Save Our Stations!' Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NewPacifica/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: NewPacifica-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/