A nasty, silly little girl. Good riddance.

Let's reserve the term "good riddance" for the occasions when people who actually deserve to die meet their maker, shall we? Nobody deserves to die merely because they're stupid and annoying.

Not good riddance, but certainly a Darwin Award.
"Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal, and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
-Robert Heinlein

Of course, what Heinlein fails to note is that we are all sentenced to die eventually. ;)

I urge you to go to Gaza and see with your own eyes the real life of Palestinian people. I urge you to read Rachel's mails and try to understand the reason why she was so "stupid" to "waste" her own life on such a distant cause. I think you'd better be just a little more respectful for someone who died while you're writing comments from your cosy house surrounded by your nice family. Best regards.

No Cecilia, a trip to Gaza would not change my mind. For most people the trip would only open their eyes as we have heard about human shields in Iraq having their eye's opened to Saddam's evil and madness.

I don't need to understand why hate-activist Rachel Corrie was stupid. I only need to understand that she was stupid to run half way around the world and jump around on the front of a bulldozer to commit suicide.

It you want me to remove the label "hate-activist" from hate-activist Rachel, then show me the documentation that she also protested against the violence of Hamas and other violent palestinian organizations, and that she protested against their practice of human suicide bombers against civilians. Rachel and ISM only want "peace" through palestinian victory and the destruction of Israel. This makes her and many others hate-activists not peace activists.

Darwin awards, here we come.

Rodney Dill

Speak for yourself Jerry, I plan to live forever. So far, so good. Heh.

Anyway, as to the lives of the Palestinians, it seems to me that they chose the path of their life. They chose it by choosing a constitution to guide them that calls for the destruction of the Jewish population of Israel, and follow that path by continuously sending their homocide bombers into crowded public areas. When peace threatened their hateful cause, they sent wave after wave of not-so-smart bombs to derail it, resulting in an Israel unwilling to show restraint for fear of being annihilated. They do not strike at Israels government, or its military, they strike at the innocent civilians because that is who they hate. The Palestinians have made common cause with the extinct Third Reich, and are reaping what they have sown.
Rachel Corrie walked with the wrong crowd, and they cheerfully used her and watched her die. She died a stupid death for Palestinian propaganda.

There is a third picture of Rachel Corrie I'll always remember. It is just her head, with a scarf pulled tightly around both sides of her face. In that picture she looks remarkably like Kenny from the cartoon "South Park". Kenny is the little innocent who has no real personality. He gets killed at the end of every episode. It's the reason he is there.

Let me be mildly pedantic and point out that the Paul Simon song was a reworking of a poem of the same name by Edwin Arlington Robinson.

Very true, Yehudit. I could have sworn I said something like that to Dean when I sent the lyrics to him.

For me, that's part of the humor; Simon subtitled his song (With apologies to Edward A. Robinson), and subtitled mine (With apologies to Paul Simon). Ok, so it's a geeky joke.

By coincidence I also performed in a local theatre group (a long time ago) in a play titled Who Killed Richard Cory?, based on the original Robinson poem.

The International Solidarity Movement supports murdering terrorists and Rachel Corrie belonged to the anti-American, anti-Israel, anti-democracy, and lets face it...anti-Semitic ISM. The article I'm posting below sums it all up very well:
Terrorist Martyr, American Style
By Myles Kantor
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 2, 2003

The photograph is pitiful.

She’s dying in the Gaza Strip on a tract of earth. Her legs look like twigs. Blood streams from her nose.

"My back is broken," she says.

Rachel Corrie doesn’t survive. Why did her life end like this?

Corrie was a 23-year-old senior at Evergreen State College in her hometown of Olympia, Washington. To gain a sense of Evergreen’s ideological orientation, its main area is called Red Square and cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal has been a commencement speaker. (A "Brownshirt Square" would be inconceivable on a campus, but it’s ok to name a quad after another genocidal dogma.)

Corrie went to the Gaza Strip in 2003 as part of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Founded in 2001, ISM refers to a "right" of Palestinian "armed struggle" and seeks "to establish divestment campaigns in the US and Europe to put economic pressure on Israel the same way the international community put pressure [on] South Africa during the apartheid regimes."

ISM’s online photo album includes a member shaking hands with Yasser Arafat—ISM member Adam Shapiro had breakfast with Arafat last year—and members leading protests in the Middle East with signs such as "America, Stop Supporting Apartheid" and "Ethnic Cleansing in Progress." Another photograph features graffiti by the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Front.

ISM members entered the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem last April to shield terrorists including members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade. Israel deported ISM member Susan Barclay this year after she worked with Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the West Bank.

Corrie did her part to incite anti-Americanism in the Gaza Strip, 70 percent of whose residents support suicide bombings according to a recent poll by the Gaza-based Palestinian Society for Culture, Science and Development. At a February 15 rally with schoolchildren, Rachel Corrie burned a paper version of the American flag.

Referring in February to "fighters" who "killed two of the illegal occupying force," Corrie wrote that "more Martyrs are ready to defend the honor of Palestine."

Corrie operated in the town of Rafah on the Egyptian border. Rafah contains what the Israel Defense Forces calls "an underground city of weaponry" through residential tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt for terrorists.

The IDF notes, "The smuggling tunnels are often elaborate, and may contain wood-paneling, electrical infrastructure, communications equipment, and elevators. Small tunneling machines, imported with the full knowledge of the Palestinian Authority, are used to dig these subterranean passages."

The IDF demolishes such houses complicit in terrorism. Middle Eastern scholar Mitchell Bard explains this collective punishment as follows: "By demolishing homes, the objective is…to demonstrate that terrorists bring destruction not only to their victims, but to their own families and communities. The hope is that before engaging in terrorism, a Palestinian might think twice about the consequences."

On March 16, the IDF demolished some homes in Rafah as a preventive measure against weapons smuggling. Corrie confronted a bulldozer that afternoon with a bullhorn and later knelt in front of it on a mound of earth. She lost balance as it proceeded and was crushed.

Arafat’s Fatah movement organized a wake for Corrie attended by members of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

This is the story of one American in the Middle East. Marla Bennett’s is another.

Bennett grew up in San Diego and first visited Israel at 16. She reflected at the time, "Have you ever been somewhere with others, just thinking ‘This is so right?’"

Bennett graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in May 2000 and returned to Israel in the fall to attend the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and graduate school at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her arrival coincided with the beginning of the current intifada against Israel.

She wrote in May 2002, "I am extremely cautious about where I go and when; I avoid crowded areas and alter my routine when I feel at all threatened." Despite this everyday peril, Bennett also wrote that "Life here is magical" and "There is no other place in the world where I would rather be right now."

On Wednesday, July 31, Bennett was at Hebrew University for a final exam. She planned to return to San Diego on Friday for a friend’s wedding.

Shortly after 1:30 that afternoon, a member of Hamas detonated a bomb in Hebrew University’s cafeteria that murdered nine and injured 85. Five Americans were among the dead, and Marla Bennett was one of them.

She was 24, and she never set America’s flag on fire.

one less hate activist in the world. hate is not a peace loving value, neither is burning the american flag in israel- look on the map!! there is no such country as palestine, its ISRAEL!
God Bless,
Jennifer

It not about peace, a country, or a religion. It has to do with living to see the next morning. It is about survival. When am I going to see my family next. Am I going to live in grief or happiness? Who said that your loved ones will be taken away from you and you can't do anything about it? The pain, sorrow, and grief that you're left with is too strong and overwhelming. You're left with seeking justice for what has been done. The baby you carried in your womb for 9 months, the one you couldn't wait to hold close to your loving heart has now been torn away from your heart, sacrificed for other people's greediness. The mother who cared for you and raised you, and nurtured you to life has now been burried under your roof. Where is the justice for that? The father who worked so hard to keep a roof over your head and food on your table, has now been tortured and killed in front of his whole family. All this just for gaining more land? Now you're telling me "Why do people act the way they do?" What Hitler has done to the Jews is a third of what the Jews are doing to the Palestinians. Have they no shame? Have they no God, no soul? If your sister, mother, daughter, or wife were being raped in front of your eyes, what would you do?
You say look at the map, I say look at history. Be educated before you speak. Palestine was always there. Isreal wants to take it over at any expense. The reason behind Israel's actions is greed, not justice. The fraction of suicide bombings does not compare to the terror Israel has inflicted on the people of Palestine. Just as our government represents the American people, so does the Israeli govt represent Israel. Jews are not overturning their govt, they are not protesting against their actions. On the contrary, they stand together. When we went into Iraq, we knew civilians may need to be sacraficed, but we went to war anyways. Palestinians are attempting to protect themselves and their families with the only things they have.

There is a distinct lack of knowledge of political history on this site--which implies that most of the contributors are American, because world history is just not taught in the US education system, nor is it part of the info-tainment that passes for "news" in the USA.

I'm British and my country chose to divide up Palestine after the war to appease the brutalized jews, to give to them some sense of a homeland, which had hitherto not existed for centuries.

The victims in this abitrary division were the Palestinians. Let us not forget. What if the US were to be divided up by a dominant power, and shared with, say the Mexicans? Do not think for a minute that most people wouldn't spend every second plotting their removal and the restoration of their homeland to the American people. What the USA lacks is any kind of true empathy. We are told that the highly militarized Israel is a justified country at war, and that Arabs and Palestinians are terrorists. A truly impartial observer would see that Israel uses might to serve its aims with a frequent lack of consience--hence the continuation of conscienscious objectors from the Israeli military.

A deep vein of advanced-era capitalism governs the current flow of news and information. The "Project for a New American Century" (search on google) is a scheme asserted by Cheney et al in 1998 - it asserts the need for AMERICAN DOMINATION in the middle east. Is this imperialism or how would you define it? Hence our support for Israel, a pact between nations who invent their own laws of dominance and violent aggression to govern a part of the world that does not belong to them.

The spontaneous, possibly ill-judged gesture by Rachel Corrie must at least be seen in terms of her compassion for suffering of the Palestinians under an ever-expanding Israel, pushing them back from more and more of the land they once had.

True compassion is a gift that America has never learned. Not the power of giving money to manipulate foreign governments, but the gift of true understanding. We might consider making policy from there, were we wise enough, or informed enough. But the news corporation ensure that we never will be.

Of course Israel deserves security, so does Palestine. Who will play God and how? Or do we have to be humble and gather everyone around the table, and admit that all are frightened, and none have received justice.

Wisdom is the last of the riches to be exploited in this New American Century. But our backlash from the middle east has not even begun. We have surely unleashed the devil in the hearts of men whose lives we have reduced to meaninglessness. Much as Hitler and all previous despots did in their turn. Power is blind, it only serves itself.

Iraq is not liberted, having been sucked dry by the lions it has now been raped by the jackals. Children are dead. HOw much American money will it take to rebuild Iraq? Will the US keep giving like it failed to do already in Afghanistan?

America, newfound land, you are not a good world leader.

Miss Corrie had the courage to risk her life for what she believed in. That, in itself, deserves our respect. It's awfully easy to sit here and post clever messages - but who among us has Rachel's conviction?

Chris Walker:

So people who are prepared to die for their beliefs automatically deserve respect?

I'm sure, then, that the foot-soldiers of every regime, Waffen SS sturmtruppen, NKVD guards, Red Guards, Khmer Rouge fighters, al-Qaeda and Palestinian suicide-bombers, LTTE suicide-bombers, all deserve respect, eh?

RACHEL CORRIE: A SAD “SOLIDARITY” STORY!!!

By Gary Fitleberg

According to the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and falsely perpetuated by the vast majority of the media, allegedly "Rachel Corrie was murdered by Israel while she was peacefully protesting against the illegal demolition of a Palestinian home."

American Rachel Corrie was killed in the Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003, when she entered an area where Israeli forces were carrying out a military operation. The incident tragically and unfortunately occurred while IDF forces were removing shrubbery along the security road near the border between Israel and Egypt at Rafah to uncover explosive devices, and destroying tunnels used by Palestinian terrorists to illegally smuggle weapons from Egypt to Gaza.

Corrie was not demonstrating for peace or trying to shield innocent civilians, she was interfering with a military operation to legally demolish an empty house used to conceal one of these tunnels.

A misleading photo published by the Associated Press gave the impression that Corrie was standing in front of the bulldozer and shouting at the driver with a megaphone, trying to prevent the driver from tearing down a building in the refugee camp. This photo, which was taken by a member of Corrie’s organization, was not shot at the time of her death, however, but hours earlier. The photographer said that Corrie was actually sitting and waving her arms when she was struck (Christian Science Monitor, April 02, 2003).

Israel’s Judge Advocate’s Office investigated the incident and concluded that the driver of the bulldozer never saw or heard Corrie because she was standing behind debris that obstructed the view of the driver whose field of view was limited by the small armored windows of his cab. An autopsy found that the cause of Corrie’s death was falling debris (Jerusalem Post, June 26, 2003).

The State Department warned Americans not to travel to Gaza, and Israel made clear that civilians who enter areas where troops are engaged in counter-terror operations put themselves unnecessarily at risk. This was not the first time protestors have tried to obstruct Israeli operations, and the IDF has made every effort to avoid harming them. This case received worldwide publicity in large measure because it was the first such incident where a protestor was killed. In fact, the army had told Corrie and other demonstrators from the anti-Israel International Solidarity Movement (ISM) to move out of the way. "It’s possible they [the protesters] were not as disciplined as we would have liked," admitted Thom Saffold, a founder and organizer of ISM (Washington Post, March 17, 2003).

The death of an innocent civilian is always tragic, and the best way to avoid such tragedies in the future is, first and foremost, by the Palestinian Authority putting an end to violence, and stopping the smuggling operations that have brought huge quantities of illegal weapons into the Gaza Strip. Activists interested in peace should be protesting the Palestinian actions. Activists also have every right to express their views about Israel’s policies, but they should take care to avoid the appearance of siding with the terrorists or placing themselves in positions where they could be inadvertently caught in the crossfire of a counter-terror operation or otherwise endangered by entering an area where military operations are being conducted.

Gary Fitleberg is a Political Analyst specializing in International Relations with emphasis on Middle East affairs.

you people are sick and pathetic. This young woman died heroically trying to help a just cause. face it - israeli soldiers are animals, and the vast, vast majority of the people they have killed have been civilians.

you people are sick to be speaking about rachel like this. i would advise that you learn how to think critically. go spend a week in the occupied terrotories and hen ask yourself if their struggle is just or not.

rachel corrie - the beautiful face of america.

Rachel Corrie's tragic death drives home a two-edged message; A.) that the Israeli occupation of the WEST BANK, GAZA STRIP, and EAST JERUSALEM must be ended IMMEDIATELY (time IS running short) (B.) The wisdom of sending ordinary, run-of-the-mill people who are not experienced, into the heart of a war zone to act as human shields is questionable at best.

If Rachel was "stupid" then so too are all those who stand up to injustice and tyranny.The world would be a much better place if there were not so many "smart" indeed "BRILLIANT" people around.