A dreadful monster assaults the city, kills its brave
defenders, and advances to devour the citizens. At the last moment, a
young maiden demurely walks forward to meet the monster. Her very sight,
the sight of feminine innocence, vulnerability, spirituality, certainty of
the right cause, stops the ogre in its tracks. The beast suffers her
to tie her belt to his mighty neck and walks away, tamed. It is the story
of St Genevieve and of other beautiful and virtuous saints; a part and
parcel of human heritage, and the subject of many gorgeous tapestries and
paintings.
Courageous and noble maidens are still with us. They
stopped the US Army trains with soldiers during Vietnam War, and they
stopped Russian tanks in Prague 1968 and in Moscow 1991. Drivers of
French, Russian, American and German tanks and trains knew: even a monster
stops when a girl placidly places herself on his way. It is a biological
law that we all are subject to.
Rachel Corrie was murdered by a monster from another tale.
This young American girl, an ISM activist, tried to stop with her fragile
body a Zionist bulldozer from ruining Palestinian homes. She could not
imagine that the driver will look at her and calmly ride his ten-ton steel
machine over her body, and back. Nothing in her life prepared her to the
encounter with a monster born and bred in the Zionist labs, a monster that
is totally alien and hostile to humans. She wrote to her parents: ‘no
amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing and word
of mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here. You
just can't imagine it unless you see it, tank-shell holes in the walls of
their homes and the towers of an occupying army surveying the [Palestinian
children] constantly from the near horizons’.
Though she saw dead bodies of Palestinian children
with their heads split by the Jewish sharp-shooters, she still had some
illusions of ‘the difficulties the Israeli Army would face if they shot an
unarmed US citizen’. She was mistaken. Her country’s President is
about to send the US Army to destroy Iraq and turn the killers of Rachel
into the undisputed supreme power of the Middle East. If Bush would be
guided by America’s interests, he would demand extradition of Rachel’s
killer. But the driver is not exclusion. The people behind the
bullet-proof windshields of Caterpillars are the final product of Zionism.
At the beginning of Zionist movement, its eugenic task was expressed in a
poem : ‘Mi dam umi eza Nakim lanu geza’ - ‘out of blood and sweat we shall
breed a new victorious and cruel race’, sang the Zionists. With murder of
Rachel Corrie the experiment came to its fruition. The ‘cruel race’ is not
a dream anymore, it is a new geopolitical reality. A few months ago, a
Jewish bulldozer driver shared with the world his experiences [click here]
of razing Jenin:
"I had no mercy for anybody. I would erase anyone with
the D-9, and I have demolished plenty. I wanted to destroy everything. I
begged the officers, over the radio, to let me knock it all down; from top
to bottom. To level everything. When I was told to bring down a house, I
took the opportunity to bring down some more houses. For three days, I
just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. I wanted to get to the other
houses. To get as many as possible. I didn't see, with my own eyes, people
dying under the blade of the D-9. But if there were any, I wouldn't care
at all. If you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people. If I am
sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down. I had lots
of satisfaction in Jenin, lots of satisfaction. No one expressed any
reservations against doing it. Who would dare speak? If anyone would as
much as open his mouth, I would have buried him under the D-9".
Rachel’s dreadful death should open America’s eyes to the
real danger to the world that grew in the Middle East. Her killers
possess nuclear weapons, not only bulldozers. If Bush is so keen on a
Middle East intervention and on removal of WMD, his troops could land
here, on the shores of ar-Rafah, where is a real threat to the world’s
peace, and forcibly remove all the weapons of mass destruction.
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