Rachel Corrie and Daniel Pearl--a curious comparison

Wednesday, 16 March 2011

Rachel Corrie and Daniel Pearl--a curious comparison

Via Leftwing-Christian.net

By Richard Edmondson

How much is a human life worth? And does it matter whether the life in question is that of a Jew or non-Jew? While a number of Israeli rabbis clearly seem to place greater value upon Jewish life, would we expect American university presidents, news anchors, and ex-presidents of the United States to subscribe to similar views?

All these are listed as honorary board members of the Daniel Pearl Foundation—an organization founded in memory of the U.S. journalist who was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan in 2002. Why is that important? Perhaps it isn’t. After all, when people die, especially if their deaths occur under tragic circumstances, the natural tendency is to eulogize and honor their memories. So it was with Daniel Pearl—so it was with Rachel Corrie. But as we mark the eighth anniversary of Corrie’s death, we can see that while there were striking similarities in the deaths of these two individuals, one Jew the other Gentile, pronounced differences have overshadowed the manner in which their legacies and memories have been treated and regarded in the years since.

Corrie, a member of the International Solidarity Movement, and Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, died within 14 months of each other. Corrie lost her life while nonviolently defending the home of a Palestinian family from demolition on March 16, 2003; Pearl was killed February 1, 2002 while pursuing a story for his newspaper. Both deaths were horrifying. Pearl was beheaded by his abductors in Pakistan while Corrie was crushed beneath a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer operated by an Israeli soldier in Gaza. It would probably be accurate to say that both died at the hands of those who felt a strong, visceral aversion to what they perceived to be their victims’ political beliefs. Pearl’s abductors opposed U.S. invasions of Muslim countries and America’s support for Israel—and probably also were aware of the Wall Street Journal’s consistently pro-war editorial stance. The Israeli military command on the other hand, and probably even the soldier operating the bulldozer, would have been well aware of the ISM’s commitment to defending the rights of Palestinians.

While there can be no doubt Pearl was killed intentionally, Israel has always maintained that the killing of Corrie was an accident, that the operator of the bulldozer failed to see her, this despite the fact the young woman was wearing an orange safety vest and had been yelling through a bull horn previously. Despite Israel’s claims, four eyewitnesses who gave statements in the days and hours just after her life ended say Corrie was killed deliberately by a driver who could not possibly have missed seeing her. The four witnesses, whose statements can be found here, were Greg Schnabel and Richard Pursell of the UK, and Tom Dale and Joe Smith of the U.S. A fifth eyewitness, Alice Coy, a nurse from Britain, testified at a trial In Haifa District Court on March 15, 2010 that she too believed the bulldozer driver could see Corrie. Despite these statements from witnesses, confusion seems to prevail over exactly what crime was committed by the driver. Some people have called it “murder;” Hussein Abu Hussein, a lawyer for the Corrie family, uses the word “manslaughter.” In either event, the driver of the bulldozer was never criminally charged. The testimony by Coy in the Haifa court on March 15, 2010—one day shy of the seventh anniversary of Rachel’s death—was given in a civil suit that was initiated by the Corrie family and that took five years, from the time the suit was filed in 2005, to bring to trial.

By contrast, less than two months after Daniel Pearl was killed, Ahmed Omar Said Sheikh, accused of being the “mastermind” behind the journalist’s kidnapping, was formally charged with murder, along with three others. Maybe Pearl’s father, Judea Pearl, breathed a sigh of relief at the arrests. The elder Pearl had expressed concern that the Pearl family’s ties to Israel might “have an adverse effect on the investigation,” as Wikipedia put it. But apparently this was not the case. The trial was over fairly quickly, and on July 15, 2002—less than six months after the reporter was abducted—Sheikh was sentenced to death. That sentence has not yet been carried out. Former Pakistani President Pervez has stated that Sheikh was an agent of the British MI6 who at some point turned into a double agent, which apparently has complicated the case. Again, quoting from Wikipedia, “His (Sheikh’s) judicial appeal has not yet been heard. The delay has been ascribed to his purported links to MI6.”

While Shiekh has been fully identified, and his photo widely published over the Internet, the name of Rachel Corrie’s killer still to this day has not been released. Moreover, the state of Israel seems intent on keeping his identity concealed. While he was subpoenaed to testify in the 2010 civil trial, his testimony was given anonymously. In court proceedings the soldier was referred to only as “YB,” and at the state’s request he was allowed to give his testimony from behind a screen. The Corrie family were able to hear his words, but were never allowed to see his face.

Left: Ahmed Omar Said Sheikh; Right: screen behind which the
operator of the bulldozer testified

Apparently, however, his identity was/is known by some observers at the trial. On the blog of Aljazeera’s Sherine Tadros, we read the following, “I can’t tell you the driver’s name (there is a gag order), but I can say that he is a Russian immigrant to Israel that, ironically, shares the same birthday as Rachel.” Tadros additionally informs us that during testimony, the Russian-Israeli answered repeated questions with variations of the phrase “I don’t remember,” and even claimed he couldn’t recall the time of day the killing took place—a fact that seems to have been especially troubling to Corrie’s mother, Cindy Corrie:

“Hearing the man who killed my daughter, without a shred of remorse in his voice, saying he couldn’t remember when it happened.”

Tadros then adds: “As Cindy says, even if he did it by mistake, how could he not recall the time of day he killed a 23-year-old girl?”

Daniel Pearl’s captors recorded his beheading on video. The body, cut into ten pieces, was later recovered, on May 16, 2002, from a shallow grave in Gadap, on the northern outskirts of Karachi. According to The Independent, the head was found propped vertically upon the horizontally-laid torso. The Caterpillar D9 bulldozer, the machine that killed Corrie, is 13 feet tall, 26 feet wide, and weighs 49 tons, although when equipped with protective armor, as was the case with the model being used that day in Gaza, the weight increases to well over 60 tons. According to the witnesses, the bulldozer ran over Corrie a first time, then reversed course and, without raising the blade, backed over her a second time. The young woman was still alive at the time the dozer finally cleared her body, though she died soon after. According to witness Dale, “She was gasping and her face was covered in blood from a gash cutting her face from lip to cheek. She was showing signs of brain hemorrhaging.”

The video of Pearl’s beheading can still be viewed on the Internet; photos of Corrie taken just after her catastrophic trauma can also be viewed on the Internet.

While Sheikh was said to have carried out the kidnapping of Pearl, it is not completely clear who actually killed the journalist. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, currently in U.S. custody in Guantanamo, has confessed to the actual beheading, although Mohammad, who most likely was tortured, also reportedly confessed to a rather lengthy catalogue of other crimes and alleged plots. At any rate, the Pakistani police, at least if we go by Musharraf’s published memoirs, handled the case professionally in searching out the killers, recovering the body, and making arrests. (An excerpt of Musharraf’s memoirs, entitled In the Line of Fire, may be found here.) He writes:

On February 21, 2002, the horrifying videotape of Pearl’s murder was released. It didn’t show the faces of his murderers.

Then in May 2002 we arrested someone named Fazal Karim, a militant activist. When we interrogated him we discovered that he was involved in Pearl’s slaughter. He also told us that he knew where Pearl was buried.

He was asked how he knew. Chillingly, he said he knew because he had actually participated in the slaughter by holding one of Pearl’s legs. But he didn’t know the name of the person who had actually slit Pearl’s throat. All he could say was that this person was “Arab-looking.”

He led us to the small house in a neighborhood in Karachi where Daniel Pearl had been held captive. He then took us to a plot of land nearby and told us where he was buried. We exhumed the body and found it in ten badly decomposed pieces. Our doctors stitched the pieces back together as best they could.

The man who may have actually killed Pearl or at least participated in his butchery, we eventually discovered, was none other than Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, al-Qaeda’s No 3. When we later arrested and interrogated him, he admitted his participation.

Regardless which of the kidnappers may have actually killed Pearl, the police investigation of the murder seems overall to have been a rather thorough one. By contrast, the Israeli government obstructed a thorough investigation of Corrie’s death. According to The Independent, evidence suggests Israeli Major-General Doron Almog may have intervened to suppress a statement being given by the commander of the vehicle to military police the day after Corrie was killed. Each D9 bulldozer reportedly is staffed by two soldiers, a “commander” and an actual operator. The evidence of the commander’s statement being squelched is found in a handwritten affidavit submitted during the 2010 civil suit, The Independent reported:

The Israeli military has maintained that its troops were not to blame for the killing of Ms. Corrie and that the driver of the bulldozer had not seen her. It accused Ms. Corrie and the ISM of behavior that was “illegal, irresponsible and dangerous.” Three days after Ms. Corrie’s death, the U.S. state department announced that the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had promised the US President George Bush that the Israeli government would undertake a “thorough, credible and transparent investigation.”

But according to a military police investigator’s report, which has now emerged, the “commander” of the D-9 bulldozer was giving testimony when an army colonel dispatched by Major-General Almog interrupted proceedings and cut short his evidence. The military police investigator wrote: “At 18:12 reserve Colonel Baruch Kirhatu entered the room and informed the witness that he should not convey anything and that he should not write anything and this at the order of the general of the southern command.

Aljazeera’s Tadros also comments that “the court procedures and last minute changes by the Israeli state attorneys are simply embarrassing for a country that claims to be a democracy and practice the rule of law.” The irregularities to which she refers include “subpar translators, erratic trial dates and a judge that stops proceedings because he has made other appointments.” The Corries are suing Israel for damages in the amount of $1.

As mentioned above, Pearl’s body was mutilated, his killers inflicting upon the corpse a level of savagery not matched by the killers of Rachel Corrie. But at the same time, it would not be accurate to say that Corrie’s body was handled gently or respectfully. Rachel’s body eventually ended up in the hands of Dr. Yehuda Hiss, an Israeli forensic scientist with the country’s Abu Kabir institute, who even at that time had something of a notorious reputation. According to Max Blumenthal, a U.S. blogger who attended the civil trial in the Haifa District Court, Hiss “was implicated by a 2001 investigation by the Israel Health Ministry of stealing body parts ranging from legs to testicles to ovaries from bodies without permission from family members then selling them to research institutes.” We are also informed that both Israeli and Palestinian corpses were “plundered” by Hiss in such a manner, whereupon Blumenthal adds, “In an interview with researcher Nancy Schepper-Hughes, Hiss admitted that he harvested organs if he was confident relatives would not discover that they were missing. He added that he often used glue to close eyelids to hide missing corneas.” Schepper-Hughes’ own in-depth report on Hiss—entitled “Body Parts and Bio Piracy”—can be found here. The report includes an interview Schepper-Hughes conducted with Hiss in July of 2000 in which the forensic scientist openly discussed the “informal” procurement of organs and tissues from bodies brought to the Abu Kabir Institute for autopsy.

Upon learning that Hiss was to conduct the autopsy on their daughter, the Corries stipulated the procedure should be carried out only in the presence of a U.S. diplomatic official—a request that was agreed to but was not honored. Reports Blumenthal:

On March 14, during the first round of hearings in the Corries’ civil suit, Hiss admitted under oath that he had lied about the presence of an American official during the autopsy of Rachel Corrie. He also conceded to taking “samples” from Corrie’s body for “histological testing” without informing her family. Just which parts of Corrie’s body Hiss took remains unclear; despite Hiss’s claim that he “buried” the samples, her family has not confirmed the whereabouts of her missing body parts.

“It’s so hard to know that Rachel’s body wasn’t respected,” Rachel’s sister, Sarah, told me. “Doctor Hiss and the Israeli government knew what our family’s wishes were. The fact that our wishes were disregarded and a judge hasn’t done anything is absolutely horrifying.”

Both Pearl and Corrie were talented writers. Following his death in 2002, fifty of Pearl’s newspaper articles were collected and published in book form as At Home in the World: Collected Writings from the Wall Street Journal. A small sampling of some of the stories can be accessed here. “At Home in the World celebrates Mr. Pearl’s life through 50 of his best Journal articles,” said the Wall Street Journal in a review of the work. Daniel had “an eye for quirky stories,” said the reviewer, but he also was “a dogged reporter who never lost sight of the humanity behind the news.” It seems to be an altogether fair and accurate assessment. The “quirkiness” the reviewer mentions is captured especially well in a 1997 feature on a Persian rug maker in Iran, who, with the help of 84 female assistants, was at work on the world’s largest hand woven carpet. And we can clearly see Pearl’s humanity in a piece he wrote on ethnic cleansing—in Croatia. In that story he quotes an elderly Serb man who in 1995 was forced to leave his home and flee, along with some 350,000 other Serbs, into nearby Bosnia Herzegovina. “I have no country except this one, and it doesn’t want me,” the forlorn man told Pearl. Daniel wrote the article in April of 1999—just as the U.S. was bombing Yugoslavia. It was a time few American journalists were willing to depict Serbs as human beings. The elderly Serb, says Pearl in a story displaying perception as well as pathos, has one “seemingly modest ambition: to die in his own house.”

Passion, perception, and pathos are also very much embodied in Corrie’s work. Following her death in 2003, her journals and emails from Palestine began receiving worldwide attention. These writings were incorporated into a 2005 play, entitled My Name is Rachel Corrie, and finally into a book, Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie, published in 2008. In a moving series of emails sent from Gaza in February of 2003, Corrie provided a graphic description of daily life in the city of Rafah, where tanks, bulldozers, and guard towers are an ever present reality. The emails describe people coping with the destruction of their homes, water wells, greenhouses and orchards, with Corrie commenting at one point, in a message sent to her mother on February 27, just seventeen days before her death, that she has had “bad nightmares about tanks and bulldozers outside our house and you and me inside.” Later in the same email she writes:

Anyway, I’m rambling. Just want to write to my Mom and tell her that I’m witnessing this chronic, insidious genocide and I’m really scared, and questioning my fundamental belief in the goodness of human nature. This has to stop. I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop. I don’t think it’s an extremist thing to do anymore. I still really want to dance around to Pat Benatar and have boyfriends and make comics for my coworkers. But I also want this to stop. Disbelief and horror is what I feel. Disappointment. I am disappointed that this is the base reality of our world and that we, in fact, participate in it. This is not at all what I asked for when I came into this world. This is not at all what the people here asked for when they came into this world.

Stark as the reality is, the emails are not without a burlesque sort of humor, though it is a humor whose beauty, like that of a flower, is fleeting, and that trails off into a heavy dose of irony:

The children also love to get me to practice my limited Arabic by asking me, “Kaif Sharon?” “Kaif Bush?” and they laugh when I say, “Bush Majnoon”, “Sharon Majnoon” back in my limited Arabic. (How is Sharon? How is Bush? Bush is crazy. Sharon is crazy.) Of course this isn’t quite what I believe, and some of the adults who have the English correct me: “Bush mish Majnoon”…Bush is a businessman. Today I tried to learn to say, “Bush is a tool,” but I don’t think it translated quite right. But anyway, there are eight-year-olds here much more aware of the workings of the global power structure than I was just a few years ago.

Left: Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at the Cannes Film Festival premiere of "A Mighty Heart"
Right: "My Name is Rachel Corrie" plays at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village

The story of Pearl’s kidnapping and murder was told in the film “A Mighty Heart,” released in summer of 2007 and based upon the memoir of the same name by Pearl’s widow, Mariane. The film was not a big box office success, but it did play in movie theaters across the country, and reviewers mostly gave it a thumbs up. The part of Mariane was played by actress Angelina Jolie.

Corrie’s story, by contrast, was never turned into a Hollywood movie, but as mentioned above, a live theatrical production based upon her writings got under way in 2005. The play opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April of that year and became a hit, playing to sellout crowds and being brought back for an encore engagement in October. It eventually won several awards including the London Theatregoers’ Choice Award for Best Play. All in all quite a triumph, but in spring of ‘06, just before it was set to open in New York, the production was effectively cancelled by the New York Theater Workshop. The reason given by James C. Nicola, the workshop’s artistic director, was that objections had been voiced by Jewish religious and community leaders who had been “polled” on the matter, reported the New York Times:

“The uniform answer we got was that the fantasy that we could present the work of this writer simply as a work of art without appearing to take a position was just that, a fantasy,” he (Nicola) said.

In particular, the recent electoral upset by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, and the sickness of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, had made “this community very defensive and very edgy,” Mr. Nicola said, “and that seemed reasonable to me.”

The cancellation was called “an act of catastrophic cowardice” by actress Vanessa Redgrave, while Alan Rickman, director of the play, denounced it as censorship. (Click here for a Democracy Now program featuring Nicola and another workshop official, both of whom come across as rather craven.)

Despite the “very defensive and very edgy” Jewish population of New York, the play finally did open there—in October of 2006 at the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village—and it has since been performed throughout much of the world. Actresses who have played the part of Rachel Corrie include Megan Dodds, Bree Elrod, Kerry Bishe, and Marya Sea Kaminski.

Left: Rachel Corrie faces down an Israeli bulldozer;
Right: James C. Nicola, of the New York Theater
Workshop. "An act of catastrophic cowardice."

A film about Corrie’s life has also been done—not by Hollywood, but by an Israeli filmmaker, Simone Bitton. The film came out in 2009 to mixed reviews (see here and here for example), although it does make one very important point about the perceived value of human life—in this case not Jew versus non-Jew, but American as opposed to Palestinian. As one writer put it:

In a self-reflective moment the film reveals that about an hour after Rachel was crushed to death, Salim Najar, a Palestinian street cleaner, was killed by an Israeli sniper in Rafah. The incident is important because it emphasizes that Palestinian blood is cheap—no media outlet bothered to cover the killing, and, as Bitton herself notes, no one will likely be making a movie about Najar.

It is a valuable criticism and one which applies as equally to the Corrie killing as to the Pearl. Had Pearl been Pakistani there would have been no movie made and probably only passing mention in the Western media—if at all.

In May of 2010, President Obama signed into law the Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act as Pearl’s eight-year-old son Adam looked on. No laws have been passed or signed in Rachel’s honor, however, a ship was named after her—the MV Rachel Corrie. The Israeli military seized the vessel on June 5, 2010 in international waters as it was attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to Gaza. On board at the time was Irish human rights activist Mairead Maguire.

Top: President Obama signs into law the Daniel
Pearl Freedom of the Press Act as Pearl's 8-year-
old son Adam looks on; Bottom: passengers aboard
the MV Rachel Corrie

In the years since her death, there have repeated attempts to smear and besmirch Rachel Corrie’s memory. Some Israel supporters have called her “clueless” and a “terrorist sympathizer,” while others have bandied about the phrase “bulldozed by naiveté.” A headline above a story in the ostensibly “alternative” Mother Jones describes her as “martyr, idiot, dedicated, deluded,” but perhaps one of the most repugnant attacks can be found on a website here, where she is referred to as “Saint Pancake” (as in flattened like one). The article is entitled “Rachel Corrie keeps the laughs coming” and is accompanied by a Photoshopped picture of the young martyr sitting before a plate of pancakes with a spatula in one hand. I am aware of no such efforts ever made to denigrate the memory or name of Daniel Pearl.

The families of both Corrie and Pearl have set up nonprofit foundations in their honor. The Daniel Pearl Foundation can be found here. The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice is here. Among the members of the honorary board of directors listed on the Pearl Foundation website are former president Bill Clinton, broadcast journalists Ted Koppel and Christiane Amanpour, Queen Noor of Jordan, author and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, violinist Itzhak Perlman, and Stanford University President John Hennessy. No such famous personages can be found on the board of the Rachel Corrie Foundation. The most recognizable names are Craig and Cindy Corrie, Rachel’s parents, who became famous after their daughter’s death.

At this point the question arises as to which legacy, Rachel Corrie’s or Daniel Pearl’s, will be the most lasting. Who will be remembered a hundred or a thousand years from now? Will it be Pearl? Will it be Corrie? Will it be both? Or neither? These are difficult questions to answer, and a number of factors would need to be calculated into the equation. Who died in greater service to humanity? And which gave of their life more selflessly? Despite all the rich and famous board members on the Pearl Foundation, and despite the non-concomitant smear attacks on Rachel (or, more precisely, maybe, even, because of them), the edge here would seem to go to Corrie. Other factors would come into play as well, such as how today’s events will ultimately be treated by history, as well as what seems at this point to be Israel’s increasing de-legitimization in the eyes of the world. But once again, when these determinants are figured in—and I’m going out on a limb here, I realize—the advantage would seem to go to Corrie.

And so on this eighth anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s death, I cannot help thinking of lines once written by the poet Emily Dickinson:

Because I could not stop for Death—

He kindly stopped for me—

The Carriage held but just ourselves

And immortality.