David Mazel
English Department
Here’s why everyone should go this weekend to see the Adams State College Theatre’s production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Not just because it’s directed by Paul Newman and stars Jenna Neilsen, which pretty much guarantees it will be awesome, but also because the Palestinian cause, which was Rachel Corrie’s cause, has been all over the news of late — ever since Mahmoud Abbas applied to the United Nations for the formal establishment of the State of Palestine.
In the ensuing contest to capitalize on this turn of events, Herman Cain appears to have taken the cake, telling a right-wing Israeli newspaper, “I think that the so-called Palestinian people have this urge for unilateral recognition because they see this president as weak.”
Any American politician can deny the legitimacy of Palestinian aspirations to statehood — it’s pretty much mandatory in both parties — but to also attribute those aspirations to the fecklessness of Barack Obama and deny the very existence of the Palestinian people is a sort of rhetorical trifecta that one really has to admire.
And the tensions are rising. About the same time that Cain was so adroitly fellating the Israel lobby and hovering up votes among the churchified, one Julio Pino, a history professor at Kent State University, stood up during a speech by a former Israeli diplomat and shouted, “Death to Israel.”
Asked about the incident later, Pino said, “What I spoke was for the sake of the children of Palestine, and no other reason. The only politics I have are ‘There is no God but God, and Mohammed is His Messenger.’”
I don’t really want to make this about religion, but I do think we’d all be better off if people like Pino were a little less into the Koran and people like Herman Cain a little less into the Book of Genesis. I’m sorry, but there just aren’t 72 virgins waiting for anyone in heaven, and, sorry again, but God did not give Israel to the Jews.
To live in the modern world and believe that kind of stuff is not only dangerous, it’s dumb. To read mythical works as if they were history books is a kind of illiteracy that ought to be cured, not nourished on Wednesday nights at Bible “study.”
But I digress. Back to Rachel Corrie.
Corrie was a student at Evergreen State College who, being cursed with a conscience, felt more keenly than most of us the injustice of the ongoing Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. In January 2003 she left school and headed to Israel to see what she could do about it, and a few months later found herself staring down a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer of the sort used by the Israeli Defense Forces to tear down Palestinian homes in Gaza.
It was not much of a showdown. The D9 moved forward, Corrie moved backward, and she was crushed to death.
Details of the incident are disputed. The driver says he didn’t see her. Eyewitnesses say otherwise. An official Israeli report says Corrie shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I say Israel shouldn’t have been there in the first place.
Corrie went on to become a martyr to the Palestinian cause.
Not to everyone, of course, and certainly not to the likes of Herman Cain. Sometime after she was crushed to death, a conservative wag nicknamed her St. Pancake.
As the left sanctified her and the right vilified her, Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner wrote a play about her, and you can watch it this Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the Xperimental Theatre. Tickets are free for students. You can reserve them by calling 587-8499.
Go and see and judge for yourself.
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