In honor of the fourth anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s descent to Allah, I’m pasting the highlights of my Corrie article from June:

After the New York Theater Workshop had the good taste to back away from staging “My Name is Rachel Corrie” a few months ago, the British production has moved to New York’s Minetta Lane Theater for a one-month run starting October 15th.

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According to Corrie’s aunt Cheryl Broderson, the family is “absolutely ecstatic” that the play will be seen in New York. As am I, since I adore English comedy. I mean, let’s be honest: I’ve seen how slowly a bulldozer moves. There’s a lot of construction in my neighborhood, and my dog and I had to get out of the way of one that was heading toward us. We managed to do so. Sixteen times. In other words, in order to end up under a bulldozer, you would have to really want to be under a bulldozer. It would have to be your life’s ambition to be under a bulldozer. And if that’s your life’s goal, there’s nothing anyone can do to stop you. So at least Corrie died doing what she loved: being under bulldozers. This play should be better than “The Madness of King George.” (It’s not for nothing that the third anniversary of Corrie’s death was commemorated with a salute to her family and friends by the Gaza Community Mental Health Program.)

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On a side note, the weapons-smuggling tunnels beg a question: One of the Palestinians’ grievances against the Israelis is that the IDF security mechanism often interferes with much needed medical supplies or medical care getting to and from the territories. But the Palestinians don’t seem to have any trouble getting weapons through. Couldn’t they just use their terror tunnels for the medical supplies? What’s the problem? …these third-worlders probably can’t get over their PR cunning — which has Americans throwing themselves under bulldozers for them. Not only do they get their own young people to sacrifice their lives for jihad, they’ve gotten ours to as well.

Additionally, this time last year, the following invitation appeared on this site, which is apparently undergoing renovations at the moment and is therefore inaccessible:

Rachel Corrie Pancake Breakfast The Public is invited to a memorial pancake breakfast at Denny’s Restaurant on Douglas Street near Finlayson, 10 am, Sunday March 12, 2006 to celebrate the life and untimely death of Rachel Corrie, Peace Activist with the International Solidarity Movement. There will be a reading of selections from Ms. Corrie’s letters and diary, followed by a ceremony at Topaz Park, where a stone cairn will be erected in her honour. Attendees are encouraged to wear their keffiahs, and to dress in black. No weapons, drugs, or alcohol please.

Several comment posters asked whether this was a joke — that a “pancake” breakfast was being held in honor of a girl crushed by a bulldozer. The original poster insisted it was no joke, but a solemn occasion indeed. I’m just going to excerpt my favorite parts from the comments posted, for anyone who missed it last year:

By a poster called “Catepillar (sic) Pancake”:

The Palestinians are a people with far less claim to historical legitimacy than the Klingons. Idiots like Rachel Corrie are like geeks who go to summer camp to learn to speak Klingon, but wind up playing with live phaser guns. Note the Klingons were created by TV scriptwriters 1966-67 as the alien nemesis to the Starship Enterprise, a full TV season before scriptwriters at the Kremlin invented the equally fictitious “Palestinians” right after the 1967 Israeli victory.

By “Some Guy”:

My sympathy for Rachel Corrie is somewhat less than nil, and my sympathy to the parents who raised her to fight against the only democracy in the Middle East is even less than that.

By “ForNow”:

Corrie’s parents are the ones most responsible for her death and they KNOW it. They are recklessly self-righteous leftists who packed her head with damned fool ideas, and sent her to the college where she was pretty much majoring in leftist activism, till she ended up putting herself in the path of Israeli efforts against a stinking terrorist thug organization. Her parents let her rush toward a sacrificial alter of their own moral vanity. Her parents are hellbent on blaming everybody but themselves for her death. All must pay because her parents are in denial…

By Michael Becker:

I’m at a loss for words. Rachel died trying to save a weapons smuggling tunnel from the Israelis and you’re having a breakfast commemorating her that bans weapons. Makes no sense. Will the Hamas delegates be able to at least check their AK’s and bomb belts at the door? This is really discriminatory.

By Dov Ber ben Sender:

Probably there was nothing that could be done to save this woman with a martyr complex. If the bulldozer hadn’t got her she would have found some other means to kill herself. My heart goes out to the driver of the bulldozer that she chose to use as her method of killing herself.

By Scott:

Rachel wasn’t protecting a childrens refuge. She wasn’t protecting greenhouses. She was protecting a tunnel used for the smuggling of arms and explosives. She was thereby contributing TO the mayhem suffered by the Palestinian people and their children.

And by a poster whose username I didn’t record: