R.S. McCain put together a very lengthy piece on Rachel “St. Pancake” Corrie, and compared her life to one who truly was innocent, Shiri Negari. I’ll take up at the point Stacy introduces Negari:
Those who have promoted the death-cult of Rachel Corrie insist that she must be remembered exactly as they wish her to be remembered, as a victim-hero whose name can only be spoken with hushed reverence for her innocent righteousness. To remember Rachel Corrie that way, you see, requires us to forget the victims of her terrorist allies.
In 1998, when Rachel Corrie was a high school senior, a 19-year-old Israeli girl traveled to America, touring the Grand Canyon and other sites. Later, the Israeli girl spent a year in Latin America, where she learned Spanish, hiked mountains and went scuba diving. She was the daughter of a dentist, third of five children, by all accounts beloved by everyone who knew her, and she signed her e-mails “Shiri Negari, World Traveler.”
“Shiri loved to laugh and made others laugh with her. She loved to dance and knew how to enjoy the little things in life. She had the gift of being able to see goodness and beauty in every person she met, and she kept up many close friendships with a wide variety of people. . . . Always full of life, she loved to sing and make music. A born actress, she often delighted family and friends with her spontaneous improvisations and impressions. She wrote poetry. She loved swimming.”
Shiri loved America so much that, shortly after her 21st birthday, she moved to New York City and got a job in a restaurant. After the 9/11 attacks destroyed the World Trade Center, her family became concerned for her safety, and eventually Shiri returned home to live with her parents near Jerusalem. She got a temporary job in a bank, working to save money for college where she planned to enroll in the fall of 2002.
Shiri Negari was on her way to work at the bank one Tuesday morning — June 18, 2002 — when she boarded Bus No. 32A in Gilo. A few minutes later, a little before 8 a.m., another passenger boarded the bus:
19 people were killed and 74 injured . . . in a suicide bombing at the Patt junction in Jerusalem. . . .
Hamas claimed responsibility for the attack and identified the bomber as Muhamed al-Ral, an Islamic law student at An-Najah University. . . .
Al-Ral boarded Egged bus no. 32A from Gilo at 7:50 A.M. at the stop in Beit Safafa, an Arab neighborhood opposite Gilo, and almost immediately detonated the large bomb which he carried in a bag stuffed with ball bearings.
Shiri died that day, just two weeks before her 22nd birthday, in a blast that ended the lives of 18 other people ranging in age from 11 to 72. They were all killed on orders of Hamas — the same terrorist organization that rules Gaza, where 23-year-old Rachel Corrie arrived to join the anti-Israeli ISM contigent in January 2003, barely seven months after the blast that destroyed Bus No. 32A.
