Silflay Hraka

Remember this picture when the inevitable hosannas to Rachel Corrie’s gentle nature and peaceful spirit start appearing.

Original photo here

Rachel Corrie, 23, from Olympia, Wash., a member of the ‘International Solidarity Movement,’ burns a mock U.S. flag during a rally in the southern Gaza Strip (news – web sites) town of Rafah in this Feb. 15, 2003 file photo. Corrie was run over and crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer Sunday, March 16, 2003, while she was trying to stop it from tearing down a building in the Rafah refugee camp, witnesses said.

Update: This is how Rachel described the rally (more below). Note that there’s no mention of a”mock” flag. Was the above staged at a later time, were there no photos taken of the real burning, or was she prevaricating to impress her audience?

As this speech was delivered, a British national burned a large British flag, and a US national burned a large US flag. Both activists then burned numerous images of US president George W. Bush.

And remember how she died

According to the ISM activist, Corrie was wearing a bright jacket and climbed onto the bulldozer shovel-plow and began shouting at the driver. “There’s no way he didn’t see her, since she was practically looking into the cabin. At one stage, he turned around toward the building. The bulldozer kept moving, and she slipped and fell off the plow. But the bulldozer kept moving, the shovel above her. I guess it was about 10 or 15 meters that it dragged her and for some reason didn’t stop. We shouted like crazy to the driver through loudspeakers that he should stop, but he just kept going and didn’t lift the shovel. Then it stopped and backed up. We ran to Rachel. She was still breathing.”

After climbing up onto the blade of a heavy earth moving machine, she either fell, or jumped off, though of course no one mentions that, and the distracted driver drove over her.* She wasn’t sitting in front of the house, she wasn’t running alongside the bulldozer, she was bronco busting. If you think a bulldozer blade is an easy place to keep your feet, go watch a construction site one day. On level ground a bulldozer will bounce enough to put that blade through a couple of feet of vertical movement. I can only imagine what it’s like over rubble, and that’s why I wonder if she didn’t jump off or not. It would take a person with a deathwish just to jump onto the blade.

Remember, because her movement is already spinning the facts about her death. This picture was released earlier today by the International Solidarity Movement, the Palestinian front organization that Rachel belonged to.

Here’s my original source, with an attached story

The picture shows someone, ostensibly Rachel Corrie just before she died, standing off to the side of a bulldozer.

The clear implication is that the bulldozer not only ran her down, but swerved to do it, as she stood motionless, a picture in direct contradiction of the eyewitness statement of one of her fellow shields. Now look at this picture, taken just afterwards a news reporter, rather than an organization with an interest in using Rachel Corrie’s death as a club to pummel the Jews with.

original source

Note the differences in terrain? In the first picture, the terrain is as flat as a pancake. Note the blade of the bulldozer, though. That’s what she was standing on. Not a flat surface on it.

The terrain is much more disturbed in the second photo, which I think speaks to the veracity of the one above. The girl is not even cold, and ISM is already lying about how she died. Anything moving over those piles of dirt is going to move violently up and down, even at slow speeds. You would have to be seriously deranged to jump onto a bulldozer blade in those conditions.

Also, don’t any of those idiots know first aid?

* the statement is unclear, but to me indicates that the driver turned around in his seat, away from the front of the vehicle where Ms. Corrie was just prior to when she fell, or jumped. If she did jump, The ISM certainly won’t tell you.

Update: Rachel Corrie, in her own words.

Note that she doesn’t call herself an American, nor does she use that appellation, or “British”, for any of her comrades. Everyone’s an “international.” She only became an American again after she died, because “International Run Over By Bulldozer” doesn’t sell newspapers.

She’s only an American when it suits her movement, and she’ll be far more valuable dead than alive to them.

There’s also a ton of references to Israeli Army anti-tunnel activity, directed against Palestinian tunnels under the border. There’s never a word of condemnation of the tunnels themselves, just of the Israeli actions taken against them. Cleary she didn’t feel that defending Israeli civilians against suicide bombers was a legitimate exercise.

The whole article is full of tidbits, including the email address and phone numbers of the Media Co-ordinator for ISM. There’s also advice for members on contacting the American media, though not written by Rachel

“Obviously, don’t mention ISM or any media co-ordinator’s name.”

Yeah, they wouldn’t want to sully their propaganda with any confusing facts. Remember that tidbit when you read what ISM has to say in the coming days.

More Update: Here’s another bulldozer picture, one that palsolidarity hasn’t bothered to show to the world*, perhaps because it is somewhat inconsistent with the ones they and others have already published. Note the bulldozer blade, for instance, and the pile of detritus in front of it as compared to the “before” picture above.

In case you’re wondering why I have it, palsolidarity has failed to secure their images directory, here. There are more images there than I can look at right now, so feel free to click around.

*They have since been published here.

Forgive Me, Father…

You know, it reads like a “j’accuse!”, but I think it’s actually a “j’avoue!”

All French Bashing, All The Time

I don’t mean it to be a theme, I really don’t. I just keep running across excellent examples of frog quashing, like this graphic from the Sun.

Rutting Behavior

My schedule’s been off all weekend. I must be getting old, as I found this frustrating. All I ask out of life is that I get to do about the same thing I do every day at about the same time each day, regardless of what is happening in the outside world. I realize this is normally the exception rather than the rule, but every now and then life allows me a day or three in a row where it doesn’t bounce me out of my warm and snuggly rut, and I become complacent. Then the cart hits a a rock, and I bounce out, and grow increasingly petulant until I can scurry back in.

Spent all of Friday night at work applying server patches and wrestling with recalcitrant Apache builds.

The initial estimate for our maintenance downtime was an hour, as we had postponed some of the more unwieldy data backups to a later date. Four and a half hours after that, we were done, though not finished. I’ll spend a good part of next week investigating why a particular vendor’s Apache config script would compile and make without complaint, yet refuse to add any of the modules listed in the configuration script to the final binary.

Yes, I know that was so much gobbledegook. Here’s a quick explication. A webserver is the computer that gives files to your browser when you surf the web. The program that starts and stops the web server is called a binary. You could also call it a program, or an executable, but that would be far too easily understood, and we geeks have to protect our job status somehow. The binary is built by something like a software assembly line, where you first define what it will look like (config script), build it (make) and put it where it needs to be to function (make install). Modules are additions to the basic webserver code that allow it to do extra things, like ask you for a password or understand requests for non-standard files. The various modules a person wants to add to a webserver are specified in the config script, and if process that builds the webserver binary doesn’t understand what you want, or can’t find something that it needs, it’s supposed to break, ideally with a message that tells you exactly what the problem is. Bridging the gap between ideally and what actually happens is what a system administrator does.

Spent all of Saturday laboring under the lash of a pregnant woman with a newly awakened nesting instinct.

I can understand why a new baby might necessitate a rearrangement of the furniture in the new nursery (old guest bedroom) and new guest bedroom (old computer room/library), or why this would also call for a new coat of paint in the guest bedroom. Bookshelves and computers leave marks, after all. What I can’t understand is why the baby felt it important that I also reseed and fertilize the lawn.

I also cooked dinner. Veal Saltimbocca, for those of you who will somehow miss the posts just below this one.

By the time all that was done it was late, and there were bedtime stories to read and Netflix DVDs to watch with the nester, who had the temerity to suggest what a long and tiring day it had been, what with watching Peter Pan and having to drive Ngnat to the playground.

I refrained from comment. I’m all about the superhuman restraint.

Spent this morning and early afternoon with the inlaws, who had came with new furniture for Ngnat, who is losing large chunks of her rooms to the new nursery. We installed the Sainted wife’s childhood chest of drawers set by way of recompense, not that she seemed to mind much. She can climb up the changing table just as easily in the next room as in her own, after all.

You would think that the nesting would be done, at this point. You would be wrong. This weekend’s activities were only preliminary to the actual nesting, merely creating the upstairs context for later nesting. Next weekend Aspiring Actress and the Menead cousins are coming to paint the entire downstairs, to set that context. Presumably then the actual nesting can start.

I live in fear that I’ll be required to whiten the mortar lines in the foundation with toothpaste at that point. If so, I’m only doing the outside. The crawlspace can fend for itself.