Court of Appeals takes up Corrie lawsuit

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit will hear arguments Monday whether there is merit to a lawsuit by the family of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old activist from Olympia killed by a bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in 2003.

The defendant in the case is Caterpillar, which made the D9 bulldozer involved in her death.

The case, Corrie et al. v. Caterpillar, was filed in Seattle in 2005, but a district court dismissed it. After this hearing, the appeals court will rule whether the suit should be dismissed or sent back to the lower court.

Cindy and Craig Corrie, the woman's parents, allege Caterpillar violated human rights and committed war crimes by knowingly selling its equipment to the Israeli army, which used the bulldozers to raze Palestinian homes and endanger people. Rachel Corrie was run over by a bulldozer driven by an Israeli soldier as she tried to block a home from demolition.

What a ridiculous lawsuit. However it's going to the ridiculous 9th Circus.

Some perspective:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7117

Published: 05/10/07, 12:38 AM
An Open Letter to the Parents of Rachel Corrie
by Prof. Steven Plaut

Your daughter was in a war zone as a belligerent.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Corrie,

You are continuing with your campaign of demonization and delegitimization against Israel, a campaign that now manifests itself in a shallow anti-Israel propaganda play being staged in Seattle. All this, of course, came after your earlier open letter to the world, “A Call to Action; Rachel’s Words Live,” which was reprinted in many different media outfits, including the viciously anti-Semitic Counterpunch magazine, and the Guardian of the UK.

Your daughter conscripted herself as an aid for those seeking to murder my children.

In that letter, you begin by recalling that your daughter was “killed by an Israeli bulldozer,” but you neglect to mention the circumstances under which she was so killed (and the fact that she died from her injuries while under Palestinian medical care). You then add, “She had been working in Rafah with a nonviolent resistance organization, the International Solidarity Movement, trying to stop the demolition of Palestinian homes and wells.”

No, she was not. She was trying to prevent the demolition of tunnels used to smuggle weapons for Palestinian terrorists seeking to murder Jewish civilians. The International Solidarity Movement, or ISM, to which she belonged openly endorses Palestinian “armed struggle” against Jewish children and civilians and openly collaborates with terrorists . It has hidden wanted terrorists and their weapons in its offices. It is an accomplice in murder. Two Arabs who entered Israel under ISM auspices blew up a Tel Aviv pub and murdered Jews. Lying is not the best way to drum up sympathy for your dead daughter.

Your daughter was in Rafiah in the Gaza Strip to serve as a human shield to defend and promote Palestinian terrorism. When you yourselves were nearly kidnapped in Gaza last year, you were there for the same reason. You pretend that your daughter died trying to protect an “innocent house.” You are lying again. That “innocent house” she was protecting was camouflage for a not-so-innocent terrorist smuggling tunnel, and the residents of that “innocent house” knew all about the tunnel. Explosives and arms were being smuggled by terrorists through that tunnel to commit mass murder.

Your daughter was in a war zone as a belligerent, as one who had - perhaps wittingly and perhaps not - recruited herself on behalf of a genocidal movement of Arab fascists seeking to destroy Israel and murder as many Jews as possible. Your daughter died while interfering with an anti-terror operation carried out by an army in a land in which she had no business being at all. You demand that we in Israel feel your pain at the loss of your daughter, yet your daughter conscripted herself as an aid for those seeking to murder my children.

No harm would have fallen her had she not decided to “play chicken” with the machine.

The raison d’etre of the ISM is to assist Palestinian terrorists murder Jewish children, and to prevent all Israeli efforts to fight that campaign of murder. Your daughter foolishly put herself in harm’s way by challenging a large bulldozer and placing herself in a position where the operator could not see her. You know quite well that the bulldozer operator was not seeking to harm your daughter. And you know very well that no harm would have fallen her had she not decided to “play chicken” with the machine - about as responsible a form of behavior as running across unlit segments of LA freeways at midnight.

In that earlier open letter of yours you write, “We had not understood the devastating nature of the Palestinians’ situation.” Of course, you have never expressed any interest in the devastating nature of the Jews’ situation. The Jews have been battling Arab fascism and terrorism for a hundred years, before, during, and after the Nazi Holocaust of six million Jews. Your daughter was allied with those seeking to continue the perpetration of Nazi-like atrocities against randomly selected Jews. You smugly praise the propaganda play about your daughter in London, which ignored all the other Rachels, the Jewish women victims of terror in Israel, who were murdered by the genocidal terrorists with whom your daughter’s ISM friends collaborate.

Your daughter, and apparently you as well, never had any understanding of the Middle East conflict. The Middle East conflict is not about the right of self-determination of Palestinian Arabs, but rather, it is about the right to self-determination of Israeli Jews. For a century, the Arabs have attempted to block any expression of Jewish self-determination, using violence, armed aggression and terrorism. The Arabs today control 22 countries and territory nearly twice the size of the United States. They refuse to share even a fraction of one percent of the Middle East with Jews, even in a territory smaller than New Jersey.
You do not have a single word of sympathy for the families of the thousands of innocent victims.

The Arab countries invented the imaginary Palestinian “people” and their imaginary “plight” after 1967 as a propaganda ploy, in imitation of the German campaign on behalf of Sudeten self-determination in the 1930s. Just as the struggle for “Sudeten liberation” was nothing more than a fig leaf for the German aggression aimed at annihilating Czechoslovakia, so the struggle for “Palestinian liberation” is nothing more than a jihad to destroy Israel and its population. And it is in support of that goal that the ISM operates, even taking its operational orders from terror leaders.

You write, “Clearly, our daughter has become a positive symbol for people.” I am afraid you are mistaken. Your daughter has become a symbol for dangerous foolhardiness. She committed suicide as an empty gesture meant to assist murderers and terrorists.

You want the world to mourn for your daughter, who died as part of her efforts to assist those trying to murder my children. You demand, on the pages of anti-Semitic propaganda web magazines, that the world mourn your daughter, but you do not have a single word of sympathy for the families of the thousands of innocent victims of the terrorists with whom your daughter chose to ally herself.