[New Republic] James Kirchick - In the 90-minute, one-woman show "My Name is Rachel Corrie," playing in New York, Corrie looks either like one of the upper-middle-class kids who take Latin American latrine-digging vacations to buff up their college resumes, or one of the "political pilgrims" who ventured to totalitarian lands and returned to boast of slumming it with the liberated natives. In a photo circulated after her death, Corrie flaunts her hatred of the U.S. by burning a mock American flag while Palestinian children crowd around her. In prostrating herself before an Israeli bulldozer, Corrie actually became that which she was (unwittingly, perhaps) protecting: the Palestinian suicide martyr. She received the martyr treatment, becoming a pieta of the anti-Israel movement. Due to the epistolary basis of "My Name is Rachel Corrie," comparisons have been made to "The Diary of Anne Frank." Anne Frank was a probing character whose blameless observations of fascist Europe demonstrated the cruelty of a period in which children were perfunctorily murdered. Rachel Corrie was a know-it-all who deliberately placed herself in the wrong place at the wrong time. What's more, there is an issue of moral culpability among antagonists. Obviously, Frank's murderers had it. But Corrie died, accidentally, after giving intellectual (and actual) cover to those who are, essentially, the heirs of Frank's killers.
2006-11-29 01:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive