I think it would be helpful if you stopped with the weak analogies.
I think Princhester’s point may be that if the bulldozer wasn’t supposed to be doing what it was doing, then Corrie had a perfect right to be standing where she was, and it’s the bulldozer driver’s fault that she was killed.
There seems to be some dispute about what the vehicles were actually doing there:
If the vehicles were in fact demolishing houses that they weren’t authorized to demolish (and I don’t know whether that’s true, but there certainly have been many accusations that the Israeli demolition forces often wantonly knock down houses that aren’t obstructing their security operations), then that makes a difference, doesn’t it?
Putting your life in jeopardy in order to try to obstruct the ordinary, legal operations of the government is one thing. Putting your life in jeopardy to try to hinder the commission of a crime is another. I think most people would agree that in the second case, the criminal is largely responsible for the death.
The protestors’ point seems to be that all these demolition operations are illegitimate, so all the damage and death they cause is criminal. I don’t know about that, but I do think that if this particular bulldozer driver was in fact doing something that Israeli officials did not authorize him to do, then he’s on the hook for causing a death in the process, by crushing a person who had much more right to be on that spot than his bulldozer did.
Awww, at least the little angel of peace got this lovely little tribute:
It warms the heart to know that such kind and caring people mourned her death in their own special way!
The Israeli government’s claim is that the houses in Rafah are being bulldozed to shut down smuggling tunnels that are being used to transport arms to terrorist organizations. If that were true, and the shutting down of these tunnels was saving lives, wouldn’t Caterpillar have a moral responsibility to keep supplying them?
Or is it more interesting to only examine one side of the issue, Astro?Oh, and about the thread topic. No, IMO Caterpillar is not responsible for Israeli misuse (if they are indeed misusing them—as I said, I don’t know all the issues about the home demolition controversy) of its machines.
On the other hand, the company is explicitly bragging about its concern for social issues. They’re not just saying “hey, we just sell machinery, it’s none of our business how you use it.” They’re saying:
If they make such claims, it’s perfectly reasonable to call them on it. If you believe that Caterpillar is knowingly selling equipment to be used in a socially irresponsible or harmful way, then exposing the company’s hypocrisy and pressuring them to stop is exactly the right thing to do.
Brutus: * It warms the heart to know that such kind and caring people mourned her death in their own special way!*
No, it doesn’t. Whatever we think of Corrie’s judgement or political stance, we should honor the courage of those pro-Palestinian activists who are committed to non-violent forms of resistance (which isn’t true of all such activists, by any means). Many people accuse the Palestinians of bringing all their troubles on themselves by supporting terrorism, and claim that they’d easily achieve what they want if they renounced violence and devoted themselves to non-violent resistance. If true, that means we need more non-violent protestors like Rachel Corrie (although it would be nice if they didn’t die under bulldozers) and fewer terrorists like Hanif and Sharif. It just undermines the cause of opposing terrorism to sneer sarcastically at non-violent demonstrators as “little angels of peace”.
And of course, it certainly doesn’t invalidate Corrie’s anti-violence principles that even some terrorists regard her as a martyr. (It might be thought to undermine their principles, but I’d argue that terrorists haven’t really got any.) There have been plenty of violent people and groups who have tried to claim other advocates of nonviolence as heroes of their own cause, too (e.g., some members of the RSS with Gandhi or some members of the Black Panthers with Martin Luther King).
Helpful to you (because you can’t cope) or helpful to the debate?
It’s interesting that so far your response to my “weak analogies” has been to say “huh”, or call them stupid or weak, or ask me to stop raising them. I’m guessing therefore it’s the former.
Basically, I have enough experience of you, Brutus, to know that you are what I would call a tribal person. Corrie was not of your tribe. The possibility that someone from your tribe could be in the wrong or that someone from an enemy tribe could be in the right is not something you’d ever accept. On that issue, I wouldn’t bother debating you any more than I’d debate a lump of wood.
What annoyed me was your silly pretence at the outset that Corrie’s death was just a pragmatic matter of personal carelessness, like a person crossing a road without looking.
You’re only fooling yourself, you know.
I don’t think that in the Corrie case that the driver of the bulldozer was culpable at all. She took her chances and lost.
And you are wanking yourself. This is not a matter of traffic, nor of playing chicken [per se] This is a matter of suicide-as-protest, such as Tienman Square, or the monks selfimmolating, deliberately ignoring personal risk in the hopes that a messy death will cause public outcry. Notice it was PROTESTERS v. Israeli army…not some random woman randomly run oer with large equipment. she PUT herself in danger deliberately and now is dead as a consequence.
If the idiot Brits hadn’t partitioned PALESTINE in the first place, the genetic indigenes wouldn’t be placed in this problem. If the allies hadn’t REFUSED to take boatloads of genetically eurpoean jews that were looking for sanctuary, and more genetically european jews had left in the early 30s when the first of the seriously constraining and punitive laws were being leigislated in instead of siitting on their thumbs thinking ‘I am German, it will never happen to me’ and gone to their relatives in America and South America there wouldn’t have been so much of a burden of ‘guilt’ pushing the Brits to partition Palestine…and on a more personal note, IMHO the genetic population has the right to remain and NOT be partitioned by a colonial government forcing a nonindigenous population onto lands already occupied. Now Israel is constantly repudiating any and all treaties, and anybody who has the nads to speak out against them are antisemetic…and therefore are just as bad as the national socialists of Germany. I am not racist, but I do have eyes and an ability to learn from history, and Israel is in teh wrong, and Britain and the UN was in the wrong in 1947.
Aruqvan, my point is a narrow one. Do you think the tank drivers and those giving them orders in Tienman were blameless?
Yes or no?
Assuming that it was unintentional. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that the driver was like “fuck 'em!” and just let the buldozer roll straight on.
While it is certainly assinine to stand in the way of a bulldozer, interfearing with a demolition project does not give the driver a license to run over anything or anyone who gets in his way. The Israeli army or whoever still has a responsibility to secure a work site for safety regardless if they are bulldozing a terrorists’s house or building a shopping mall.
I’m with Lilshieste on this point.
I haven’t seen the video (if anyone has a link it would be nice), but from the sounds of it, Corrie stood in front of a bulldozer travelling in a straight line. It didn’t go veering around hunting her. It moved forward and irresistable force met squishable object. I think the driver may bear some responsiblity, but you have to pin some on Corrie as well. She wasn’t put in front of the tank at gunpoint. She put herself there and stayed.
I don’t know that there’s video of the actual event, I’ve only seen video showing the protesters general tactics sufficient for it to be obvious that the drivers knew there were protesters doing what they were doing.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing Corrie isn’t at all to blame (or, at the least, I don’t think anyone’s arguing that the evidence is sufficient to show conclusively that she wasn’t partly to blame). It’s just the idea that she’s solely to blame I take issue with.
Don’t be silly. There’s no indication that Corrie deliberately got herself run over. But it’s probable that she had no realistic conception of how dangerous her acts were. At least some early reports indicated that she tripped and fell on loose terrain while trying to get out of the way.
And how much notice did they give the populace to move before they rolled the bulldozers in? If it was more than an hour, then they shouldnt have been there. If it was more than 24 hours, then she deserved getting flattened unless it was an honest tripping over dirt clods [or whatever] I am not the one who kept calling she and the others ‘protesters’ which leads me to believe that they had full knowledge that something was going to happen, and they deliberately inserted themselves in a position to obstruct the bulldozers, therefore they are responsible for moving or dying.
Frankly, the whole problem was caused by guilty consciences back in the 40s, the Israelis keep making it worse by refuising to honor treaties, and where I can sympathize with palestinians protesting, dying is a particularly futile way to protest.
No dude, it’s because your analogies are weak and stupid. There are times when analogies can be useful, and this may be one of those times, but we will never know because you keep coming up with these outlandish comparisons.
Heheh, ‘tribal’?
No, Corries death was like a person looking both ways, seeing the speeding cars, then crossing the road. Pure stupidity.
Wikipedia’s version of what happened.
It answers quite a few questions posed here.
Gah, now I see that a few posters here have already provided said link…my bad.
and…
“Chicken” is an understatement. I wouldn’t trust anyone behind the wheel of that behometh if I were to stand in front of it; not even my brother-in-law who is a professional heavy equipment operator. It certainly would have helped if Rachel had her megaphone with her at the time and/or her friends when this happened. Very unfortunate, yet foolish.
Taking out the Israeli-Palestinian politics, I can imagine something similar happening in the US to the Rachel Corrie case. Suppose the government decides that a building needs to be demolished for some public purpose (e.g., building a highway, or because the building is structuraly unsound). And suppose some one wants to protest that decision (e.g., because of the historic significance of the building, or because homeless people are using it as shelter). The protester stands between the building and the bulldozer, and the bulldozer driver knows that the protester is likely to be there (though he can’t see her). Would he be blameless if he drove on, without checking on whether she was still there? I think not.
(The solution to the dilemma would be for the police to remove the protester: she can protest, but she can’t obstruct the demolition. Why could that not have happened in Palestine?)
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I work in engineering in the mining industry, and have worked with these machines. Any person on the ground in the vicinity of such equipment without direct communication with the operator is some combination of ignorant, suicidal and reckless.
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A 49 ton tracked vehicle does not stop on a dime, and in fact on uncompacted ground will tend to wander as the supporting soil finds a new equilibrium underneath the tracks. This is especially true on downgrades, where the dozer will surge forward on the supporting earth as it “flows”.
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According to the article, the protestors repeated several times the act of blocking the dozers’ path and forcing them to take evasive action. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is annoying to the operator, as well as dangerous. Continuing this behaviour, even if the operator were to take all possible action to evade, is bound to get you killed eventually. People fatigue, and that sort of thing is like Russian roulette.
IMO, the incident described is an example of natural selection in progress.
-FK