MEDIA INCITEMENT

BY JERUSALEM CENTER

The Death of Rachel Corrie - Joshua Hammer
A damning photograph shot by an ISM activist and almost immediately released by Reuters appears to show Corrie standing before the bulldozer and addressing the soldiers with her megaphone seconds before being crushed. Yet the infamous photo turned out to be misleading. In fact, the megaphone photo was taken hours before Corrie's death; she had handed the loudspeaker to a colleague some time before she was run over, and she was kneeling, not standing, in front of the machine when she was killed. Newspapers ran corrections.

The army reservist who ran Corrie down is a Russian immigrant with long experience as a bulldozer operator. On Israeli TV he insisted that hi! s field of vision was limited inside the D9 cabin and that he had no idea Corrie was in front of the machine. "You can't hear, you can't see well. You can go over something and you'll never know," he said. "I scooped up some earth, I couldn't see anything. I pushed the earth, and I didn't see her at all. Maybe she was hiding in there." The IDF compiled a video about the Corrie incident that includes footage taken from inside the cockpit of a D9. It makes a credible case that the operators, peering out through narrow, double-glazed, bulletproof windows, their view obscured behind pistons and the giant scooper, might not have seen Corrie kneeling in front of them. The writer was Jerusalem Bureau Chief for Newsweek at the time. (Mother Jones, Sept. 2003)