Front and Center

If you want to see a real drama—or, the next best thing, read about one—catch up on the New York Times accounts of the conflict the New York Theater Workshop is having mounting the play called My Name is Rachel Corrie. It seems that this play was to move from London’s Royal Court theater to a stage in Gotham. Rachel Corrie was a 23-year-old Canadian who went to Israel to defend the Palestinians in Gaza as a human shield and was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the process. She evidently kept diaries and wrote letters about her efforts and these have been adapted into a play. I have not seen the London production nor read the material, but for the purposes of this article that is of minor importance. In fact, to me, Rachel Corrie is of minor importance, save for her ability through death to open a window onto the ongoing world of intellectual and cultural focus that hides behind anti-Semitism. This play is just another entertainment in an intellectual pogrom that has been going on for decades.

The New York Theater Workshop is having a huge battle that is being played out in the press because they have “delayed” the play’s opening. There seems to be some conflict between those who claim that this play promotes anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist agendas and is little more than a propaganda piece for the Hamas fundamentalist movement, and those that believe Rachel’s story must be told uncensored and that a commitment had been made to the Royal Court for a New York production. The don’t-show-it side is claiming that the Gaza “resistance” is, as the Palestinians themselves define it, a war, and that Ms. Corrie was in fact a tool in that armed struggle. They believe that the Gazans don’t want peace and their own territory, but, as they themselves put it, want to “bathe in fountains of Jewish blood as it flows in the streets of Tel Aviv.” Naturally, the “intellectual” supporters of the Palestinians, as named in the Times—Harold Pinter, Tony Kushner, and Vanessa Redgrave—have combined with one of the play’s backers, an editor with the English-language version of the reincarnated Der Sturmer: the Guardian of London. These thinkers believe that the play is a first-person account of life lived under the cruel hand of occupying oppressor Israelis.

Pull up from this focal point and look at the larger picture. Why is this play being mounted at all either in New York or London? Why is the intellectual community of writers and editors so focused on a tiny little piece of land in a conflict-torn region? Why did Rachel Corrie choose to go to Gaza instead of scores of other war zones on four continents where millions of people are dying every year? Why is her life so important when before this sentence is finished dozens will have died in conflicts in Africa, Asia, and South America?

There are several possible answers, but the one I like best is just that anti-Semites have a screen to hide behind: it’s not about the number of oppressed; it’s about the oppressor. The Chinese in Tibet just don’t arouse the world’s venom as do the Jews in Ramallah. As my cousin Rafi in Israel once said to me about the conflict in Africa, “No one gives a shit about those people.” If you could do a graph of the deaths versus the amount of article lineage, black, yellow, and brown deaths would have a ratio of a million per page; Palestinian deaths would be a million pages per death. The backers and promoters of Rachel Corrie are guilty of the global version of what the news industry calls the MWW syndrome. That stands for missing white women whose stories sell and saturate our media while countless women of black and brown skin who are missing, raped, and murdered go completely unnoticed. Through this obsession about one small naïve white woman who intentionally put herself in harm’s way, countless murderers of women from the Amazon to Amman get a free pass to slaughter in the dark.

Have we seen one play in London about the genocide in Zaire or Sudan, about the train full of families immolated by religious fanatics in India, about entire villages wiped out in Colombia by FARC guerrillas? Have we seen one play about the thousands of women all over the Muslim world strangled by relatives in “honor killings,” which are legal everywhere in the land of the prophet? Why didn’t Rachel go to Nigeria to protect animist Christians from being butchered by their Muslim neighbors, or perhaps to protect the Berbers from the cruel hand of their Arab oppressors? Rachel probably never even heard of the Berbers. Why didn’t she go anywhere else? Because there are no Jews involved.

The deepest form of Jew hatred results in the obsessive focus on what any honest observer would have to deem a very minor skirmish. More people were hacked to death in ten minutes in the Tutsi-Hutu war than have died in all the strife between Israelis and the Palestinians since the “occupation.” More children were ripped from their mothers’ wombs by machete-wielding tribesmen in a day than have been killed on the West Bank in decades. But it’s hard to travel there. Rachel would have had to risk her life just to fly into Kinshasa. Traveling to the Columbian jungle to protect the lives of simple farmers just doesn’t seem as exciting; perhaps los indios are just less worthy of living. Environmental pollution in China is responsible for more children being hideously deformed and suffering more horrific deaths than the intifada, but how important is that to Tony Kushner or Harold Pinter or the Guardian?

The sad truth is that the Jew haters and their intellectual smokescreen of pro-Palestinian propaganda serve the world’s butchers well. They get to do what they want to the people of lesser importance because the world is intentionally distracted by its ever-present anti-Semites armed with a cause. Rachel and the ridiculous imbroglio about her useless life should remind us that they are ever present. These refined Goebbelites had better hope that there isn’t a judgment day either here or in the afterworld because they will be judged as having blood on their hands.