The Heart of the Matter: US Media Replace Rachel Corrie with Israeli Spy

When a young man interrupted President Obama's speech, shouting in Hebrew, American media outlets reported that the man was protesting about Jonathan Pollard, the imprisoned Israeli spy.  The heckler was actually an Arab-Israeli student who was questioning Obama's arming of the apartheid state and the American government's complicity in the killing of Rachel Corrie.

As reported by Philip Weiss (based on Linah Alsaafin's story at Electronic Intifada):

Twenty-five-year-old Rabeea Eid, a student activist and member of the National Democratic Assembly, had heard and had enough. He stood up in the middle of Obama’s speech and called him out on three issues that summarized the flaccid nature and flagrant inefficacy of Obama’s visit to occupied Palestine.

“Did you really come here for peace or to give Israel more weapons to kill and destroy the Palestinian people? Did you happen to see the apartheid wall on your way here?”

“There are Palestinians sitting in this hall. This state should be for all of its citizens, not a Jewish state only.”

“Who killed Rachel Corrie? Rachel Corrie was killed by your money and weapons!”

So the American media render invisible an Arab student who tried to make visible an American victim of Israel, replacing him with an assumed Israeli defender of a spy against America, and erasing Rachel Corrie and other American victims of Israel once again. The mind sees what the heart feels. We know where the mind and heart of the American media are.

Alsaafin quotes Eid on Obama's firmly Israel-embedded discourse: “I couldn’t stand listening to the speech any more....It was a very Zionist speech that made other speeches by Zionist figures pale in comparison.”

Indeed, Eid's remarks go to the heart of the problematic of Zionism ("not a Jewish state only"), and the American government's fateful embrace thereof ("your money and weapons" killed Rachel Corrie). Would that more Americans have the courage to interrupt this deadly dance and the phony narrative melody that accompanies it.