The Odd Affinity Of The International Solidarity Movement Towards Rape, Kidnapping And Murder

During the past few days she [Rachel Corrie] and the nine other ISM activists had become preoccupied with an anonymous letter circulating through Rafah that cast suspicion on the human shields. "Who are they? Why are they here? Who asked them to come here?" it asked. The letter referred to Corrie and the other expatriate women in Rafah as "nasty foreign bitches" whom "our Palestinian young men are following around." It was a sobering reminder that outsiders -- even international do-gooders -- were untrustworthy in the eyes of some Palestinians. [emphasis added]
Joshua Hammer, The Death of Rachel Corrie

But that fact was not seen so much as a warning than as an incentive--for them to raise the bar on provocation:

That morning, the ISM team tried to devise a strategy to counteract the letter's effects. "We all had a feeling that our role was too passive. We talked about how to engage the Israeli military," Richard "Fuzz" Purssell told me by phone from Great Britain. "We had teams working in the West Bank, going up to checkpoints, presenting a human face to soldiers. But in Rafah we'd only seen the Israelis at a distance." And as is so often the case in the Middle East, lack of any humanizing interaction meant that the idf and the ISM knew each other only by their worst acts. Few activists had spent much time in Israel or spoken to soldiers except in moments of conflict; the soldiers experienced the peace activists only as nuisances who were getting in their way in highly volatile situations. That morning, team members made a number of proposals that seemed designed only to aggravate the problem. Purssell, for instance, suggested marching on a checkpoint that had been the site of several suicide attacks. "The idea was to more directly challenge the Israeli military dominance using our international status," Purssell told me. [emphasis added]

We all know how that strategy worked out. Between ignoring the warning signs on the one hand and hiding behind their supposed 'status' when inserting themselves into dangerous situations, the results were predictable.

Predictable, and often denied.

The danger to these self-proclaimed peace activists is not always death.
Sometimes it is rape:

Arabs Harass Female 'Peace' Activists; Left Silences Victims

Two activists have exposed a disturbing phenomenon that they say is an open secret within the “peace camp”: female “peace” activists are routinely harassed and raped by the Arabs of Judea and Samaria with whom they have come to identify. They say the phenomenon has gotten worse lately and that many foreign women end up as wives of local Arabs against their will, but cannot escape their new homes.

Roni Aloni Sedovnik, a feminist activist, penned an article in News1 – an independent website run by respected investigative reporter Yoav Yitzchak – under the heading “The Left's Betrayal of Female Peace Activists Who were Sexually Assaulted.”

“A nauseous atrocity has been going on for a long time behind the scenes at the leftists' demonstration at Bil'in, Naalin and Sheikh Jarrah [Shimon HaTzaddik],” she writes. “A dark secret that threatens to smash the basic ideological values upon which the demand to end the occupation of the Territories rests.”

These people are victims--tragic victims of a situation they only partly understand.
One cannot--and should not--be quite so generous with the leadership of ISM.

The kidnapping of Alan Johnston in Gaza should have served as a warning of the potential dangers.
The potential dangers that became very real in the case of the kidnapping Vittorio Arrigoni--a kidnapping that led to his death.

But it's not as if the terrorists themselves will get much bad press over this.
Hamas are the good terrorists.

And the leaders of the ISM will continue to hide behind the cloak of victimhood.

Technorati Tag: Vittorio Arrigoni and ISM and Hamas and Gaza.