New Trend Magazine (www.newtrendmag.org)

[Biggest Islamic web site in the U.S.]
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1. Greenboro report on Rachel Corrie, sweet rose of America, victim of Zionism.
2. Report on unprecdented million march in Lahore, Pakistan.
3. Day 4: Day of defeat for U.S. as Iraq fights back.
4. Chicago from ground level: Mexicans support Arabs and Muslims.
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80 protest at Greensboro vigil
U.S. woman killed in Gaza Strip is remembered as 'hero'

By Michael Hewlett
JOURNAL REPORTER

About 80 people gathered yesterday at the Governmental Plaza in downtown Greensboro to protest the war in Iraq and to remember a 23-year-old American woman killed in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Yusra Al-Alqrah, a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank and taught in Kuwait a year before the first Persian Gulf War started in 1991, said she saw Rachel Corrie as a hero.

Corrie, a college student from Olympia, Wash., was the first international protester to be killed during the 30-month conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Working for a U.S. group called International Solidarity Movement, Corrie was killed when an Israeli military bulldozer crushed her as she crouched in its path. Witnesses have said that she was trying to protect the home of a Palestinian physician in the Gaza Strip.

"What Rachel did, she didn't do for oil, money or to be famous," Al-Alqrah said. "She went to help innocent people."

Corrie's parents, who live in Charlotte, have asked that the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the State Department conduct an independent investigation in the incident. Israeli officials have called the death an accident.

Others also protested what they see as an immoral war. "I feel that the impasse between Islam and the West will continue as long as the American administration is playing God in this war," said Badi Ali, the president of the Islamic Center of the Triad.

The center organized the candlelight vigil along with the Greensboro Coalition for Peace and the Not in Our Name Project, a national anti-war organization.

Ali had planned to travel to Iraq to serve as a human shield and said he was ready to leave Monday, but the Iraqi borders were closed. The vigil was another way to get the same message across, he said.

He said he disagrees with those who say that the war is to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's dictatorship. "We liberate people by bombs and missiles?" Ali said. "I don't understand. Is this war going to liberate them or are we going to liberate them from life?"
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2003-03-24 Mon 07:38ct