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Caoimhe Butterly (born 1978) is an Irish anti-Israeli activist and saboteur, who has also worked with AIDS victims in Zimbabwe, the homeless in New York, and with Zapatistas guerillas in Mexico. She has criticized all wars fought by Western-style democracies, including the War of Iraq and the Israel attack on the Jenin refugee camp, where she was shot by an Israeli soldier. Butterly spent 16 days inside the compound where Yasser Arafat was besieged in Ramallah. .

Early life

Caoimhe Butterly was born in Dublin to a familly therapist. Her step-father's work as a UN economist moved the family from Ireland to Zimbabwe when Caoimhe was a young child. She grew up in Canada, Mauritus and Zimbabwe. She spent time working in the New York Catholic Worker, then moved to Latin America where she spent 3 years living with indigeneous in Guatemala and in Chiapas Mexico. She also lived in Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank for a year. She has visited Iraq on numerous occasions, she has recently been to Lebanon protesting British prime minister Tony Blair's visit to the country after allowing bombs shipments via Britain to be used to bomb Lebanese cities and villages and infrastructure by Israel during the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war.

Caoimhe was brought up in a culture of liberation theology, which, she says, "deeply inspired" her to spend her life campaigning for human rights. At a very young age, she says, she developed a deep sense of duty. "I've always felt the need to almost a painful degree of needing to stand up against injustices in whatever contexts they lie." She left school at 18, wanting to travel, and headed to New York, where she spent time working in soup kitchens for the US Catholic Worker movement, which was founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin in 1933. She went on to Guatemala and from there to Chiapas in Mexico, where she worked for two years among the separatist Zapatista communities. In 2001 she spent 10 days fasting in front of the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, in protest at the government's decision to allow US warplanes to refuel at Shannon Airport in their way to Afghanistan. She was arrested while trying to block the runway.

In April 2002 she smuggled her way into Arafat's Ramallah compound, at that time under siege by IDF soldiers. She claimed to have gone in to give basic medical aid to a Palestinian friend who had been shot in the leg, and who had called her for help after the IDF denied him access to the Red Crescent ambulances, which had a history of ferrying terrorists and weapons under cover of medical neutrality. She managed to get help to him, but couldn't get herself out again. "The Israeli army announced officially that any international trying to leave the compound would be immediately deported and arrested, if not shot at," says Caoimhe. "By day three, it became glaringly obvious that I had made a huge mistake. We were just beginning to get the news that the tanks were on their way to Jenin. I spent the next 12 days in there as the stories of Jenin got worse and worse, and I knew I had friends who were bleeding to death." (Most of the "stories" Butterly referred to were later proved to be part of a major hoax, a hoax that she helped promote.

Shot in Jenin

During the Israeli military operation in Jenin Palestinian refugee camp, in the West Bank, then 24 years old, Caoimhe was injured by a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier while she was trying to lead a group of Palestinian children to safety. Caoimhe was luckier than British peace activist Ton Hurndall who, in similar circumstances this month in Gaza, was shot in the head went into a coma and then died. After being shot Caoimhe still refused to leave Jenin, after more than a year of standing in the way of Israeli tanks and troops in Jenin . In an interview in The Guardian, journalist Katie Barlow reports being inspired to meet Caoimhe by the footage of her blocking Israel Defence Force tanks as they fired over her head, and stories of her standing in the line of fire between soldiers and Palestinian children, as the IDF threatened to "make her a hero". In the report, Katie Barlow describes how Caoimhe ran straight, despite the continuing fire, toward a disabled Palestinian boy who was shot by an Israeli sniper. Later a Red Crescent ambulance arrived at the scene and amid continuing gunfire, the paramedics got the boy into the vehicle, the snipers managed to shoot through the ambulance window, shattering glass all over the boy, and nearly killing the local cameraman who was filming a report. The boy would survive, but was paralysed from waist down. This, Caoihme tells, is everyday life in Jenin.

During the Israeli 2002 military operation in Jenin, after she was trapped in Yasser Arafat's sieged coumpound in Ramallah, she escaped by luck, when the IDF forgot to shut a gate surrounding the compound, and ran for her life past tanks and soldiers. She got back to Jenin camp towards the end of the invasion. "It was the smell of rotting human flesh that first hit me. There were still soldiers in the camp, but a lot of people chose to violate the curfew, to bury their dead and to drag in the wounded. One man had been shot at close range, and his body was rolled over by tanks until he was nothing but bones and a sheath of flesh. There was no machinery to dig up the dead, so I helped to dig up the bodies by hand. Very few intact: burnt, broken body parts, a little girl's plait and the foot of a baby. In clearing away the rubble I picked up what remained of a head. There was the body of a little girl who was curled up with her teddy bear. She had suffocated when her house was demolished."

In the Guardian interview, Caoimhe emphasises that atrocities occur daily. The Guardian's Katie Barlow agrees, reporting that, in the two weeks she spent with Caoimhe, 19 civilians were shot, six fatally. Seven of the victims were children on their way to school, shot as tanks opened fire in the middle of the town. One market stallholder was shot in the head in an erratic spray of bullets from an invading tank as he was setting out his vegetables.

Caoihme explained she was trying to persuade the IDF, after they shoot dead a nine-year old boy, to stop shooting at the children. They had told her to get out of their way or they would shoot her. It was while she was clearing the children off the streets that she was shot, the Guardian journalist reports. An IDF spokesman explained: "We are in the middle of a war and we cannot be responsible for the safety of anyone who has not been coordinated by the IDF to be in the occupied territories right now. While we do not want innocent Palestinians to suffer, or internationals to get hurt, we are trying to ensure the safety of the Israelis and we will not tolerate internationals interfering with IDF operations. It is not the job of internationals to stand in the line of fire, unless they are the son of God, but he hasn't come yet." After being shot Caoihme refused to leave: "I'm going nowhere. I am staying until this occupation ends. I have the right to be here, a responsibility to be here. So does anyone who knows what is going on here."

Gulf War

Before the War on Iraq began, she campaigned against the Irish government's decision to allow the US military to use Shannon Airport. She was initially a signatory to the Pitstop Ploughshares action that disabled a US warplane at Shannon in February 2003, but decided ultimately not to participate, because she wanted to go to Iraq in solidarity with civilians there (the Pitstop Ploughshares were acquitted by an Irish jury in July 2006, when the jury ruled they had a 'lawful excuse' to damage the plane). The 2003 Bush-Blair summit in Belfast saw Caoimhe arrested, and dragged away by her hair, for smearing red jam on the riot shields of two policemen. "There is no such thing as a benign occupation" she says. "It's time to focus again on what is happening in Baghdad."

Caoimhe in Beirut

After the war that destroyed most of Lebanon infrastructure, British Prime Minister Tony Blair went on a political trip to the Middle East for meetings with leaders of the region. A feeling of anger against the British Prime Minister was mounting in Lebanon, in relation to his stance during the war, his refusal to call for an immediate ceasefire and his aligning of his policies with those of president George Bush in support of the Israeli military operation. Caoimhe interrupted Blair's press conference with the Lebanese Prime mMinister Fouad Seniora, accusing Blair of complicity in the recent Israeli bombardment of Lebanon. "This visit is an insult", "Shame on you Tony Blair" Caoihme shouted as Saniora and Blair spoke at Saniora's office complex. She held a banner saying "Boycott Israeli apartheid" in front of live TV cameras, until security guards holding her by arms and legs carried her out. Blair and Saniora stood quietly as she shouted.

Caoimhe critics

Some pro-Israeli critics think that Caoimhe Butterly is openly biased against Israel; blogger Nicholas Stix has called her a "humanitarian terrorist." Her supporters counter that she is merely highlighting Israel's ongoing human rights abuses against Palestinians.

External links

• Front line life of an Irish peace crusader
• London: Suicide Decoys and Humanitarian Terrorists?
• "They Are Sick, Deeply Sick"
• I Was Shot While Escorting Jenin's School Children
• The Blanker
• Voices from Iraq: Letters from Iraq
• Caoimhe Butterly; Reading & Questions

1. Anatomy of Anti-Israel Incitement: Jenin, World Opinion and the Massacre That Wasn't
2. London: Suicide Decoys and Humanitarian Terrorists?

• 1978 births
• Living people
• Irish activists
• People from Dublin