John Chuckman
(RINF) – An almost perfect measure of the decay of democratic values in American politics is found in a letter from Hillary Clinton to Haim Saban, a wealthy American-Israeli and a major contributor to the Democrats. It is a letter whose only purpose is to elicit funds, ingratiating its author to the recipient by condemning the perfectly legitimate right of free people to choose boycotting Israel over its appalling behaviors. The letter is disturbing in some of its views and characterizations, but it has been reviewed and remarked upon by many, as here
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephen-zunes/the-troubling-implication_b_7772936.html>.
We were not supposed to know this, but there are actually two letters. The first letter was released by its recipient, but the second letter was intended only for its recipient’s eyes. Somehow, it managed to be leaked to *The Guardian*, although in searching the Internet to discover just what happened it seems Google has done a pretty good job of sweeping over the trail.
It is the second letter, the one we were not supposed to see, which goes beyond being disturbing.
I am not exaggerating when I characterize it as something comparable to words which might have been written by… well, choose the name of any grisly dictator, but Adolph Hitler’s would have to be the one jumping to the minds of most people. This second letter’s words are absolutely chilling. If you think I’m exaggerating, here are Hillary’s words:
*“Quite frankly, Israel didn’t teach Hamas a harsh enough lesson last year.
True to form, Obama was too hard on our democratic ally, and too soft on
our Islamofascist foe.*
*“As president, I will give the Jewish state all the necessary military,
diplomatic, economic and moral support it needs to truly vanquish Hamas –
and if that means killing 200,000 Gazans, then so be it.*
*“We realist Democrats understand that collateral damage is an unavoidable
by-product of the War on Terror, and me being a mother, grandmother and
tireless children’s rights advocate does not mean that I will flinch even
one iota in allowing Israel to obliterate every last school-cum-rocket
launching pad in Gaza. Those who allow their children to be used as human
shields for terrorists deserve to see them buried under one-ton bombs.”*
Let’s just analyze a few of the more unacceptable and repugnant statements
in this letter.
*“Israel didn’t teach Hamas a harsh enough lesson…”*
In 2014, Israel killed over 500 children plus another 1,700 adults in Gaza,
and that came after another invasion, 2008, and a series of operations
beginning in 2006, which saw Israel kill more than another 1,500
Palestinians. It should be noted that the Palestinian population is a young
one, so a disproportion of children is always at risk in any attack. We had
reliable reports that Israeli soldiers grabbed Palestinian children to hold
in front of them in a number of instances. We also had first-hand reports
of families being targeted.
Over this period, Israel has maintained a brutal blockade of Gaza, which in
its first inception included an actual calorie count for the amount of food
which could just keep a person alive, an idea we might want to credit to
Himmler. International pressure brought an end to that aspect of the
blockade, but even today the Palestinians cannot get cement to repair their
sanitation and homes. Israel also launched its infamous Gaza flotilla raid
in 2010, seizing half a dozen ships attempting to bring aid to Gaza and
killing 10 crew members, all of them unarmed.
I remind readers just what Gaza is. It is essentially a huge refugee camp,
a place where Palestinians huddled for protection from Israel’s 1948 terror
campaign against residents of ancient villages long since bulldozed out of
existence. Today, surrounded by fences and guards and towers with
automated, radar-operated machine-guns, Gaza resembles a vast outdoor
prison, or, if you will, a Bantustan or concentration camp. Even its
fishermen are allowed to go only a short distance into the sea before being
attacked by Israeli gun boats. Periodically, Israel does dirty work like
cut its power or foul its water. Recently, a huge swath of land around its
perimeter was sprayed with herbicides, cutting food supplies and insuring
future malformation of children, just as we see in Vietnam as a result of
America’s use of Agent Orange.
*“…our democratic ally…”*
Israel is certainly one of the world’s strangest “democracies.” About half
the people living under its rule do not want to live under its rule, have
no votes, have absolutely no rights, and are treated in the most abusive
manner. Even their homes are not their own with Israel periodically seizing
them for its own purposes.
Then we have the fact that only Jews are supposed to live in “the Jewish
state.” Only Jews are welcomed. Indeed only Jews are accepted. Other kinds
of refugees are turned away. There is a government program underway right
now to clean out the Knesset, Israel’s legislature, of its few Arab
members. These are the representatives of Arabs trapped in what became
Israel in 1948 and reluctantly granted citizenship, although in daily
practice and in many laws, Arab citizens are not deemed as full citizens,
identity papers are stamped and they are subjected to hearing regular
demagogic demands that they all be pushed across the Jordan River and out
of the country.
If you consider Israel a genuine democracy, then you must also view the
American Confederacy or South Africa under the National Party as
democracies. They both held elections and had legislatures and the dress-up
appearances of democracy. It was just that huge numbers of those countries’
people could not vote and could not own certain property and had no rights.
Israel’s so-called democracy has other serious impairments, including a
structure for the role of money in politics that much resembles America’s.
It is at best a plutocracy. Millions pour in to favored candidates like
Netanyahu from sources like American billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
Israel has another highly undemocratic characteristic, and that is its
aversion to democracy in countries or groups anywhere near it. It always
has supported happily tyrants like Mubarak in Egypt and has worked
assiduously to get what was a democratic organization like Hamas declared
and treated as some kind of terrorists.
If Israel is, as Israelis like to say, the Middle East’s only democracy, I
think we can be glad there are not more such democracies.
*“…our Islamofascist foe…”*
Since when are the Palestinians – who, as is often ignored, include both
Islamic and Christian people – “our foe”? I don’t recall them threatening
or attacking anyone? Women and children and hard-working men on farms and
in shops are our foe? People without even the semblance of a military?
Since when are they “Islamofascists”? They are just people driven out of
their own ancient homes and farms by groups of well-armed newcomers from
Europe and America. And what is an “Islamofascist,” beyond a slur term
coined in Israel for people who are resented, hated, and abused merely for
the fact of their very existence? We did briefly see in the last assault on
Gaza how ugly things get in Israel, something generally kept from our eyes,
with video of Israelis in lawn chairs on the heights watching homes being
bombed and cheering as though it were the home team scoring a goal at a
football match.
*“I will give the Jewish state all the necessary military, diplomatic,
economic and moral support it needs to truly vanquish Hamas…”*
What in God’s name does that mean? America literally pours military,
security, and technical assistance into Israel. There is continuous typhoon
of it hitting Israel’s shores. And how would more help “truly vanquish
Hamas”? What would be the shape of that? A couple of thermonuclear weapons
lobbed into Gaza? But Israel already has its own thermonuclear weapons,
albeit through lying and deceit and even theft and against the intent of
all international law and organization, although with the secret
contrivance and acceptance of a couple of generations of politicians like
Hillary.
Why should Hamas be vanquished? It was elected to office in a clean
election, likely cleaner than most American and Israeli elections. But I
forget, Israel hates having democracies anywhere near its borders. It
prefers dealing with – when it deigns even to speak to its neighbors – men
like Mahmoud Abbas, who last legally held office in 2009 and has
unilaterally extended his own term as President ever since, and who is
completely ineffectual in his relations with Israel.
We shouldn’t forget that after Hamas’s internationally-supervised election,
Israeli troops raced into Gaza and illegally arrested many of its elected
officials. It also publicly threatened the leader’s assassination. Funny,
but I don’t recall things going the other way from this supposedly
terrorist organization. After all, it earned the “official” designation as
terrorist from politicians like Hillary Clinton or Newt Gingrich or Dick
Armey working to keep those pro-Israeli campaign funds flowing in.
All of the horrors of invasions, bombardments, and blockades came after
that simple election. Israel hates Hamas because it does not do exactly as
it is ordered to do. Always the excuse is used that Hamas won’t recognize
Israel as “the Jewish state,” but that view deliberately hides many
legitimate issues. In conflict or disagreement, countries typically do not
extend formal recognition. The United States has done this countless times,
including for the last half century with Cuba. It did it for years with the
Soviet Union.
But Israel’s case is not just a matter of formal recognition. There is a
subtle but immensely important difference. It wants recognition as “the
Jewish state.” What would happen to those million or so Palestinians who
hold Israeli passports and are now at least nominally Israelis? Forced
marches across the Jordan River? What happens to the many important
Palestinian claims on Israel? What claims do you think a non-Jew can have
in “a Jewish state” under purely Jewish courts and laws? What happens to
the entire West Bank, which exists under Israeli occupation and is
regularly predated by sudden demands for non-Jewish properties? This is no
simple issue as Israel repeatedly and tiresomely insists that it is.
You are not a terrorist because you refuse to accept Israel’s terms: you
are a people looking out for your own interests, something all people have
the right and need to do. Israel always insists that this acceptance come
before any other matters can be dealt with, and it then turns to the press
and says, “See, I told you, they are terrorists.” Simply absurd, expecting
people to just lie down and let you do whatever you want to them!
*“…and if that means killing 200,000 Gazans, then so be it…”*
Only a person so exceedingly biased towards Israel as to be effectively
blind would fail to recognize the tone of those words. They could easily
have been written by Adolph Hitler or one his charming goons such as
Heinrich Himmler or Joseph Goebbels.
In the churches and schools where I was brought up, such speech could never
be countenanced, yet here it is, written by a woman who was Secretary of
State now wants to be President. She obviously knows enough to keep this
morally-filthy language secret, hence her method of the second letter. So,
even in her, maybe there is some little remaining sense of shame? But I
doubt it because she is writing these ghastly words for what purpose? To
ask for a large amount of money.
Now, if you wrote words like that in Israel or in a number of countries,
only changing the name of who are to be killed in mass, you would most
certainly go to prison, besides being labelled a terrorist for life.
Apparently, when Hillary learned that this letter leaked, she made the
excuse that there had been a typo, that it should have read “20,000.” Her
moral and ethical organs are so charred and twisted that she actually
thinks 20,00 people killed sounds okay, just fine, maybe ten times as good
as killing 200,000?
But of course, Hillary is grotesquely lying even in this excuse, as she has
lied innumerable times over her adult life, an ongoing stage play we have
all enjoyed in the news: watching her defend her predatory husband for the
sake of future political success, watching her politically-motivated
statement of being shot at in Bosnia in 1996, a claim almost instantly
proved fraudulent by the press, watching her squirm and lie about what
really happened during the murderous events at Benghazi, and watching her
lie as she is investigated about using her private server for top secret
material as Secretary of State.
*“Those who allow their children to be used as human shields for terrorists
deserve to see them buried under one-ton bombs”*
This statement is so sick and twisted, it is frightening. It begs the whole
genuine issue of whether any Palestinian ever did this, while we know from
witnesses that Israeli soldiers did. Just what is it here that we are
talking about where children are said to have been used as shields? A
full-fledged invasion by heavily-armed troops, supported with tanks and
artillery and fighter planes into a densely-crowded civilian area, often
aptly described as an open-air prison for a million and a half souls. How
could children avoid becoming targets? In the poor places of the Middle
East with their high birth rates, children are a greater portion of the
population than in advanced countries. Only a genuine monster would launch
such an invasion, and only an equal monster would defend it.
To my mind, this damnable behavior of Israel’s could be compared to, say,
the Detroit Police Department, supported by the Michigan National Guard,
invading the ghettos of Detroit to capture a few criminals and killing
literally thousands of innocent people in the process and leaving the place
a pile of rubble. The whole world would be appalled. But even that
comparison is inadequate. Israel was not chasing criminals. What Israel was
really hoping to do was murder the leaders of Hamas, a legitimate political
party. But even if Hamas were not a legitimate party, Israel’s act is
comparable to Detroit’s police and National Guard killing thousands to try
getting a few members of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s.
We’ve surmised that things like this letter go on in private because we see
our politicians countenancing mass murder and we see the entire Middle East
in flames owing to the same cause. But having the paper in hand is another
matter. For instance, we know Newt Gingrich received the best part of $20
million for his last nomination campaign from billionaire Sheldon Adelson
and proceeded to make campaign speeches about there being “no such thing as
a Palestinian.”
We know former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a man whose career was
well financed by special interests, actually said in the late part of his
career that Israel should just sweep all the Palestinians out of the
country.
We know that former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in response
to a question about 500,000 deaths of children in Iraq, “We think the price
is worth it,” and does anyone wonder why Albright not only strongly
supports Hillary but recently spoke of “a special place in hell for women”
who didn’t support Hillary?
It tells us a great deal of the lengths to which an American politician
will go to secure large sources of funds. It tells us too something about
her relationship with the recipient that Hillary believed she could freely
address him in such an appalling fashion. Finally, it confirms everyone’s
worst fears about the Israel Lobby and the extremes to which its supporters
are prepared to go.
We all know there is a huge amount of behind-the-scenes, dirty dealing in
American politics, but not just in politics, in foreign affairs. There is
no other explanation for the murky, bloody swamp into which America’s
government has towed the country. America has been continuously at war for
a quarter century. It has killed great numbers of people and destroyed
whole societies. And none of those people threatened the United States, not
even the Taleban who were arbitrarily and without proof held responsible
for the events of 9/11.
Virtually all of it relates directly or indirectly to Israel and making the
Middle East comfortable for a state which itself never hesitates to
threaten, attack, kill, imprison, torture to gain its objectives, its
objectives being to enlarge itself far beyond its original accepted
boundaries, to reduce the native Palestinian population of millions to such
miserable discomfort that they flee their homes, and to assure itself of
hegemony throughout the region, seeing independent-minded leaders like
Assad or Gadhafi literally murdered and their countries torn apart.
It is a program which parallels closely historical examples which none of
us has been taught to admire or approve, historical examples which have
caused great wars and massive human misery. We have established some of our
greatest international institutions precisely out of the wreckage of
history with the aim of not letting it happen again, but today every one of
these institutions is compromised by American pressure on Israel’s behalf,
the work of corrupt politicians like Hillary Clinton.
So it is happening again, although on a smaller scale – though I wouldn’t
want the job of explaining to the people of Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and
a number of other places that their desolation and misery are on a smaller
scale.
The present Secretary General doesn’t even peep at America’s many appalling
acts. Past Secretaries General who managed to get elected despite their
opposition to American imperialism – an example was Boutros Boutros-Ghali –
were removed in behind-the-scenes plots. Madeleine Albright for example won
her State Department spurs arranging just that kind of thing. Combinations
of threats and bribes do the job nicely, and, of course, the UN hasn’t
forgotten the long period of time the United States simply refused to pay
its treaty-required dues, a quarter of the institution’s budget.
But ordinary Americans and others rarely get even a peek at any of the
details going into the shaping of their world. Here is one small instance
where they do, and it is a telling one.