=By= John Chuckman
[dropcap]A[/dropcap]n 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.
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.
Editor Note: As Mr. Chuckman notes, the access to this letter seems to have disappeared. I have spoken with him and he stands by this article. I have published Mr. Chuckman’s work for almost a decade and he has always been highly credible. However, as with any matter where source material may be unavailable, some caution should be used. In my opinion, there are points here that are important above and beyond the letter.
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 20,000 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.
Bill Clinton and Haim Saban (Ynet)
Editor’s Note. Hillary is not the only one friendly with Saban.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Chuckman lives in Canada and is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. He is a lifelong student of history. He writes with a passionate desire for honesty, the rule of reason, and concern for human decency. His first book has just been published, The Decline of the American Empire and the Rise of China as a Global Power, published by Constable and Robinson, London. He blogs at : Chuckman’s Choice of Words”
NOTE: YOU CAN READ BELOW, ON PAGE 2, STEPHEN ZUNES OWN PRESENTATION ON THIS THORNY ISSUE, in which he essentially corroborates the existence of this letter. His essay appeared on The Huffington Post, hardly a radical sheet, and therefore all the more credible in this regard.
Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s position on the Israeli occupation of the West Bank in a recently-released letter does not bode well for her future foreign policy.
Originally posted on Foreign Policy in Focus, July 10, 2015
On July 2, former secretary of state and frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination Hillary Clinton wrote a letter to Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban, a strong supporter of the right-wing Netanyahu government, denouncing human rights activists who support boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation.
In the letter, made public a few days later, Clinton made a number of statements which are not only demonstrably false but raise serious concerns regarding what kind of policies she would pursue as president.
She claimed that the BDS movement was working to “malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people.” Though some BDS activists target Israel as a whole, most efforts on college campuses and elsewhere focus solely on the Israeli occupation, particularly companies that profit from that occupation and support illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. In any case, the BDS campaign does not “malign and undermine” Jews. This cynical effort to depict the movement as anti-Semitic could be an indication of the kind of rhetoric she would use as president to discredit human rights activists who challenge her policies elsewhere.
Clinton claims in the letter that initiatives through the United Nations critical of Israeli violations of international humanitarian law are inherently “anti-Israel,” thereby implying that those who raise concerns about a given country’s human rights record do so not because of a desire to uphold universally recognized ethical and legal principles, but because of an ideological bias against a particular country. Although some UN agencies have disproportionately targeted Israel for criticism, the vast majority of such reports and resolutions have been consistent with findings and concerns raised by reputable international human rights organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) and Israeli groups (such as the B’tselem human rights group and the veterans’ organization Breaking the Silence.)
Clinton further argues that it is illegitimate to use sanctions to “dictate” that an occupying power should end its illegal colonization of occupied territory and withdraw to within its internationally recognized boundaries in accordance with UN resolutions and international law. Indeed, she rejects any kind of “outside or unilateral actions” against such flagrant violations of international legal norms. Instead, she insists that resolution to such conflicts be based solely on negotiations between an occupying power and those under occupation regardless of the gross asymmetry in power between the two parties and a series of UN Security Council resolutions, rulings of the International Court of Justice, and longstanding international legal principles that recognize the illegitimacy of any country expanding its borders by force and moving settlers into occupied territory.
Clinton’s lack of concern for international law is also evidenced in her reference to the predominantly Palestinian Old City of Jerusalem as being part of Israel, even though it was seized by Israeli forces in the 1967 war and is recognized by the UN and the international community as being under foreign belligerent occupation.
She also proudly references her condemnation of the 2009 report by the UN Human Rights Council–headed by the distinguished South African jurist Richard Goldstone (a Zionist Jew)–which documented war crimes by both Israel and Hamas. In the letter, she implies that the report denied Israel’s right to self-defense, when it in fact explicitly recognized Israel’s right to do so. The report’s only objections to Israeli conduct were in regard to attacks on civilian targets, not its military actions against extremist militias lobbing rockets into Israel. The implication, therefore, is that Hillary Clinton believes killing civilians can constitute legitimate self-defense.
Her reference to Israel as “a vibrant democracy in a region dominated by autocracy”–while certainly true on a number of levels–ignores Israel’s denial of democratic rights to Palestinians under occupation. Furthermore, it ignores her history as a senator and secretary of state of backing Arab dictatorships in the face of pro-democracy struggles by their own peoples, which has contributed to the predominance of autocratic rule in the Middle East.
In the letter, she also reiterates the romantic Western myth that Israel is “a vibrant bloom in the middle of the desert.” Although Israelis are certainly responsible for impressive advances in irrigation technology in the Negev region and elsewhere, it ignores centuries of agriculture and urban settlement in what is now Palestine, Lebanon, and the western parts of Jordan and Syria, long known as the “Fertile Crescent.” Indeed, Israel originally seized much of its fertile lands by force from Palestinian farmers.
There are other troubling aspects of the two-page letter as well: She boasts about her efforts to block UN recognition of Palestinian statehood. She pledges to work with Republicans to fight BDS activists, who are mostly registered Democrats. She links anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism and the terrorist attacks against Jews in France. In addition, by denouncing BDS because it “singles out Israel,” she is implying that any human rights group that focuses on one country (i.e., Tibet, Burma, Western Sahara, Syria, or Iran) is thereby illegitimate.
Finally, her pledge to “defend Israel at every turn” and that as president she will “always stand up for Israel” is particularly troubling, given her propensity to equate “Israel” with the policies of its right-wing government.
Taken altogether, this letter raises very troubling questions regarding the kind of president Hillary Clinton would be, not just in regard to Israel and Palestine, but in relation to human rights and international law overall and her reaction to those who support such principles.
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