HILLARY’S SECRET LETTER AND THE WHOLE MATTER OF ENDLESS WAR AND THE ALMOST COMPLETE CORRUPTION OF AMERICA’S GOVERNMENT

John Chuckman

 

NOTE: It comes to my attention that there is reason to suspect the original source of the second letter. It may well have been a hoax. But even if that proves to be the case, I stand by my comments and observations as things which needed saying, having their own validity quite apart from that of the letter.

 

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.

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.

 

FOOTNOTE: It comes to my attention that there is reason to suspect the original source of the second letter. It may well have been a hoax. But even if that proves to be the case, I stand by my comments and observations as things which needed saying, having their own validity quite apart from that of the letter.

 

THINGS MY MOTHER NEVER TOLD ME

John Chuckman

 

Despite my title, this is not a memoir, dealing as it does with some of the most deadly serious subjects on the planet.

I was brought up by a hard-working, fiercely honest woman. She was brave in the most profound way, not the momentary, over-hyped stuff of soldiers and sports stars, but the unsung stuff of facing great odds and painful situations and doing her duty, not for moments or days, but for year after year. She was unusual for the early 1950s, a time of great social conformity in America, for having left my father whose drunken abuse she refused to endure. She set off on her own with two very young boys and never looked back. She always set an example of high standards, expecting the same from my brother and me, made us regular church-goers, and generally bestowed a great deal of love on us.

For the greatest part of my life, I believed in the same values and precepts she taught although I parted with church-going before I was a man. I was not without cynicism about many things I observed through life, but now, in my old age, I realize forcefully how entirely different are the rules which actually govern human affairs, and especially those pertaining to international affairs. Virtually everything my mother taught me, and my church too, was mistaken.

We hear a good deal these days about the problem of bullying in schools, and my instincts always put me on the side of victims and make me question teachers and authorities who do not step in to protect the innocent. But just look at the major political and economic leaders of our time: virtually every one of them has been an unqualified bully. It appears that being a bully features prominently on the road to success.

And we all believed that the bad guys never won and that time would see victims receive justice. The painful truth is though that the bad guys, at least all the clever and well-connected ones, always win and their victims almost never receive justice.

My mother had no tolerance for lying, and obvious lies still try my patience, but lying is in fact one of the chief occupations of those who govern us. Messrs. Obama, Netanyahu, Cameron, Harper are all the grossest liars, as were Sharon, Clinton, Blair, Bush, Cheney, and a very long list of others notable for their positions and the headlines they generated. Most of these individuals, along with a good many others, likely have never, in their entire careers, uttered a single truthful sentence, discounting the platitudes and bromides they are accustomed to delivering.

The issue of lying most comes into prominence in the case of war. I have seen so many wars in my lifetime, and it is painfully clear that every one of them was based on lies. The poor citizens of every land are never told why their lives are being snatched and their wealth squandered. They are certainly never consulted about whether so terribly serious a measure as war should be undertaken. Instead they are lied to. The ghastly horror of Vietnam, all that vast work of death and destruction on a genocidal scale – carpet bombing, napalm, and poisons dropped – was about nothing which mattered to almost all ordinary people, it was about blood-drenched lies their leaders told them.

And how can you possibly have meaningful democracy when the voters are lied to daily by those running for office and those holding office? You cannot, clearly.

And today, the whole Middle East is either in flames or has recently passed through war or revolution – Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Libya, and still others. We are given many reasons for this phenomenon, but at the heart of the matter, there really is only one cause, and that cause is never mentioned in our press.

In all cases, American is found either covertly directing affairs or at least pouring money and weapons into countries to de-stabilize them. And why does it do this? It reflects a vast effort to mold the Middle East into a shape comfortable for the rather unusual requirements of its colony in the region, Israel. Why unusual requirements? What other small country in the world seems to need to control and dominate everything around it for at least a thousand miles? And this is only necessary because Israel refuses to obey almost any of the laws and customs of nations as we have grown to understand them in modern times. Israel continues to rule areas conquered in what itself was a fraudulent war, the Six Day War, nearly fifty years ago, and it doesn’t just rule these places against all international law and conventions, it treats their millions of residents as entitled to no law or justice, no hopes or aspirations, and not even entitled to hold the property they have because whenever a chunk of it appeals to Israelis, they simply take it.

Such is the behavior of the self-designated “only democracy in the Middle East,” a glib and meaningless phrase which completely ignores the fact that half the people ruled by Israel have no votes and no human rights. Actually, it is a good thing there are not more such “democracies,” or the region would be total hell on earth. Democracy for some is not democracy at all. Think of Orwell’s precept in Animal Farm, a book intended to satirize Stalin’s Soviet Union, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal.” That could have been just as well written about modern Israel. Israel’s embrace of neighbors who are virally anti-democratic – from Egypt to Saudi Arabia – again says something profound about the nature of Israeli “democracy.”

And the much bigger country which likes to style itself, the world’s oldest democracy and the land of the free, not only supports Israel in its disregard for law, customs, and international conventions, it finances a great deal of the tyrannous behavior. Where is the regard for democracy, rights, or even due process in that?

The always-tolerated violation of accepted principles by Israel which seems most remarkable to me is its regular theft of homes and farms. Americans are comfortable with bombings and assassinations and torture, at least judging from their national behavior over a good many decades in a number of countries, but when you consider how Americans revere property rights above all else in their society, it does seem it should be another matter when it comes to property being swiped in public. Property and profits are the truest guiding, long-term principles in American society. So you might think, despite the shower of lies in which Americans are immersed concerning Israel and its neighbors, public theft would stir something deep in their hearts. So why don’t we see American leaders, even if they can’t get worked up over endless occupation and abuse and killing and apartheid-like laws, at least strenuously objecting to Israel’s regular, high-handed thefts of property?

America’s politicians always back Israel because America’s government is constituted on the fallacious and unethical concept that money is free speech when it comes to political campaign contributions – fixed by a Supreme Court whose history includes vigorous support of such other glorious principles as slavery. When you allow such a political financing system to dominate your politics, it follows, ipso facto, that those able and willing to give very large sums as campaign contributions (as well as favorable press coverage, there not being a single major newspaper or network in America which does not play the game of boosting Israel) receive access and have their voices heard to the virtual exclusion of others.

What is certainly one of the most efficient and untiring lobbies, the Israel lobby, understands America’s system perfectly and has adapted over time to work it perfectly, resulting almost in a custom-designed, industrial-scale machine for turning out loyal and uncritical politicians in one country concerning the acts of a foreign country. Again, there’s very little truth and even less democracy in that way of conducting politics.