by Jeff Dunetz
Except for the time she needed New York’s Jewish voting bloc, Hillary Clinton has never been pro-Israel.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, wrote an op-ed for the liberal Jewish Newspaper the Forward. In the piece she pledges her continued friendship with the State of Israel, and to Israeli Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. That pledge should raise the eyebrows of any fair-minded observer.
If
one looks at Hillary Clinton’s public history one finds a lifetime of
anti-Israel positions. But wait some might say, Hillary was a big
supporter of Israel when she was in the U.S. Senate. Indeed, she was.
With the possible exception of the time from her first campaign New
York’s Senate seat in 2000 to her resignation from the Senate to become
Secretary of State in January 2009– except for the time she needed New
York’s Jewish voting bloc, Hillary Clinton has never been pro-Israel.
And when she held the position of Secretary of State, she helped Barack
Obama craft his anti-Israel positions.
Even before her marriage to Bill, Hillary Clinton was opposing Israel and promoting the forces of terrorism. In his book American Evita on page 49, Christopher Anderson writes.
At
a time when elements of the American Left embraced the Palestinian
cause and condemned Israel, Hillary was telling friends that she was
“sympathetic” to the terrorist organization and admired its flamboyant
leader, Yasser Arafat. When Arafat made his famous appearance before the
UN General Assembly in November 1974 wearing his revolutionary uniform
and his holster on his hip, Bill “was outraged like everybody else,”
said a Yale Law School classmate. But not Hillary, who tried to convince
Bill that Arafat was a “freedom fighter” trying to free his people from
their Israeli “oppressors.”
On
page 50 of the same book, the author relates an experience that Hillary
and her future husband had during a trip to Arkansas in 1973:
It
was during this trip to his home state that Bill took Hillary to meet a
politically well-connected friend. When they drove up to the house,
Bill and Hillary noticed that a menorah-the seven branched Hebrew
candelabrum (not to be confused with the more common and subtler
mezuzah)-has been affixed to the front door.
“My
daddy was half Jewish,” explained Bill’s friend. “One day when he came
to visit, my daddy placed the menorah on my door because he wanted me to
be proud that we were part Jewish. And I wasn’t about to say no to my
daddy.”
To his
astonishment, as soon as Hillary saw the menorah, she refused to get out
of the car. “Bill walked up to me and said that she was hot and tired,
but later he explained the real reason.” According to the friend and
another eyewitness, Bill said, “I’m sorry, but Hillary’s really tight
with the people in the PLO in New York. They’re friends of hers, and she
just doesn’t feel right about the menorah.”
Hillary’s
attitude did not change when she became first lady. In May 1998 Ms.
Clinton became the first person ever who attached to any presidential
administration ever to call for a Palestinian State. Think about that
for a moment, nobody in the Carter administration made that demand
neither did anyone in the Reagan or Bush 41 presidency. It took Hillary
Clinton to “break the ice.” She told a youth conference on Middle East
peace in Switzerland, that she supports the eventual creation of an
independent Palestinian state. Her spokesperson, Marsha Berry told
reporters: “These remarks are her own personal view.”
In
November 1999, while on a purported State visit to the Middle East, she
publicly appeared with Yasser Arafat’s wife Suha. Mrs. Arafat made a
slanderous allegation:
“Our
[Palestinian] people have been submitted to the daily and intensive use
of poisonous gas by the Israeli forces, which has led to an increase in
cancer cases among women and children.” Suha also accused Israel of
contaminating much of the water sources used by Palestinians with
“chemical materials” and poisoning Palestinian women and children with
toxic gases.”
Mrs.
Clinton sat by silently listening to a real-time translation, and the
terrorist’s wife hug and a kiss when she finished speaking.
Later,
many hours after the event, and only after a media furor put her on the
spot for what many view as a bit more than a mere political “boo boo
Mrs. Clinton called on all sides to refrain from “inflammatory rhetoric
and baseless accusations,” including Israel, whose leaders made no such
accusations.
Glossing over
this repugnant affair, Hillary Clinton has yet to specifically
contradict and denounce the monstrous lies uttered by Yasser Arafat’s
wife in her presence. Only years later did she make feeble attempt at an
excuse, the translator screwed up.
Before
her tenure in the State Department, Bill and Hillary Clinton made mega
dollars from their extensive involvement with Dubai. Besides being a
leader in the movement to boycott Israel, Dubai is the “Hong Kong” of
the terrorist world. And a major commerce and shipping point for the
“business-side” of terrorism. Bill and Hilary are major friends of
Dubai, to the point where the Clinton Foundation have established Dubai
Study departments in universities in the US and London. They worked hard
at granting legitimacy to this Jew-hating, terrorist supporting nation.
While she was running for President in 2007, San Francisco Examiner columnist P.J. Corkery, wrote that Clinton made
$10 million a year from Yucaipa a Dubai firm. Ron Berkle, the owner of
Yucaipa companies was a major fund-raiser for Bill and Hillary. And all
this was before the recent questions about the Clinton Foundation
donations.
The Clintons
also had a connection to what was then, the worlds biggest exporter of
terrorism, Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Royal Family donated $10,000,000 to
the Clinton Library.
According to a 1993 New York Times article, Prince
Turki bin Feisal was a college classmate of Bill’s at Georgetown
University and (at the time of the article’s writing) was the head of
the Saudi Arabian intelligence service. While he was still governor of
Arkansas, it looks like Bill Clinton cashed in on that relationship,
“work[ing] hard to secure a multimillion-dollar Saudi donation to a
Middle Eastern studies program at the University of Arkansas.” Due to
the intervention of the Gulf War, the first installment of $3.5 million
didn’t arrive until 1992, with another $20 million arriving after Bill
Clinton’s first inauguration.
During
her Senate years Ms. Clinton became a vocal supporter of Israel because
she needed the Jewish vote. But one of her first actions after leaving
the Senate to become Secretary of State was to ignore a previous deal
with Israel and call for the end of the construction of new homes in
existing settlement neighborhoods.
Clinton’s
demand for a building freeze in existing settlement communities broke a
US/Israel agreement made during the Bush administration. Ms. Clinton
said there was never an agreement between Israel and the US about
natural expansion of existing settlements. But Elliot Abrams who negotiated the agreement for the United States said Clinton’s contention is simply not true.
As
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton first demanded the “settlement”
freeze in 2009 and was quickly backed up by Obama. What she perceived as
a minor concession (a “settlement” freeze including no new housing
units in existing communities) was for Israel a grave sacrifice. For all
intents and purposes Clinton was telling Israeli parents their married
children could no longer live in their neighborhoods
This
was a major error by the Clinton State Department and it was compounded
by the inclusion of Jerusalem in the mix and the constant public
berating of the Jewish State by Clinton and Obama that as we know,
continued even after she left the administration.
Immediately
the Palestinians seized upon the Hillary-created settlement issue.
Seeing an opportunity to avoid talking, they used the administration’s
demands, to make a “settlement” freeze a precondition to further talks
even though there were negotiations and construction going on
simultaneously before Hilary Clinton became Secretary of State.
In August 2009 Prime Minister Netanyahu announced a ten-month “settlement” freeze.
It was approved by the cabinet and implemented on November 25, 2009 and
was to run till September 25, 2010. Despite pressure from the United
States, the Palestinians refused to join any talks the first 9+ months
of the freeze; they did not come to the negotiation table till September
2010, three weeks before the freeze ended.
As
the end of the construction halt approached, the US began to negotiate
with the Israel to extend the freeze. Based on their experience with
Clinton denying the deal negotiated by Elliot Abrams during the Bush
Administration, Israel demanded that any proposal be presented in
writing, as any oral deal with Clinton and the Obama administration was
worth the paper on which is was printed on.
The written offer never came; the Secretary of State wasn’t negotiating in good faith. Instead Ms. Clinton was playing “Bait and Switch.”
As Israel waited for a letter clarifying America’s guarantees in
exchange for a proposed building ban for Jewish residents of Judea and
Samaria, a diplomatic source finally came forward saying that no such
letter is on its way. The United States Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton misled Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The source, a senior
diplomat with inside knowledge of Netanyahu’s recent meetings in
Washington, said Clinton made commitments when talking to Netanyahu, but
later slipped out of them by claiming that she had not been speaking on
behalf of U.S. President Obama – who, she said in the end, did not give
his approval.
In 2011
speaking at the at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the
liberal Brookings Institute, Clinton tried to delegitimize Israel as a
free nation by expressing concern for Israel’s social climate in the
wake of limitations regarding female singing in the IDF and gender
segregation on public transportation. Both were accommodations made to
the Orthodox communities in Israel.
She
referred to the decision of some IDF soldiers to leave an event where
female soldiers were singing; she said it reminded her of the situation
in Iran. It did? Wow! In Iran the women would have been lashed or
executed. In Israel they sang, but the people who felt it was against
their religious beliefs were allowed to walk out. Most senior officers
in the IDF supported the women’s right to sing. It’s called personal freedom.
Clinton
also spoke of her shock that some Jerusalem buses had assigned separate
seating areas for women. “It’s reminiscent of Rosa Parks,” she said, taking
the typical progressive position that faith should not matter outside a
place of worship. Clinton’s statement was part of the continued attempt
by the Obama administration/Clinton State Department to de-legitimize
the Israeli democracy and destroy one of the reasons for American
support of Israel, the fact it is the only democracy in the Middle East.
And then there was her book “Hard Choices” which included some anti-Israel passages:
When
we left the city and visited Jericho, in the West Bank, I got my first
glimpse of life under occupation for Palestinians, who were denied the
dignity and self-determination that Americans take for granted” (pg
302).
She says
nothing about terrorism, such as blowing up buses with school children,
nothing about the fact that during he presidency of her husband Yassir
Arafat turned down a deal that would have given him about 98% of what he
wanted (at least that’s what Bill Clinton said).
“The
sticking point would be Jerusalem. East Jerusalem had been captured
along with the West bank in 1967, and Palestinians dreamed of one day
establishing the capital of their future state there.” (pg 317).
Hillary’s
statement is totally biased. Israel didn’t capture Jerusalem; Jordan
did in 1948. Jews were the majority of the Jerusalem Population from
1844 through the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 when they
were kicked out by Jordan. In fact, Muslims were the third largest
religion in the city until about 1890. The Palestinian’s want East
Jerusalem as their capital because they don’t want Israel to have it.
Even
after the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE when the Romans punished the Jews
for revolting by changing the name of their country from Judea to
Palestinia (after the Philistines the ancient Jewish Enemy who no longer
existed) and the name of the holy city from Jerusalem to Aelia
Capitolina (literally Capitoline Hill of the House of Aelius) , most of
the world recognized the Holy Land and Jerusalem as Jewish. The truth
of the matter is that even ancient Muslim writings recognized Jerusalem
as a Jewish City.
“There
has been nearly a decade of terror, arising from the second intifada,
which started in September 2000. About a thousand Israelis were killed
and eight thousand wounded in terrorist attacks from September 2000 to
February 2005. Three times as many Palestinians were killed and
thousands more were injured in the same period.” (pg 308).
Like
many who are anti-Israel Hillary Clinton draws a false equivalency
between the terrorist attacks on Israel and Israel’s attempts to defend
herself. To maintain her ridiculous logic, the US should be chastised
because more al Qaeda terrorists died than Americans were killed on
9/11/01.
The second intifada was a horrible period of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians, bus loads of children blown up, pizza places bombed, even a hotel where families were celebrating the Passover Seder in peace. There is no equivalence between the attacks and Israel’s attempts to defend herself.
“Because
of higher birth rates among Palestinians and lower birth rates among
Israelis, we were approaching the day when Palestinians would make up a
majority of the combined population of Israel and the Palestinian
territories, and most of those Palestinians would be relegated to
second-class citizenship and unable to vote.” (pg 312)
The
page 312 quote was reminiscent of John Kerry’s apartheid remark (which
he backed away from). What Israel’s deputy defense minister Danny
Danon said about Kerry’s remark applies here also.
To suggest that the Jewish people would ever establish an apartheid regime was particularly hurtful.
Equally
hurtful was the implied double standard. Although the administration
has from time to time chided the Palestinians for “unhelpful” steps,
those comments have not come close to the pointed criticism that has
been leveled at our government. This policy of sharing the blame for the
collapse of the peace talks, which from the outset was deemed by most
independent experts as a long-shot attempt at best, has created the
illusion of parity between the two sides. The secretary’s comments make
it seem that Israel’s decisions to issue housing tenders, or to
exhaustively debate whether to release convicted murders who would have
very likely received the death penalty in U.S. courts, were just as
damaging to the peace process as the “unity” pact that Palestinian
Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has now signed with Hamas, a
virulently anti-Semitic terrorist organization.
And
then there are the Clinton emails. While most of the media coverage of
the emails from her close friend Sidney Blumenthal are about his
recommendations about Libya. Blumenthal sent many emails about Israel.
Some of then consisted of forwarding articles from his anti-Semitic son, writer Max Blumenthal. But others were recommendations of policy, generally one sided describing Israel as the oppressor. As reported by NRO:
Blumenthal
sent dozens of e-mails advising Clinton on Israel in 2010. Before her
March speech at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC),
Blumenthal sent Clinton a breathless article from left-wing Israeli
writer Uri Avnery accusing the Netanyahu government of “starting a
rebellion” against the United States and defending interests that
diverge from America’s. “I have to speak to AIPAC tomorrow,” Clinton
responded. “How — and should I — use this [sic]?” Blumenthal promised to
send another memo the next day.
In
that memo, he instructed Clinton to “hold Bibi [Netanyahu]’s feet to
the fire” on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. “Perhaps most
controversial,” he continued, would be for Clinton to “remind [AIPAC] in
as subtle but also direct a way as you can that it does not have a
monopoly over American Jewish opinion. Bibi is stage managing US Jewish
organizations (and neocons, and the religious right, and whomever else
he can muster) against the administration. AIPAC itself has become an
organ of the Israeli right, specifically Likud.”
Interestingly if you asked Likud, they would claim that AIPAC favors Israel’s leftist parties.
On
May 17, Blumenthal forwarded Clinton an article on the Israeli
government’s decision to deny professor and Palestinian activist Noam
Chomsky access to the West Bank. “Barring him for his political opinions
has created a needless PR disaster,” he wrote. “The US should not be a
passive onlooker. . . . The US effort on his behalf to gain entry should
be part of the story.” Clinton forwarded the memo to staff with
instructions to “pls print 3 copies.”
Chomsky has been fierce in his opposition to Israel’s right to defend herself from terrorism (some even say he is an anti-Semite), and had been officially banned from the country since 2010
In
an e-mail from May 31 entitled “Several observations on the Israeli
raid,” Blumenthal blames Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s family
inferiority complex for his decision to launch a raid on the so-called
“Gaza Flotilla,” a group of ships seeking to break the Israeli blockade
of Gaza. “Bibi desperately seeks his father’s approbation and can never
equal his dead brother,” Blumenthal wrote. He then hinted that the raid
was deliberately orchestrated to kill the peace process and humiliate
President Obama before his scheduled visit with the prime minister.
Clinton forwarded the message to Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of
staff at the State Department. “FYI and I told you so,” she wrote
Now
Hillary Clinton is running for President. And she is campaigning on the
basis that she is a friend of Israel, just as she did in the Senate,
just as Obama did twice. As Secretary of State she was the architect of
the policy of the most anti-Israel president since the rebirth of Israel
in 1948. It was a policy which reflected views she has held her entire
life, with the exception of the nine-year period where she ran for and
held the office of U.S. Senator from New York State. Let’s hope
the Republican who gets the nod will not let the former Secretary of
State get away with hiding her true past.
Jeff Dunetz
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/17862#.VkJMiL-zdds
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
A 64-page terrorist operations manual recently released
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James Comey told U.S. intelligence officials last month that the Bureau has approximately 900 ongoing Islamic State-related inquiries, most of which involve homegrown suspects.
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