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Tough Hillary Clinton says ‘dreadful’ pictures of dead women and children make it hard to get at truth– Hamas is to blame

 

Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton

I couldn’t read too much of this, Hillary Clinton’s sit-down with Jeffrey Goldberg. She’s so tough it’s disturbing. 

Yes, Goldberg gets sick access, and why? Because the former Israeli corporal is the living embodiment of the Israel lobby in American politics: Jewish leaders read him closely, they trust him. And any ambitious Democratic politician, say Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, who wants to kiss the tuchus of the Israel lobby can do so readily by sitting down across from him and performing in such a manner that Goldberg will proclaim “masterful,” as he does of Hillary’s mind. 

That performance here is pure toughness. Hillary repeatedly takes a position to the right of Obama, The Palestinians stage-manage civilian deaths to win the sympathy of an anti-Semitic world. This is the very worst moment, Goldberg gets to be the sensitive interlocutor:

JG: Nevertheless there are hundreds of children—

HRC: Absolutely, and it’s dreadful.

JG: Who do you hold responsible for those deaths? How do you parcel out blame?

HRC: I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame because it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.

Appalling in its insensitivity. We shouldn’t be moved by the killings of children.

Hillary slams Hamas as a guerrilla resistance movement. But while she twice faults Russia for occupying a neighbor state, she never refers to Israeli occupation or settlements, except to praise Netanyahu’s glorious settlement freeze. Do you wonder why there’s a guerrilla resistance movement in Palestine? That’s why.

She peddles a lot of false history here. Hamas started this conflict. Barak offered the Palestinians everything they could want and Arafat walked away (in fact, the West Bank the Palestinians got would have been nearly bisected by Israeli settlements). Says Peter Beinart in Haaretz: “Clinton offered the most articulate, sophisticated, passionate defense of Netanyahu’s conduct I’ve heard from a government official on either side of the Atlantic. Unfortunately, important chunks of it aren’t true.”

Here are excerpts of the abominable portions. On Iran, she undermines Obama.

Goldberg: Are you taking a harder line than your former colleagues in the Obama administration are taking on this matter?

HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON: It’s a consistent line. I’ve always been in the camp that held that they did not have a right to enrichment. Contrary to their claim, there is no such thing as a right to enrich. This is absolutely unfounded. There is no such right. I am well aware that I am not at the negotiating table anymore, but I think it’s important to send a signal to everybody who is there that there cannot be a deal unless there is a clear set of restrictions on Iran. The preference would be no enrichment. The potential fallback position would be such little enrichment that they could not break out. So, little or no enrichment has always been my position.

JG: Am I wrong in saying that the Obama administration’s negotiators have a more flexible understanding of this issue at the moment?

HRC: I don’t want to speak for them, but I would argue that Iran, through the voice of the supreme leader, has taken a very maximalist position

She blames Hamas for the latest conflict. Not a word about Palestinian efforts to form a unity government between Fatah and Hamas in May, which Netanyahu opposed.

HRC: the corner that Hamas felt itself in, I’m not surprised that Hamas provoked another attack [this June.

JG: The Israeli response, was it disproportionate?

HRC: Israel was attacked by rockets from Gaza. Israel has a right to defend itself. The steps Hamas has taken to embed rockets and command-and-control facilities and tunnel entrances in civilian areas, this makes a response by Israel difficult. Of course Israel, just like the United States, or any other democratic country, should do everything they can possibly do to limit civilian casualties.

JG: Do you think Israel did enough to limit civilian casualties?

She could say simply, Yes. But again she goes to the right of Obama on the Gaza slaughter. He’s had the temerity to say, Israel could do more to prevent civilian casualties.

HRC: It’s unclear. I think Israel did what it had to do to respond to the rockets. And there is the surprising number and complexity of the tunnels, and Hamas has consistently, not just in this conflict, but in the past, been less than protective of their civilians.

JG: Before we continue talking endlessly about Gaza, can I ask you if you think we spend too much time on Gaza and on Israel-Palestine generally?

He’s asking her, Don’t people single Israel out? And right on cue, Clinton goes down a list of trouble from the Ukraine and Syria and wonders at all the attention Israel gets.

HRC: and yet we do see this enormous international reaction against Israel, and Israel’s right to defend itself, and the way Israel has to defend itself. This reaction is uncalled for and unfair.

JG: What do you think causes this reaction?

HRC: There are a number of factors going into it. You can’t ever discount anti-Semitism, especially with what’s going on in Europe today. There are more demonstrations against Israel by an exponential amount than there are against Russia seizing part of Ukraine and shooting down a civilian airliner. So there’s something else at work here than what you see on TV.

And what you see on TV is so effectively stage-managed by Hamas, and always has been. What you see is largely what Hamas invites and permits Western journalists to report on from Gaza. It’s the old PR problem that Israel has. Yes, there are substantive, deep levels of antagonism or anti-Semitism towards Israel, because it’s a powerful state, a really effective military. And Hamas paints itself as the defender of the rights of the Palestinians to have their own state. So the PR battle is one that is historically tilted against Israel.

JG: Nevertheless there are hundreds of children—

HRC: Absolutely, and it’s dreadful.

JG: Who do you hold responsible for those deaths? How do you parcel out blame?

HRC: I’m not sure it’s possible to parcel out blame because it’s impossible to know what happens in the fog of war. Some reports say, maybe it wasn’t the exact UN school that was bombed, but it was the annex to the school next door where they were firing the rockets. And I do think oftentimes that the anguish you are privy to because of the coverage, and the women and the children and all the rest of that, makes it very difficult to sort through to get to the truth.

But she really doesn’t have trouble getting at the truth. It’s Hamas’s fault.

There’s no doubt in my mind that Hamas initiated this conflict and wanted to do so in order to leverage its position, having been shut out by the Egyptians post-Morsi, having been shunned by the Gulf, having been pulled into a technocratic government with Fatah and the Palestinian Authority that might have caused better governance and a greater willingness on the part of the people of Gaza to move away from tolerating Hamas in their midst. So the ultimate responsibility has to rest on Hamas and the decisions it made.

That doesn’t mean that, just as we try to do in the United States and be as careful as possible in going after targets to avoid civilians, that there aren’t mistakes that are made. We’ve made them. I don’t know a nation, no matter what its values are—and I think that democratic nations have demonstrably better values in a conflict position—that hasn’t made errors, but ultimately the responsibility rests with Hamas.

JG: Several years ago, when you were in the Senate, we had a conversation about what would move Israeli leaders to make compromises for peace. You’ve had a lot of arguments with Netanyahu. What is your thinking on Netanyahu now?

HRC: Let’s step back. First of all, [former Israeli Prime Minister] Yitzhak Rabin was prepared to do so much and he was murdered for that belief. And then [former Israeli Prime Minister] Ehud Barak offered everything you could imagine being given under any realistic scenario to the Palestinians for their state, and [former Palestinian leader Yasir] Arafat walked away. I don’t care about the revisionist history. I know that Arafat walked away, okay? Everybody says, “American needs to say something.” Well, we said it, it was the Clinton parameters, we put it out there, and Bill Clinton is adored in Israel, as you know. He got Netanyahu to give up territory, which Netanyahu believes lost him the prime ministership [in his first term], but he moved in that direction, as hard as it was.

Finally, this bit about Hamas, again undermining Obama from the right, inside the Democratic Party.

JG: There’s a critique you hear of the Obama administration in the Gulf, in Jordan, in Israel, that it is a sign of naiveté to believe that there are Islamists you can work with, and that Hamas might even be a group that you could work with. Is there a role for political Islam in these countries? Can we ever find a way to work with them?

HRC: I think it’s too soon to tell. I would not put Hamas in the category of people we could work with. I don’t think that is realistic because its whole reason for being is resistance against Israel, destruction of Israel, and it is married to very nasty tactics and ideologies, including virulent anti-Semitism. I do not think they should be in any way treated as a legitimate interlocutor, especially because if you do that, it redounds to the disadvantage of the Palestinian Authority, which has a lot of problems, but historically has changed its charter, moved away from the kind of guerrilla resistance movement of previous decades.

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Baltimore political reporter Frank Kent wrote the book The Great Game of Politics, published back in 1923. In it, he has chapters on why politicians running for office never tell the unvarnished truth, how telling the unvarnished truth is invariably fatal for a politician. He calls this the price we pay for universal suffrage. Whether or not he’s right on where he places the blame, his book does demonstrate how U.S. politicians have been lying as a matter of course for a long time.

My father voted for Goldwater in 1964 and for McGovern in 1972. (In both cases, I disagreed with him at the time, and it is only with time that I have come to realize that he was right in both cases.) In both cases, his reason was the same: he voted for an honest politician against a crook. But also in both cases, an overwhelming majority of voters did what Kent predicted, and allowed themselves to be deceived by a politician’s lies.

Which raises the question: why don’t voters give more weight to a politician’s honesty than to most other considerations? (I won’t say that the honest politician should always be elected. Hitler was quite open for a politician in saying what he would do.)

My apologies to Peter Weiss.I know you must have worked hard to bring this and it must be done.

Reading this is like being stabbed in the back repeatedly.She even twists the knife each time she spouts her dishonest and self serving biased lies.

Sickening.

Israel’s new lawyer: Hillary Clinton
She sees the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through Bibi’s eyes, which could be the reason she gets so much wrong.
By Peter Beinart | 17:24 11.08.14

Who’s the Israeli government’s best spokesperson? Ron Dermer? Michael Oren? Bibi himself? Nope. It’s Hillary Clinton. In her interview on Sunday with Jeffrey Goldberg, Clinton offered the most articulate, sophisticated, passionate defense of…
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.610007

“He got Netanyahu to give up territory, which Netanyahu believes lost him the prime ministership [in his first term], but he moved in that direction, as hard as it was.”HC

Bully for Bill and Bibi.They gave back stolen Territory and she views that as a compromise.She is more Zionist than many Zionists.

I recall even Martin Indyk made the link between the Gaza onslaught and the unity government in this debate on c-span http://www.c-span.org/video/?320873-1/discussion-israelpalestinian-conflict .But I don’t recall where in the debate…