Jessica Valenti, The Guardian

It’s official. Americans won’t be inaugurating a woman president next January. From a feminist perspective it’s hard not to feel a bit defeated. Even for those who, like me, preferred Barack Obama, there’s still that chilling feeling that maybe sexism scored a point this campaign season. But even though Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is at an end, the effect it has had on women and politics is reason enough for feminists to chin up.

For perhaps the first time ever there has been a national conversation about women’s political participation — much of it among women. Dana Goldstein at the American Prospect wrote this week: “Over the course of this historic, thrilling, aggressive primary election, we’ve seen more female pundits than ever before writing and speaking about presidential politics … (and) experienced unprecedented interest from male politicos in women’s participation in the electoral process.” Clinton’s run is also sure to have a lasting effect on women considering running for office. Marie Wilson, president and founder The White House Project, noted: “More young women … are motivated because they have seen her persist.”

There’s even a silver lining to be found in the distressing downsides of her candidacy. As someone who spots sexism for a living, I found myself absolutely shocked at the amount of gender-based vitriol directed at Clinton. But while the unrelenting sexism in the media coverage of Clinton’s campaign was a harsh reminder of how pervasive misogyny is in America, we needed that reminder.

I’d like to think the sheer volume of public misogyny jump-started a nationwide dialogue about sexism. Because every time a pundit called Clinton’s voice “grating”, someone at home watching television cringed. When several young men at a campaign stop in New Hampshire thought it would be just hilarious to yell out “Iron my shirt!”, there was public outrage. And when MSNBC host Chris Matthews asked former Democratic presidential candidate Chris Dodd if he “found it difficult to debate a woman”, he was roundly mocked in the political blogosphere. (Even by Dodd himself, who looked at Matthews curiously before answering: “No, not at all.”)

Though sexist pundits and misogynists-for-fun weren’t held nearly accountable enough, it’s heartening to know that now there can be no denying that yes, Virginia, there is sexism.

For the feminist movement itself, the benefits of Clinton’s candidacy may have to be worked for. The election put a brutal spotlight on an undeniable divide between feminists, largely the result of an already-brewing generational tension.

A New York Times opinion piece by Gloria Steinem that claimed sexism was a bigger problem in America than racism, and a widely circulated article by Robin Morgan suggesting young women voting for Obama were “eager to win male approval”, set the stage for a battle that left many disenchanted. After all, why was the only “appropriate” feminist vote one for Clinton? And the assumption that younger women who supported Obama were simply being naive or — even more insulting — voting to please their boyfriends, didn’t exactly sit well.

Feminists of all ages also resented how the mainstream movement seemed to be pitting sexism against racism in their campaign conversations. Latoya Peterson of the popular blog Racialicious.com wrote: “While I can truly understand if some women feel that their gender problems take more prominence than their race problems, other women need to understand that, for some of us, that separation does not happen. Our discrimination is not race neutral. So why should our feminism be?”

Generational divides and concerns that mainstream feminism focuses its energy on white women, above all others, are not new. But now that they’re out in the open being discussed, we have an amazing opportunity to fight for an even-better women’s movement.

Martin Luther King, in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, noted: “We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with.

Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.”

Clinton’s campaign didn’t need to be successful for it to mean something incredibly important for American women. Whether it’s uncovering the ugly boil of American sexism or a battling for a better feminist movement, a new conversation has been started about women and political power. And now that we’re here, with our wounds uncovered, we’re tending to them with an eye towards the future.

What are the underpinnings of Hilary Clinton’s threat to obliterate Iran?

By Robert Weitzel

“To misunderstand the nature and threat of evil is to risk being blindsided by it…An evil unchecked is the prelude to genocide.” - Dr. Mordechai: The Ezekiel Option

There are over 70 million human beings living in Iran, 17.5 million of whom are under the age of fifteen. Hillary Clinton vowed to attack Iran and “totally obliterate” the majority of the Persian race in a furnace of primordial fire should the Iranian government attack Israel with nuclear weapons, which they do not now possess or are likely to for some time - if ever.

Hillary’s “final solution” to the Persian problem bests Adolf Hitler by a magnitude of ten. Missing in Clinton’s campaign trail pandering to America’s pro-Israel lobbies and the mushrooming evangelical Christian Zionist movement is the “inconvenient truth” that Israel has the most modern and most deadly army in the Middle East thanks to an annual $3.5 billion in American aid - one third of the U.S. aid budget.

Israel is also a major nuclear power in the region - though it refuses to admit it - with up to 200 nuclear warheads and the inter-continental-range ballistic missiles to deliver them and, according to the U.S. Congress Office of Technology Assessment, also has an undeclared offensive chemical and biological warfare program. Israel, along with India and Pakistan are the only three nations not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Iran is a signatory of the NNPT, by the way.

The most inconvenient truth, however, is that Israel has a 60-year history of attacking - with American-supplied armaments - any Arab country it perceives as a threat, nuclear-armed or slingshot-armed alike. Israel’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility in 1981 comes to mind as an example of the former, its shelling of Gaza the latter. Israel can and will “ pre-emptively defend” itself against Iran, the country that a February 2008 International Atomic Energy Agency report concluded has not diverted nuclear material to non-peaceful purposes.

Unfortunately for the 70 million Persians in Hillary’s bombsight, Iran’s biggest liability is its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad - but then the U.S. is equally burdened. So the real truth behind Clinton’s “final solution” to the Persian problem or John McCain’s “bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran” off-key hyperbole is not simply a “David and Goliath” struggle for survival, but is instead a cynical exploitation of the unholy marriage of convenience between fanatical Jewish Zionists who want a Muslim-free Eretz Israel in order to fulfill Old Testament prophecy and bring about the first coming of their Messiah and fanatical Christian Zionists who want the entire Middle East in flames to fulfill New Testament prophecy and bring about the Second Coming of their Messiah. Jewish Zionists need the money and the political clout of the Christian Zionists. Christian Zionists need the Semitism and the chutzpah of the Jewish Zionists. Politicians need the votes that both groups can deliver, which in religion-drenched America is a hefty consignment. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, fully 44 percent of Americans believe that “God gave the land that is now Israel to the Jewish people” and 36 percent believe the “creation of the state of Israel is a step toward the Second Coming of Jesus.”

Depending on which poll is the most accurate, there are between 105-135 million evangelical and born-again Christians in the United States. Of these Christians, a 2004 International Fellowship of Christians and Jews poll found that 31 percent identified U.S. support for Israel as their “primary consideration” in selecting a presidential candidate, while 64 percent cited it as an “important factor.”

Predictably then, when Hillary Clinton or John McCain threaten to obliterate Iran, or any predominately Muslim country in the Middle East, with nuclear weapons, the primary audience for their saber rattling is not the Muslim “evildoers” but is, instead, the pro-Israel lobby and the Christian Zionist muscle in America who are willing to see the “ultimate evil” committed to further their ideological and eschatological agenda.

Nowhere does “ultimate evil” play a more prominent role than in the End Time machinations of two well-connected Christian Zionists, Tim LaHaye and John Hagee.

Tim LaHaye is best known as the co-author of the blockbuster Left Behind series, which has sold over 60 million copies worldwide. The pulp fiction series takes the Book of Revelation as its inspiration and chronicles the tribulations that will occur between the Rapture of born-again Christians and the Second Coming of Jesus. The blood and viscera of millions of infidels and heretics—unrepentant Atheists, Jews, Muslims, and Catholics—are spattered on every page.

Tim LaHaye is least known as the founder and first president of the secretive Council for National Policy. The CNP was formed in 1981 as an umbrella organization to advance an ultra-conservative, right wing Christian agenda. LaHaye’s particular agenda items include replacing U.S. secular law with Old Testament biblical law and a Middle East foreign policy that expedites the Second Coming.

According to the New York Times, the CNP consists of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations…to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.” Though the membership of the CNP is a guarded secret, a list of those known to have been associated with it reads like a who’s who of Christian Zionists and neocon ideologues whose passion is to see the Middle East in flames and in chains.

A short list includes: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, former Attorney Generals John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, former U.N. ambassador John Bolton, the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Phyllis Schlafly, and Oliver North - the guy who sold weapons to Iran using Israel as the middleman.

Do not be blindsided. The CNP is a major player in domestic and foreign policy decisions and the “evil” that results.

John Hagee, televangelist and pastor of the 19,000-member Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is the founder of Christian United for Israel. Hagee formed CUFI in 2005 following the publication of his book, The Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, which sports a mushroom cloud on its cover and argues for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran to fulfill God’s plan for both Israel and the West.

Hagee’s theology - and vision of the future - focuses on selected apocalyptic passages from the Old Testament. He believes that a nuclear strike against Iran will cause Arab nations to unite under Russian leadership, as outlined in the Book of Ezekiel, leading to an “inferno [that] will explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” Consequently, CUFI exists to set the fires of the Apocalypse and bring about the Rapture and the Second Coming, but it needs Jewish Zionists to strike the match.

Christians United for Israel is the evangelical equivalent of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobby courted and placated by every American politician who has national aspirations. John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama have each pledged their fealty to AIPAC.

John Hagee is not without his own short list of beltway benefactors. The list includes, but is not limited to: George W. Bush, House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, Senator Joe Lieberman—who called Hagee an “Ish Elokim,” a man of God—and John McCain who was “very honored by Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement [for president].”

When Christian Zionists with the stature of LaHaye and Hagee shill for fanatical Jewish Zionists who are promoting the ethic cleansing of Eretz Israel for biblical or nationalistic reasons or the pre-emptive “defensive” nuking of Iran, politicians with the stature of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, along with a hefty consignment of the electorate, are their willing dupes. It’s just the politics of religion as usual in America.

But Jewish Zionists need to understand that the difference between Christian Zionists and Muslim suicide bombers is scale, a nuclear warhead versus a backpack bomb, and a willingness to let others do the killing - and the dying - for them.

Jewish Zionists should also keep in mind that Christian Zionists have no intention of being around when the sands of the Middle East are turned to glass in a furnace of primordial fire. They will have been Raptured and out of harm’s way in Paradise. Their Bible tells them so.

- Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience. His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: robertweitzel@mac.com

McCain criticises Carter’s meeting with Hamas, calling it ‘a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader.’ (Photo: Reuters)

By Stuart Littlewood

I don’t know about you, but Hillary Rodham Clinton scares the pants off me.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I am president, we will attack Iran,” she ranted when asked what she’d do if Iran launched a nuclear attack on Israel. Not only that, she’ll “totally obliterate them”… 70 million people.

Jeepers… what kind of lunatic would drag us all into World War 3 to defend a lawless, racist regime like Israel?
I see the Council on Foreign Relations helps keep tabs on the stooge-for-Israel inclinations of each presidential candidate, so how’s Hillary doing? “Clinton co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006,” says the CFR. “She also sponsored a Senate resolution in 2007 calling for the immediate and unconditional release of soldiers of Israel held captive by Hamas and Hezbollah.”

Was she concerned about the 9,000 Palestinians, including women and children, abducted from their homes and held in Israeli jails? Apparently not.

Since taking office in 2000, Clinton has regularly supported military and financial aid packages to Israel. In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) she spouted the now-compulsory mantra: Hamas should not be recognised “until it renounces violence and terror and recognises Israel’s right to exist.”

She supports Israel’s ‘security wall’ and its declared purpose of preventing terrorist attacks. Does she support the wall’s undeclared purpose - which has nothing to do with security - and the way it bites deep into Palestinian territory?

Barack Obama has said the United States must isolate Hamas. He also co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006 and called on the Palestinian leadership to “recognise Israel, to renounce violence, and to get serious about negotiating peace and security for the region”. OK, why don’t America and Israel get serious about implementing the dozens of UN resolutions on the subject? He doesn’t say.

He called Carter’s meeting with Hamas leaders “a bad idea”, so what’s his pledge to talk with US adversaries without preconditions worth? If elected, Obama will insist on fully funding military assistance to Israel. Does this mean paying them even more billions of US tax dollars so that they can fire even more high-tech munitions at Gaza, vaporize more women and kids and knock out more infrastructure that Britain and the EU paid for?

John Sidney McCain the Third says he’s “proudly pro-Israel” and argues that there can be no peace process “until the Palestinians recognise Israel, forswear forever the use of violence, recognise their previous agreements…” Has he asked Israel to do the same? No.

He criticises Carter’s meeting with Hamas, calling it “a grave and dangerous mistake for an American leader”. And he wants the United States to continue providing Israel with whatever military equipment and technology it needs. If elected McCain would “work to further isolate the enemies of Israel”. Surely his time would be better spent worrying about why half the world hates the US.

McCain even thinks Israel’s military action in Lebanon in 2006 was justified. He’s willing to use military force against Iran if it acquires a nuclear weapon and poses a “real threat” to Israel. Well, we know from past experience what “real threats” boil down to. And guess what: he too co-sponsored the Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act of 2006.

What is this Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act they all so desperately wanted? It doesn’t make nice reading. The idea is to heap misery on any Palestinian government in which Hamas has a hand, ignoring the fact that the resistance movement is democratically elected and shows no sign of running away. The Act demands everything from the Palestinians and nothing from Israel, which can do no wrong in Washington’s eyes but, as everyone outside America knows, is the biggest terror organisation and law-breaker in the region.

Palestinians are perfectly entitled to put up armed resistance against illegal military occupation. Nevertheless the US requires them to end their struggle, get on their knees and publicly kiss their tormentors’ ass. They must re-commit to the Road Map and the two-state solution even though the ‘irreversible facts on the ground’ Israel is hurrying to establish and the impoverished, fragmented leftovers of land the Palestinians will be left with (less than 20% of what was originally theirs) are not a recipe for peace.

The plan is plainly to support Israel’s lust for prime land and strategic resources and end all hope of Palestinian viability and self-determination.

So the three main presidential candidates are singing off the same hymn-sheet and running neck-and-neck for the job of Stooge-in-Chief. Whichever finally makes it into the White House can count on us Brits being equally well prepped, thanks to the Israel lobby’s energetic string-pulling on this side of the Atlantic too.
Israel’s prime minister Olmert says AIPAC is “the greatest supporter and friend that we have in the whole world”. It is certainly busy, claiming that “through more than 2,000 meetings with members of Congress… AIPAC activists help pass more than 100 pro-Israel legislative initiatives a year… procuring nearly $3 billion in aid critical to Israel’s security.” Lobbyists meet every member of Congress and cover every hearing on Capitol Hill that touches on the US-Israel relationship.

Ariel Sharon is famously quoted as saying: “We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.” (1) Had he been available for comment today he’d probably be saying the same about the UK where AIPAC’s little brother, Friends of Israel, has succeeded in embedding itself deep inside British politics and at the heart of government. Its stated aim is to promote Israel’s interests in Parliament and sway policy.

Conservative Friends of Israel, for example, claims 80 percent of Conservative MPs and provides a programme of weekly briefings, events with speakers, and delegations to Israel. It also operates a ‘Fast Track’ for parliamentary candidates fighting target marginals at the next election.

According to senior Conservatives Israel is “a force for good in the world… In the battle for the values that we stand for, for democracy against theocracy, for democratic liberal values against repression - Israel’s enemies are our enemies and this is a battle in which we all stand together”.
Are they mad? We’re talking here about a ruthless ethnocracy with racist policies, an apartheid agenda, advanced skills in state-terrorism and contempt for the UN Charter and international law.

Nevertheless MPs of all parties, and ministers, are basking in Israel’s hospitality, absorbing the propaganda and allowing themselves to be persuaded to push the interest of this foreign military power sometimes at the expense of our own. Such conduct is at odds with the second of the Seven Principles of Public Life, namely Integrity – “Holders of public office should not place themselves under any financial or other obligation to outside individuals or organisations that might seek to influence them in the performance of their official duties.”

Efforts are being made to have the influence of the Israel lobby investigated, but the people’s watchdog - the Committee on Standards in Public Life - is itself infiltrated and refuses to act.

This week former Serb officers went on trial at The Hague for ethnic cleansing. They face life sentences for murder, persecution, forced deportations and inhuman acts during the 1991-95 Balkan wars. Many people feel it’s time Israelis faced charges for similar crimes during the 60 years of occupation and catastrophe they have inflicted on the Holy Land. The list includes

• torture
• collective punishment
• targeted assassinations
• house demolitions
• wholesale slaughter
• use of indiscriminate and prohibited weapons against civilians
• land theft
• engineering humanitarian disasters
• creating medical and public health crises
• the wanton destruction of key infrastructure and public & private property
• restrictions on movement and trade
• illegal detention
• suppression of education
• denial of basic human rights
• denial of the right of refugees to return
• illegal settlements
• violation of every convention and code of conduct.

Speaking of the Holy Land, are the three stooges aware that Christian communities under Israeli occupation are being oppressed and crushed along with their Muslim neighbours?

It was heartening to read in The Guardian this week a letter signed by more than 100 prominent Jews saying they cannot celebrate the 60th birthday of a state “founded on terrorism, massacres and the dispossession of another people from their land… and that even now engages in ethnic cleansing.” They’ll celebrate when Arab and Jew live as equals in a peaceful Middle East.

So there you have it. Hillary/Barack/John the Third, you would do well to steer a different course in the Arab-Israel conflict. Quit stooging, kick AIPAC into touch, back off and re-think US foreign policy.

How much support do you think you’d get for annihilating 70 million Iranians?

-Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation.

Gwynne Dyer, Arab News

You have to admire the macho instincts of Hillary Clinton. Asked on the day of the Pennsylvania primary what she would do if Iran made a nuclear attack on Israel, she replied: “If I’m the president, we will attack Iran… we would be able to totally obliterate them.” And it’s perfectly true. The United States has enough nuclear weapons to blast, irradiate, incinerate and obliterate all 75 million people in Iran many times over. All she has to do is press the button.

First she has to win the presidential election, of course, but American voters can rest easy in the knowledge that Mrs. Clinton would not hesitate to kill tens of millions of people on behalf of their friends in Israel. What a contrast with wimpy Barack Obama, who said: “Using words like ‘obliterate’ — it doesn’t actually produce good results.” What does he use for a backbone?

Tedious purists will point out that Iran doesn’t actually have any nuclear weapons. Indeed, late last year the US intelligence agencies produced a joint National Intelligence Estimate stating that Iran has not even been working to develop nuclear weapons for the past four years.

The critics and the carpers might also point out that Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons of its own, and is perfectly capable of obliterating Iran without American help. But practical politicians like Hillary Clinton know that there is always some political mileage to be gained by promising to help Israel, whether it needs help or not.

On the very same day, by coincidence, another American was revealed to be in the business of helping Israel. His name is Ben-Ami Kadish, and he appeared in a New York courtroom charged with spying on the United States for Israel.

Kadish, who worked at the US Army’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center in New Jersey from 1979 to 1985, allegedly gave secrets involving information about nuclear weapons, fighter jets and missiles to Israel in the 1980s. He was charged with four counts of conspiracy, including disclosing documents relating to national defense and acting as an agent of Israel.

Kadish, 84, is long retired, but he is still in touch with Israeli diplomats. When he realized on March 20 that he was going to be arrested, he called his current Israeli handler, according to the Justice Department, and was instructed: “Don’t say anything….What happened 25 years ago? You don’t remember anything.” Nor is this the first time that an American citizen has been publicly accused by the US government of spying for Israel.

In the most prominent case, Jonathan Jay Pollard was convicted in 1987 of passing thousands of secret documents to Israeli agents while working at the US Defense Department. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for spying for Israel, and ever since then Israeli governments have been trying to secure his release. He was granted Israeli citizenship in 1998.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey, asked what Washington was going to do about the Kadish case, said that Israel would be informed of his arrest. “Twenty-plus years ago, during the Pollard case, we noted that this was not the kind of behavior we would expect from friends and allies, and that would remain the case today,” he said. But there will be no diplomats expelled, none of the dramatics that you would see if the US government caught some American spying for the Russian or Chinese.

To be fair, the United States probably spies on Israel as well. This is just the normal behavior of sovereign states, but even close allies normally complain quite loudly when they catch the other party spying on them.

There is a curious asymmetry in the US-Israeli relationship. Israel is the sole beneficiary of this alliance — indeed, the US pays a significant price for it in terms of its relations with other Middle Eastern countries — and yet Israel can spy on the United States with impunity.

During the Cold War, Israel was a valuable strategic ally for the United States in the Middle East, but that ended 20 years ago. Now it is not a strategic asset at all, but Israel has persuaded the American public otherwise. So much so that Israel can brazenly spy on the United States and suffer no political penalty.

Hillary Clinton presumably knows this, but she also knows that threatening mass slaughter in defense of Israel is a vote-winner in the current political environment in the United States. Barack Obama obviously knows it, but although he is not going to commit political suicide by saying it out loud, at least he refused to echo her blood-curdling threat.