Hillary Clinton’s statement on the mass murder in Orlando is mostly a confection of the empty, saccharine pieties for which the entire American political class is known – but it concluded with a revealing statement.
There she said: “This is the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the United States and it reminds us once more that weapons of war have no place on our streets.” (Emphasis, jw)
But those “weapons of war” have been used on the streets of Iraq and in midnight raids on the civilian population in the war there that Hillary so ardently backed.
A video of one such military operation on unarmed civilians in Baghdad was captured here on the video “Collateral Murder,” uncovered and released by Wikileaks. The attack from a helicopter gunship under moment to moment control by central command uses firepower that can blast right through wall as can be seen. The unarmed civilians are attacked without warning and a passing van with many children in it is also obliterated when it tries to save the blood-drenched victims. The U.S. command said that all this occurred according to approved “Rules of Engagment.” Wikileaks gave us one such video. There are certainly many thousands (tens or hundreds of thousands?) of such videos.
Watch and think again of Hillary’s words.
Does she even grasp what she is saying? She is saying that it is an atrocity to use such weapons on Americans – but not on the brown people, civilians in their homes, in Iraq and throughout the greater Middle East and North Africa in U.S. wars of aggression and occupation. To be horrified by the use of those weapons on Americans but not on Arabs qualifies as racism of the basest sort.
And what about the causes of the atrocity in Orlando? In attempting to discuss the cause, she mentions the lack of gun control and the discrimination against the LGBT community. But she forgets to say in her statement that ISIS laid claim to the atrocity, lauding one of its American followers for carrying out the deed. So ISIS is responsible, and the hatred of America on which ISIS thrives is responsible.
But where does ISIS come from? It did not exist before the war on Iraq that Hillary and her fellow neocons peddled so assiduously with lie upon lie. The war on Iraq, the divide and conquer tactic that the US invaders used to set Shia against Sunni to cripple the population are the factors that brought ISIS into being. The civil war in Syria, another pet project of Hillary’s, gave a further opening and impetus to ISIS.
And Barack Obama had pretty much the same message as his evil ex-Secretary of State. Gun control and LGBT rights were front and center, but nary a word about the devastation the U.S. Empire has wrought in the Middle East that brought about the rise of ISIS.
The word “blowback” was not to be found in Hillary’s or Obama’s statements.
But of course it goes deeper than that. The U.S. has long backed Saudi Arabia where the ideology for ISIS was concocted and promoted. Saudi Arabia and the other medieval monarchies of the Gulf who have so ardently supported ISIS have long been supported by the U.S. The secular governments in the region like those of Gaddafi, Hussein and now Assad, in contrast, are targets for regime change ops – brutal ones at that. These are the very governments that fought the Islamic fundamentalists – and the US has attacked every one of them. How deep does the hand of the U.S. government, or parts of it, go in the rise of ISIS? It is a question that needs to be answered by a full Congressional investigation, but chances of that are nil while Obama and Hillary and their neocon buddies are in charge.
Finally the U.S. alliance with Israel and the backing of the apartheid Jewish state in its long, slow genocide of an entire Arab people, the Palestinians, also stirs hatred for the U.S. Does Hillary think that has nothing to do with the hatred ISIS expresses for the U.S? She apparently thinks “the price is worth it,” to quote a protege of hers. Thus Hillary in her obeisance to AIPAC and the rest of the Israeli Lobby puts herself in the front ranks of those who have given birth to events like the ones in Orlando.
Atrocities breed atrocities. Or as Andrew Kopkind remarked in another context, the skies were dark in Orlando this past weekend with the chickens coming home to roost.
