The Observer describes a decade-old audiotape that might come back to haunt Hillary Clinton, in which she seems to suggest rigging the 2006 elections for the Palestinian Legislative Council.
Actually, there’s not much ambiguity about what Hillary Clinton proposes in the clip, and she does not seem to have been joking.
“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,” she told The Jewish Press, during her Senate re-election campaign in New York. “And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
In the January 2006 election Clinton was referring to, the terrorists of Hamas won far more seats than the more moderate Fatah faction preferred by the U.S. government.
The Jewish Press editor and staff writer Eli Chomsky told the Observer that it was surprising “anyone could support the idea – offered by a national political leader, no less – that the U.S. should be in the business of fixing foreign elections.”
Another remark from the tape that surprised Clinton’s tiny audience of newspaper staffers was a rambling comment in which the Senator depicted Hamas and the Israeli military as essentially rival gangs looking to show each other up:
And then, when, you know, Hamas, you know, sent the terrorists, you know, through the tunnel into Israel that killed and captured, you know, kidnapped the young Israeli soldier, you know, there’s a sense of like, one-upsmanship, and in these cultures of, you know, well, if they captured a soldier, we’ve got to capture a soldier.
More of this moral relativism was on display when Clinton, who was at that point three years away from becoming secretary of state, expressed a willingness to hold talks with the Assad regime in Syria. She compared it to the U.S. talking with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, which Ken Kurson of the Observer opines, “sounds more like Trump 2016 than Clinton 2016,” since Russia has become the locus of planetary evil in the Democrat mind.
Clinton was also notably more comfortable with using the terms “Islamic terrorism” and “Islamo-fascism” than she is today, and she acknowledged Islamic terrorism was a “global threat” that needs a “global response.”
Interestingly, Chomsky said his bosses at The Jewish Press thought these comments would be damaging to Clinton, which is why they didn’t publish the tape or an account of her remarks. He said the paper “had this mindset that they would not want to say anything offensive about anybody – even a direct quote from anyone – in a position of influence because they might need them down the road.”
The Observer can only offer Chomsky’s thoughts on what made his old colleagues reluctant to publicize Clinton’s remarks, but he seems to think her ideas about rigging the Palestinian elections were the most controversial tidbit, particularly in light of complaints about voter fraud and “rigged elections” in the current U.S. election.