I'm about to lose computer access for several days, but I'll say in advance I think Van Auken makes good points. Clinton should not unequivocally embrace the outrageous violence being inflicted upon the people of Lebanon.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jul2006/clin-j19.shtmlHillary Clinton celebrates Israeli war crimes
By Bill Van Auken, Socialist Equality Party candidate for US Senate from New York
19 July 2006
The speech given by New York’s Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton to a rally staged by Zionist organizations Monday across from the United Nations headquarters in Manhattan amounted to a celebration of massacres and war crimes.
Her remarks left no doubt that a vote for Clinton in November is a vote not only to continue the US war in Iraq, but to expand and intensify the slaughter throughout the region.
Under conditions in which Israeli war planes, gunships and artillery are turning Lebanese bridges, highways, power plants and residential buildings into rubble while killing hundreds of civilians, Clinton made it clear that she not only supports the ongoing aggression that has been unleashed against the Palestinian and Lebanese people, but is quite prepared to back its escalation into a full scale war against Syria and Iran as well.
“We will support
efforts to send a message to Hamas, Hezbollah, to the Syrians, to the Iranians, to all who seek death and domination instead of life and freedom,” she told the crowd.
“Send a message” is such an innocuous phrase to describe mass murder and state terrorism. How is this message being sent? In southern Lebanon, Israeli planes dropped leaflets warning villagers that they should flee north for their lives. When they complied, a warplane attacked a column of refugees incinerating 18 people, most of them children. Then other planes demolished the main roads as well as all of the bridges over the Litani River, forcing many of the refugees to abandon their vehicles and continue their exodus on foot.
Homes, schools and even hospitals and ambulances have been targeted by Israeli bombs and missiles. On Sunday morning, an Israeli air strike took out an entire wing of the Jabel Amel hospital in Tyre, killing a family of nine, who had come there seeking aid after suffering a previous bombing of their apartment building.
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