On September 5, 2006, Eli Chomsky was
an editor and staff writer for the Jewish Press, and Hillary Clinton was
running for a shoo-in re-election as a U.S. senator. Her trip making the rounds
of editorial boards brought her to Brooklyn to meet the editorial board of the
Jewish Press.
The tape was never released and
has only been heard by the small handful of Jewish Press staffers in the room.
According to Chomsky, his old-school audiocassette is the only existent copy
and no one has heard it since 2006, until today when he played it for the
Observer.
The tape is 45 minutes and
contains much that is no longer relevant, such as analysis of the re-election
battle that Sen. Joe Lieberman was then facing in Connecticut. But a seemingly
throwaway remark about elections in areas controlled by the Palestinian
Authority has taken on new relevance amid persistent accusations in the
presidential campaign by Clinton’s Republican opponent Donald Trump that the current election is “rigged.”
Speaking to the Jewish Press
about the January 25, 2006, election for the second Palestinian Legislative
Council (the legislature of the Palestinian National Authority), Clinton
weighed in about the result, which was a resounding victory for Hamas (74
seats) over the U.S.-preferred Fatah (45 seats).
“I do not think we should have pushed for
an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake,”
said Sen. Clinton. “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.”
Chomsky recalls being taken
aback that “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.”
Some eyebrows were also raised
when then-Senator Clinton appeared to make a questionable moral equivalency.
Eli Chomsky, photographed today
at the Observer offices, participated in an interview with Hillary Clinton at
the Jewish Press in 2006. Observer
Regarding
capturing combatants in war—the June capture of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit by
Hamas militants who came across the Gaza border via an underground tunnel was
very much front of mind—Clinton can be heard on the tape saying, “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.”
Equating Hamas, which to this
day remains on the State Department’s official
list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, with the armed forces of a close
American ally was not what many expected to hear in the Jewish Press editorial
offices, which were then at Third Avenue and Third Street in Brooklyn. (The
paper’s office has since moved to the Boro Park section of Brooklyn.) The use
of the phrase “these cultures” is also a bit of a head-scratcher.
According to Chomsky, Clinton
was “gracious, personable and pleasant throughout” the interview, taking
about an hour to speak to, in addition to himself, managing editor Jerry
Greenwald, assistant to the publisher Naomi Klass Mauer, counsel Dennis Rapps
and senior editor Jason Maoz.
Another part of the tape
highlights something that was relatively uncontroversial at the time but has
taken on new meaning in light of the current campaign—speaking to leaders with
whom our country is not on the best terms. Clinton has presented a very tough
front in discussing Russia, for example, accusing Trump of unseemly ardor for
strongman Vladimir Putin and mocking his oft-stated prediction that as president he’d “get along”
with Putin.
Chomsky is heard on the tape
asking Clinton what now seems like a prescient question about Syria, given the
disaster unfolding there and its looming threat to drag the U.S., Iran and
Russia into confrontation.
“Do you think it’s worth
talking to Syria—both from the U.S. point [of view] and Israel’s point [of
view]?”
Clinton replied, “You know, I’m pretty much
of the mind that I don’t see what it hurts to talk to people. As long as you’re
not stupid and giving things away. I mean, we talked to the Soviet Union for 40
years. They invaded Hungary, they invaded Czechoslovakia, they persecuted the
Jews, they invaded Afghanistan, they destabilized governments, they put
missiles 90 miles from our shores, we never stopped talking to them,” an answer
that reflects her mastery of the facts but also reflects a willingness to talk
to Russia that sounds more like Trump 2016 than Clinton 2016.
This is how news used to be
collected. Observer
Shortly after, she said, “But
if you say, ‘they’re evil, we’re good, [and] we’re never dealing with them,’ I
think you give up a lot of the tools that you need to have in order to defeat
them…So I would like to talk to you [the enemy] because I want to know more
about you. Because if I want to defeat you, I’ve got to know something more
about you. I need different tools to use in my campaign against you. That’s my
take on it.”
A final bit of interest to the
current campaign involves an articulation of phrases that Trump has accused
Clinton of being reluctant to use. Discussing the need for a response to
terrorism, Clinton said, “I think you can make the case that whether you call
it ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamo-fascism,’ whatever the label is we’re going
to give to this phenomenon, it’s a threat. It’s a global threat. To Europe, to
Israel, to the United States…Therefore we need a global response. It’s a global
threat and it needs a global response. That can be the, sort of, statement of
principle…So I think sometimes having the global vision is a help as long as
you realize that underneath that global vision there’s a lot of variety and
differentiation that has to go on.”
It’s not clear what she means
by a global vision with variety and differentiation, but what’s quite clear is
that the then-senator, just five years after her state was the epicenter of the
September 11 attacks, was comfortable deploying the phrase “Islamic terrorism”
and the even more strident “Islamo-fascism,” at least when meeting with the
editorial board of a Jewish newspaper.
In an interview before the
Observer heard the tape, Chomsky told the Observer that Clinton made some “odd
and controversial comments” on the tape. The irony of a decade-old recording
emerging to feature a candidate making comments that are suddenly relevant
to voters today was not lost on Chomsky, who wrote the original story at the
time. Oddly enough, that story, headlined “Hillary Clinton on Israel, Iraq and
Terror,” is no longer available on jewishpress.com and even a short
summary published on the Free Republic site offers a broken link that can
no longer surface the story.
“I went to my bosses at the
time,” Chomsky told the Observer. “The Jewish Press 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.
My bosses didn’t think it was newsworthy at the time. I was convinced that it
was and I held onto it all these years.”
Disclosure: Donald Trump is
the father-in-law of Jared Kushner, publisher of Observer Media.
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