Hillary Clinton Sets Up Conditions for Rape

I Will Neither Justify nor Excuse Her Monstrous Speech or Murderous Policies

There was never a more loathsome excuse for a human being than Hillary Clinton.

HRH Clinton published a video of herself (I found it via Danny Haiphong on X yesterday) in which she spat out these claims:

As you well know, many women and girls were attacked brutally by Hamas on October 7th and they have testified to the gender based violence that they both experienced and witnessed. As a global community, we must respond to weaponized sexual violence wherever it happens with absolute condemnation. There can be no justification and no excuses. Rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity. Such atrocities have no place in any society or any conflict. It is outrageous that some who claim to stand for justice are closing their eyes and their hearts to the victims of Hamas.

I’d like to respond to her in this open letter of sorts, a letter I know she’ll never read nor give a flying eff about. First of all, I’ll address her shockingly shameless announcement. Then I’ll type out a bit about her history. For the record, as a woman, I have spent my entire cognizant life looking over my shoulder, into bushes, and the back seat of my car, and, for the record, I have been sexually assaulted in broad daylight by a group of males.

That said. No, Hillary, we don’t well know Hamas raped many women and girls. In the first place, Hamas is an organization. Organizations don’t rape, people do. Who are these monstrous people? I mean, what are their names? Who are these victims? I mean, what are their names? Exactly what happened and to whom did it happen? Surely, as a Yale trained lawyer, you must well know that you can’t just waltz into a prosecutor’s office, say, with an allegation with no name attached to it? I mean, you know that, right?

And, what do we mean by “many”? If you’ve got a figure, please speak it. I’m all ears. But, my guess is, like the unfounded, self-serving allegation itself, you have none.

Of course rape as a weapon of war is a crime against humanity. We all know that. Tell us something we don’t know. Like, how you personally set up the conditions in the United States, Haiti, Honduras, and via Saudi Arabia in which rape and other acts of sexual violence were inevitable. Because, you know, crime or not, that is how war works.

Who, exactly, is closing their eyes and hearts to October 7? I know of none who is. You must well know that October 7 was not the foundational act of violence nor that it came out of nowhere. You do know that, right, Madame Former Secretary? You have heard about 1948, right? That foundational act of violence known as the “nakba”? You know that word, right? And what it means? Surely, Madame Former Secretary, you know about the nakba?

Moving along.

Here’s the thing: anything that makes women, girls, boys, men (remember Abu Ghraib ?) vulnerable sets them up for sexual violence.

I well remember when you proclaimed in Beijing in 1995 that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all!” But, Sister, that is what we call the “okeedoke.” Kind of like a shell game. Why do I say that? I say that because at roughly the same time you were speaking slippery slidey words in Beijing you had just promoted the 1994 Violent Crime Control And Enforcement Act and the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Reconciliation Act. You remember them, right? When you depicted Black kids as animals and “super-predators. No conscience. No empathy. We can talk about how they ended up that way, but first we have to bring them to heel.” Racist, dog-whistling language if I ever heard it. Pardon the pun.

The VCCEA was the largest crime bill in United States history. It greatly expanded the death penalty, creating 60 new death penalty offenses. Created new immigration crimes. Eliminated higher education Pell Grant funding for inmates. Created “boot camps” for delinquent children.

In other words, in no small part because of your support, the package systematized the carceral state. In addition to expanding poverty, it decimated Black, poor, and undocumented America and depicted Black women, in particular, as needing discipline and punishment. Like certain brands of pornography only more focused.

What is the inevitable result of expanding the carceral state and depicting Black, poor, and immigrant women as needing discipline and punishment? You know where I’m going with this: the inevitable result is the expansion of rape, sexual violence, sex work, and sex trafficking, among other things, because the conditions leading to rape, sexual violence, sex work, and sex trafficking have been expanded. Miss Hillary, you are a lot smarter than I am. I mean that. And, if I knew this, you knew this, and you knew it at the time you promoted the package.

I wish that were all there had been to it. But it wasn’t.

There was also your vigorous promotion of the sweat shop model of production in Haiti.

Your surreptitious and illegal support for the 2009 coup d’etat in Honduras of its democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, because your benefactor, Dole Foods, was opposed to Zelaya’s reforms. And what was the outcome? A downward spiral into poverty of the people of Honduras, and what goes with downward spirals into poverty? I keep saying it, but I’ll say it again: the expansion of violations of human rights, women’s rights, and indigenous rights. And, as you said so eloquently in Beijing, “women’s rights are indigenous rights and indigenous rights are women’s rights.” Or something like that. There was, as has been documented, an explosion of rapes, femicides (that means, murders of women), murders of lesbian, gay, and transgender Hondurans, and murders of indigenous Hondurans. I suppose you heard that Honduras’s indigenous woman and environmental activist, Berta Cáceres, directly pointed her finger at you for these human rights violations? Before she was assassinated, I mean.

Then, there was the largest weapons deal in United States history, the weapons deal with Saudi Arabia in 2010, the primary beneficiary of which was Raytheon. I well remember that the rationale was 9/11 although you well knew Saudi Arabia had nothing to do with it and you well knew Saudi Arabia was in a proxy war with Iran, and I well know that Yemen and Syria may never recover. I don’t need a special rapporteur on women’s rights and/or rape as a war crime to know that rape has been endemic in Yemen and Syria because that is how it works.

So, please Madame Former Secretary of State, spare me your condemnation of the eyes and hearts of those who don’t fall for your cynical politicization of rape. You have forfeited any moral authority to criticize any one or any group about rape when you have done so much to foster it.


Photo Credit: Gero Breloer/AP