Ahmed Moor writes: The United States is a sovereign country. That is sometimes hard to remember.
Illinois Senator Mark Kirk had a stroke in January. The serious neurological event sent him into surgery, where doctors excised two, tiny, damaged pieces of his brain. By all accounts, the senator is now in great recovery, his office releasing a video in May, which showed him walking on a treadmill and describing his eagerness to “get back to work”. Yet it appears that he has already got back to it.
At the end of last month, Kirk sponsored an amendment to a Senate appropriations bill, seemingly intent on stripping the United Nations Relief and Works Agency of some of its funding. His attempt to re-determine the definition of Palestinian refugees was met by stiff opposition from the State Department, but the senator prevailed – a considerable feat for a recovering patient.
The amendment requires the State Department to distinguish between and report on how many of those Palestinians who receive assistance from UNRWA were personally displaced from their homes as a result of the 1948 war, and those who are their descendants – which the UN agency continues to count as refugees, unable to return to their ancestral homes.
Ha’aretz reported that the senator had some help with his legislative burden, and not only from his deputy chief of staff, Richard Goldberg. It turns out that the amendment to the bill was first written by an Israeli politician. Einat Wilf, a member of the Israeli parliament, reportedly spent months working with current and former AIPAC employees, including Steve Rosen – who was once suspected by FBI agents of obtaining classified US government information and passing it on to Israeli officials – to deliver the language on Palestinian refugees to the US legislature.
In summary: a senator who suffered crippling neurological damage received legislation from an Israeli politician by way of AIPAC before he slipped it into a US bill that eventually became law. In other words, an Israeli politician helped write a US law. Then she boasted about it. [Continue reading…]
