It's clear that many democrats are now openly supporting hamas. Are American Jews getting the message yet that the demorats are not their friends.
Congressman calls for US to circumvent Israeli Gaza blockade
By HAVIV RETTIG GUR
21/02/2010
Rep. Brian Baird compares Strip to Berlin Blockade after third visit to Gaza since Hamas took over.
Rep. Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington state, called on the Obama administration on Friday to “circumvent” Israel’s blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip.
Baird spoke in Jerusalem after a two-day visit to Gaza, his third since Hamas took over the territory in 2007.
The US should circumvent Israel’s blockade, “much like we did when we circumvented the Berlin Blockade,” he said. “We would accomplish this using roll-on/off ships supplying the needed material for Palestinians to rebuild their society.”
Baird criticized Israel for being too stringent in its blockade, which he said “was established so that contraband weapons and equipment used for rockets to shell Israel will not enter Gaza.
“While there are foodstuffs entering Gaza, the shipments are tightly controlled and items such as tomato paste and pasta are sometimes restricted by the Israelis. Palestinians cannot rebuild their homes, their schools, their hospitals because they cannot import the cement needed to complete the projects. They cannot build sewage systems and prevent 55 million metric meters of sewage flow into the Mediterranean because the Israelis limit the amount of construction materials into Gaza.”
He also called for US special envoy George Mitchell to visit Gaza “to determine first-hand humanitarian needs.”
Israel has rejected Baird’s call, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor telling CNN that he wondered whether Baird’s support for a Berlin-like breaking of the blockade would have extended to a Berlin under the control of Nazi Germany. The best way to help Gaza residents, Palmor said, was “to get rid of those who took power in a bloody coup and now rule there with the bayonet.”
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WASHINGTON — When Iran was caught last September building a secret, underground nuclear enrichment plant at a military base near the city of Qum, the country’s leaders insisted they had no other choice. With its nuclear facilities under constant threat of attack, they said, only a fool would leave them out in the open.
So imagine the surprise of international inspectors almost two weeks ago when they watched as Iran moved nearly its entire stockpile of low-enriched nuclear fuel to an above-ground plant. It was as if, one official noted, a bull’s-eye had been painted on it.
Why take such a huge risk?
That mystery is the subject of fervent debate among many who are trying to decode Iran’s intentions. The theories run from the bizarre to the mundane: Under one, Iran is actually taunting the Israelis to strike first. Under another, it is simply escalating the confrontation with the West to win further concessions in negotiations. The simplest explanation, and the one that the Obama administration subscribes to, is that Iran has run short of suitable storage containers for radioactive fuel, so it had to move everything.
The debate reflects the depth of confusion about the intentions of a badly divided Iranian leadership. Since October, when Iran agreed in principle to ship much of its nuclear stockpile out of the country so that it could be converted to fuel for a medical reactor, there have been a series of unexplained actions. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has veered from hailing the deal to backing away from it. The country has declared that it will soon build 10 new enrichment plants — a number it does not have the capacity to carry out. It has declared that it has answered all the questions posed by inspectors about potential work on weapons; the inspectors say there have been no responses since mid-2008.
So while Washington and its allies are deeply immersed in assessing Iran’s technical capabilities, they are still trying to divine its political intentions. Despite considerable evidence that the United States and Israel have at least partly penetrated the Iranian program — snatching up scientists, obtaining photos of the inside of facilities and tapping into computer data from the nuclear program — they still are not certain whether Iran is seeking a nuclear bomb, or just the ability to build one, or even merely the appearance of the ability. As one senior adviser to Mr. Obama said late last year, “We’ve got a near-perfect record of being wrong about these guys for 30 years.”
What touched off this whole guessing game was a single sentence in one of the normally bone-dry reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The report said that on Feb. 14, with inspectors present, the Iranians moved roughly 4,300 pounds of low-enriched uranium out of deep underground storage to the small plant that they have declared they will use to re-enrich the fuel to 20 percent purity. (It takes 80- to 90-percent purity to make a weapon, a relatively small technological leap from 20 percent.)
On the surface, the move made no sense. Iran does not need anywhere near that much fuel for its ostensible purpose: feeding an aging reactor in Tehran that makes medical isotopes. Moreover, the fuel now sits out in the open, where an air attack, or even a carefully staged accident or fire, could destroy it.
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