I’m late posting this, but better late than never. Senator Jon Kyl introduced an amendment to the budget bill:
“None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be available to resettle Palestinians from Gaza into the United States.”
Talking Points Memo (TPM) reports that Kyl realized the threat of resettling Palestinians from Gaza here might not be real and quotes him as saying:
There has been a suggestion that perhaps [refugee resettlement of Palestinians] might be permitted, and we simply want to make it clear that will not be permitted with any funds in this bill.
Talking Points Memo and other sites call it “an internet rumor making the rounds on the right.” A number of leftist blogs have had great fun pointing out Kyl’s error, calling it “anti-Palestinian bigotry,” “clearly discriminatory,” and the like. The New York Times blog said:
Internet headlines and blogs had twisted the meaning of the memorandum, suggesting that Mr. Obama was financing potential terrorist migration paths.
Our posts pointing out the misinterpretation are here, here, and here. I repeat what I said in the first of those posts a month ago:
It is understandable that the directive would be interpreted as it was. We have learned that we cannot trust anything President Obama says or does. And he has been positively obsequious toward the Muslim world since he took office — no, since well before he took office.
And I add now that the reason the rumor became so widespread is that every day it becomes more obvious that this is something Obama wouldn’t hesitate to do if it served his purposes. So we don’t fault Senator Kyl; his staff just should have checked the facts better. Kyl is a terrific fighter for freedom, who hosted Geert Wilders and a showing of Fitna on Capitol Hill a couple of weeks ago. His other amendments to the bill are these, TPM reports:
The second of Kyl’s three amendments is arguably redundant: it would prevent any of the $900 million that Secretary of State Clinton has pledged for Gaza reconstruction from going to entities controlled by Hamas … a rule that Clinton has already set. [We’ll see how effective Clinton’s rule is. Not at all, since UNRWA is controlled by Hamas and that’s where a lot of the money is going.–JW]
Kyl’s third amendment would require the State Department to report on whether American aid to Egypt could be used to improve the counter-smuggling effort along the Egypt-Gaza border.
Senator Kyl withdrew his amendment about the refugees and his other two amendments were defeated.
(Sorry about the typefaces; sometimes WordPress translates copied text into the normal typeface and sometimes it doesn’t, and I don’t know how to change that.)