Mark Kirk: “I want to thank Mr. Wolf and our chairwoman for building a bipartisan bill that I think we all should support. This…”

“I want to thank Mr. Wolf and our chairwoman for building a bipartisan bill that I think we all should support. This legislation funds critical programs that advance our values overseas, it supports key allies of the United States, and it meets many of the humanitarian aspirations of the American people to do our part to relieve human suffering. As a staffer, I helped found the global program on AIDS in 1985, and in this bill we have record funding to accomplish a great humanitarian mission of fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In this legislation, we support our best ally in the Middle East, Israel, now caught between two satellites of Iran: Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza. In this bill, I helped sponsor language that increased the audit responsibilities over UNRWA programs in the West Bank and Gaza, a $2 million audit especially to look at incidents in which an al Qaeda cell was allowed to form in a UNRWA camp now bedeviling the Government of Lebanon, and where we saw Gaza Islamic University, a U.S.-funded foreign assistance recipient who is running in its chemistry lab a cell of Iranian military officers training students in the chemistry of making suicide bombs. In this bill, I also helped fund increasing assistance in the Frontier Autonomous Tribal area of Pakistan.”