Barney Frank: “I am enormously proud as a Jew at this moment of the government of Israel and Ehud Barak. We are seeing on the part of…”

“I am enormously proud as a Jew at this moment of the government of Israel and Ehud Barak. We are seeing on the part of the government of Israel an enormous outreach unlike what any victor in a war has ever done towards those it was forced to fight. I am therefore pleased that this bill funds at the requested level money for those who are trying to make peace in the Middle East. Precisely for that reason, I am very sad that I must morally vote against the bill. I am confident that in the end a bill will pass which will fund fully the needs of those in the Middle East, including Israel and this enormously courageous leadership of Ehud Barak. But I do not see how we can be asked to vote for a bill which at this point condemns countless hundreds of thousands of innocent children to death by starvation and disease which is avoidable. We debate often in this Chamber about measures, the outcomes of which we cannot be sure. We debate about things which can be uncertain, things which are complex. Sometimes things are simple and important. Millions of children and other vulnerable people in Africa and Latin America and in Asia, in the poorest countries in the world, literally the poorest countries in the world, go without food, go without sanitation, go without basic medical costs, partly because of policies for which we are responsible, because in the exigencies of the Cold War we lent money to thugs and crooks, unconcerned about how they spent it.”