[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 61 (Monday, April 28, 2014)]
[House]
[Pages H3234-H3237]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                      ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Cook). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 3, 2013, the Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from 
Minnesota (Mrs. Bachmann) for 30 minutes.
  Mrs. BACHMANN. Mr. Speaker, I am grateful to be here tonight. Today 
is a significant day. It is Holocaust Remembrance Day. And the greatest 
ally that the United States has, Israel, had a remarkable experience 
that they hold every day because of the unique situation that the 
Jewish people have endured, and that is, the entire nation and all of 
the people in Israel come to a complete stop. Cars literally stop in 
the middle of highways. Buses literally stop in the middle of highways. 
Metros stop. If a pedestrian is walking on a street, kids playing in a 
park, they stop. A siren goes off for 2 minutes' time, and during that 
time every person in the nation comes to a standstill. Why? Why this 
extraordinary action?
  Because, quite simply, nothing like the history of Israel has ever 
happened anywhere in the annals of recorded human history. It is this: 
6 million people lost their lives. They lost their lives simply because 
they were Jewish. They were children, they were grandparents, they were 
moms and dads. They were disfigured. They were disabled. They were high 
functioning. They weren't even necessarily in Israel. They were in 
countries all across primarily European areas. But 6 million died. And 
it is important that we never forget. That we never forget that a 
people were so brutally targeted that 6 million were killed virtually 
in silence; silence because of the devious ways in which the German 
regime carried out this horrific action. That is what happened about 70 
years ago.
  We will commemorate D-day, the 70th anniversary this June 6, as we 
should, probably one of the greatest sacrifices ever made by one people 
for another, led in large part by the Americans to liberate Europe as 
they were under this cloud of Adolf Hitler. It is a horrific past, but 
it is something that we have to remember because we can never forget. 
We can never, ever, ever forget.
  We join with our great ally Israel today as we remember this horrific 
act. It was a racist act on the part of Adolf Hitler. It was a bigoted 
act on the part of Adolf Hitler, and I think that is why today we are 
all rather shocked when the story was disclosed that our American 
Secretary of State had made comments last Friday behind closed doors in 
a meeting with members of the Trilateral Commission, and he had said 
that if Israel does not go along with the proposed two-state solution, 
that Israel would risk becoming an apartheid state.
  Now that is a shocking comment to come from an American Secretary of 
State, particularly to have this comment revealed on Holocaust 
Remembrance Day, to accuse the Jewish people who have undergone what no 
other people have undergone, a horrific act to be targeted by Adolf 
Hitler some 70 years ago, within the lifetime of some people who remain 
alive today. And yet our Secretary of State, accusing this nation of 
engaging in an act, an institutional act against another people based 
upon race with no evidence whatsoever because there is none.
  I want to read the definition of the 1998 Rome statute. It says:

       The crime of apartheid is defined as inhuman acts committed 
     in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic 
     oppression and domination by one racial group over any other 
     racial group or groups and committed with the intention of 
     maintaining that regime.

  Now, that would apply to an Adolf Hitler. That did apply in the case 
of South Africa. It does not in any possible imagination or universe 
apply in any possible sense to the Jewish State of Israel, and yet that 
is what our Secretary of State said last Friday in reference to our 
greatest ally. Our Secretary of State needs to apologize humbly to the 
people of Israel, and then he needs to tender his resignation 
immediately to the President of the United States.
  But our Secretary of State did not stop there. He went on to 
reiterate a statement that he had made prior that merely was an echo of 
what the Palestinians had intimated, and it was this: That Israel could 
be looking at a third fatwa--that is a war--that Israel could look at a 
war by the Palestinians, by people who would engage in

[[Page H3235]]

terrorist acts against Israel, that Israel could be looking at the 
threat of another war if they failed to give up 40 percent of their 
land to people who, number one, don't recognize that Israel has the 
right to exist; number two, that they have the right to exist as the 
Jewish state; and number three, that they have the right to defend 
themselves.
  Since when do we force our greatest ally to sit down with people and 
negotiate with people who want to see them killed and annihilated? That 
is the stated position of Hamas. Just read article 7 of the Hamas 
charter.
  The head of the Palestinian Authority, Abbas, recently said:

       I am 79 years old, and I have no intention of changing my 
     ways.

  In other words, he has no intention of recognizing the legitimacy of 
the Jewish State of Israel and their right to exist. And the United 
States is expecting, our Secretary of State is expecting after that 
statement, not only that Israel would sit down and negotiate in good 
faith with people who have said unequivocally they will never recognize 
the right to exist. And Israel is the bad guy here, Mr. Speaker?
  Mr. Speaker, I think we have our priorities wrong. Not only did Abbas 
say he would not recognize Israel's right to exist, we also heard last 
week that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which is a foreign 
terrorist organization, part of the violent Muslim Brotherhood, have 
said that they are looking to merge--the Palestinian Authority and 
Hamas. And again, we are going to force our great ally, Israel, to sit 
down at a negotiating table and negotiate with terrorists over Israel's 
right to exist and give the terrorists 40 percent of their land?
  This is madness. This is once again an alternative universe that 
doesn't make any sense.
  Our Secretary of State went on to say that Israel has built 14,000 
living units, apartments, extra rooms, what have you, for Jewish 
people. Well, of course, a population that increases has to build 
apartments.
  How many times has our Secretary of State talked about the 
Palestinian building of apartments on their land? Because, after all, 
this is Israelis building apartments on their own land. Since when is 
this a detriment to peace? And since when will our American Secretary 
of State ever call out the Palestinians and say those Palestinians, 
they shouldn't be building apartments, they shouldn't be building 
houses on their own land. Are you kidding? In the multiple times that I 
have been to Israel and the multiple times that I have been to 
Ramallah, to the Palestinian Authority, it is a building bonanza going 
on in the Palestinian Authority. And if it is their land, more power to 
them. Let them go ahead and build.

                              {time}  2130

  Since when is it wrong for Israel to build on their own land? You 
see, there is a reason why the Obama administration has been accused of 
being the most anti-Israel American administration since Harry Truman 
wisely recognized the modern Jewish state's sovereignty in May of 1948.
  Eleven minutes after Israel declared her independence, the greatest 
military economic super powerhouse of the world, the United States of 
America, recognized Israel's right to exist. That meant something 
because our strength and our wealth was behind Israel. We had Israel's 
back.
  No one, no nation, thinks that America unequivocally has Israel's 
back today. All you have to do is look at Israel's neighborhood. It has 
become a very dangerous place, a very dangerous place, indeed. The 
epicenter of jihad today is on Israel's border in Syria.
  There are more weapons floating around in the Middle East today in 
the hands of terrorists than ever before; and yet our Secretary of 
State, rather than being focused on Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, 
which it has stated unequivocally it will use to annihilate the Jewish 
state and to murder millions of Jewish people in Israel, rather than 
the Secretary of State calling out Iran for its ongoing action tonight, 
as I am speaking before C-SPAN and before the Speaker of this House, 
tonight, Iran has thousands and thousands and thousands of centrifuges 
spinning, fissile material that can be used and converted into nuclear 
weapons.
  Tonight, as we speak, research and development continues to go on for 
nuclear warheads. Tonight, as I speak, Iran continues to work on a 
delivery system--a missile delivery system to deliver a nuclear bomb, a 
nuclear warhead with the fissile material to take out Israel. The fact 
is Iran already has the capability to deliver a missile into Israel.
  What they don't have is that capability yet to deliver a nuclear 
warhead against us, the United States. You see, that is Iran's ultimate 
goal. They call us, the U.S., the Great Satan. Israel is the Little 
Satan. So, of course, the goal of Iran will be let's wipe out, with a 
nuclear weapon, some strategic main cities in America, so that we can 
achieve our real goal, which is the annihilation of the Jewish State of 
Israel. That is the goal.
  Where is our Secretary of State calling out Iran? What about the 
epicenter of jihad, Syria, where weapons are awash? Where is our 
Secretary of State there, talking about the numerous, numerous 
terrorist organizations that are already running completely independent 
in Syria? Where is our Secretary of State talking about the problem 
with the communist nation of Russia, which has illegally seized Crimea 
and is now making incursions into the eastern area of Ukraine?
  I just returned from a trip, Mr. Speaker, on Sunday, visiting some 
former Soviet bloc nations to talk about their response to the 
aggressive illegal actions of Russia and what is happening to reset the 
table in the former Soviet bloc nations.
  These are nations that are very worried about what they are seeing. 
They are worried because they understand that you can trust a communist 
to be a communist, and their actions today are a mere image of what 
their actions were formerly.
  Russia recognizes that, if no one pushes back, they will continue to 
salivate over more lands and more influence and seek to dominate more 
people. Russia is responsible for enslaving millions of people. In 
fact, they even murdered tens of millions of their own people under 
Stalin. This is a regime that needs to be watched.
  Unfortunately, under our previous Secretary of State, Hillary 
Clinton, she gave, in my opinion, unwisely, the reset button to the 
former Russian government and apparently didn't think that they would 
push the button.
  They did. They pushed the reset button, and they pushed it in a way 
that has the Soviet Union looking at the United States and making the 
calculation that the United States is now a weak power, that we have 
weakened ourself, and therefore, now is Russia's opportune time to seek 
to influence and pull back into the fold former Soviet bloc nations.
  As we have learned from history, when a madman speaks, listen. Madmen 
spoke in the form of Lenin and Stalin, and millions--tens of millions 
of people were enslaved in misery for decades. The same happened under 
Adolf Hitler, with a madman who spoke, and he murdered 6 million Jewish 
people. That is why we have, today, the Holocaust Remembrance Day.
  We need to pay attention today to the thugs and rulers that are 
making their mad statements. They are doing it again. That is why 
again--why did the Obama administration demand that Israel release from 
prison over 100 murdering terrorists, murderers who murdered innocent 
people--children, women, men--in order for the Palestinian authority 
just to go to the table and have negotiations and talks?
  Now, these same leaders are saying: Don't worry, we will never 
recognize the Jewish state; and, oh, by the way, we want to form up a 
new league with a terrorist organization.
  That is why I say tonight, Mr. Speaker, our Secretary of State has to 
first apologize to the Jewish state and then tender his resignation. I 
call on President Obama, Mr. Speaker, to completely change course on 
his foreign policy.
  We are looking at one foreign policy disaster after another. After 
the thugs of the world have calculated that the United States has put 
itself into a position of weakness, while we are in the process of 
gutting the greatest military force in the world, the bad actors of the 
world are recalculating and resetting the table.
  We are seeing China making aggressive moves that we haven't seen 
before

[[Page H3236]]

against Japan and causing trouble in that area and region of the world. 
We are seeing Russia making incursions, again, as I just said, in 
Eastern Europe that we haven't seen before.
  Even just today, we heard of a mayor in eastern Ukraine who was shot 
in the back by Russian forces. Just over this last weekend, there were 
those who were killed also in Ukraine and those who were taken hostage. 
This is moving forward. This isn't stopping. This is moving forward.
  In Syria, with the epicenter of jihad, and as we saw three Americans 
killed--innocent Americans killed in Afghanistan by a member of the 
Taliban. You see, they are making calculations, these murderers. They 
are looking at the United States. They are seeing this failed foreign 
policy.
  They are seeing that America won't stand up for her allies, like the 
Jewish State of Israel, and at every turn, we lift up the agenda, for 
some inexplicable reason, of the radical Islamist who seeks to destroy 
the Jewish state and destroy the United States of America. It is a 
policy that will lead to a day that I believe we will all regret.
  That is why America and the world needs to wake up and listen to 
these bad actors. So when our Secretary of State calls the Jewish State 
of Israel an apartheid state, it is more than unhelpful. Those words 
are dangerous because a state that was born after seeing 6 million of 
its compatriots, one-third of the entire Jewish population in the world 
at that time, one-third of its people annihilated by the maniacal evil 
ruler named Hitler, to see them called an apartheid state, 
institutional oppression, really? There is no such thing. You will find 
it nowhere.

  Mr. Speaker, as we look again to the Jewish state and as we remember 
with great sadness what this day signifies, the incredible loss of life 
that this signifies, I am reminded of the violence that I witnessed 
myself on a recent trip that I took to Israel.
  I was in the area that President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry 
have demanded that the Jewish state give up and yield, which is 40 
percent of its land. It is the biblical homeland of the Jewish people. 
Hebron is the city, essentially, where the Jewish people were born. 
Abraham was in Hebron.
  It was in Hebron where I was invited into the home of a Jewish woman 
who is in a so-called settlement and has been there for decades. She 
invited me into her kitchen.
  In her kitchen, she showed me some of the doors on her cabinets. 
Those doors on her cabinets had bullet holes in them, Mr. Speaker, 
bullet holes, bullet holes fired across her land, over her deck, in 
through the glass windows of her kitchen and into the cabinet doors of 
her kitchen.
  Every day, her family is reminded of the very real existence that 
they have, that they literally can be in their home and bullets can fly 
in to a place where children should be able to be free, where a wife 
should be able to whip up supper or breakfast and not have to dodge 
bullets.
  You see, that is the very real existence that the Jewish citizens 
have had to face in the southwestern section of Israel, where I had a 
chance to live for a summer. The day after I graduated from high 
school, I was privileged to be able to go and live and work on a 
kibbutz down in Be'er Sheva.
  Kibbutz Be'eri is the area now that is oftentimes dealing with the 
violence from Gaza where Qasam and various rockets are fired from Gaza 
into the Jewish area with no other intention other than killing 
innocent civilians. This is what Israel deals with on nearly a daily 
basis.
  Mr. Speaker, just in the month of February alone this year in 2014, 
there were more rockets that were shot into Israel in this one month 
this year in February than there were all of the previous 12 months in 
2013 put together.
  The Jewish state is under attack, and yet what is Israel's response? 
In Israel, especially in the area known as the disputed territory, what 
is called occupied territory by people in our United States State 
Department, the greatest human rights that women--Arab Muslim women in 
the Middle East are afforded is in no other country but Israel, in the 
so-called occupied territory.
  That is the area where women--Arab Muslim women enjoy the greatest 
protection of human rights, and Israel is being called the apartheid 
state--Muslim women enjoying the greatest rights that they can find 
anywhere in the Middle East in Israel.
  What about jobs? Jobs are available for Palestinians in Israel at 
higher wages, at better conditions, and they are grateful to have those 
jobs. I was in the area where there is a threat by now potentially 
European nations and other nations.
  Even 5,000 academics from America were calling for boycotts, 
divestment, and sanctions on any products that are made in the so-
called occupied territories of Judea and Samaria. Those are Israel's 
biblical homeland. There are 3,500 years of history. Just pick up the 
Bible, read the Bible.
  This is the land that God gave to Abraham. He said: I give you this 
land, Abraham, to you and your descendants through Isaac. Through the 
descendants of Abraham, I give you this land, not just for a year or 5 
years or 10 years.
  But in the Bible, God said: I give you this land for eternity.

                              {time}  2145

  If you don't want to believe the Bible or if you think that it is a 
book of fiction, that is up to you. I believe it is true. You can look 
at historic documents. You can look at documents from this last 
century. International agreements gave this particular piece of land 
not to any other country but to Israel. This is Israel's rightful land.
  Don't we recognize that this has been a very long effort on the part 
of the Arab Muslim people, who made a decision that they don't want 
Israel to exist?
  As I said previously, Mr. Speaker, even the head of the Palestinian 
Authority--Abbas--has said:

       I am 79 years old. I am certainly not about to recognize 
     Israel now.

  He is the one Israel is supposed to negotiate with?
  Even with the leader of the Palestinian Authority--and going back for 
decades--the stated position has been from the Palestinians: Israel 
does not have the right to exist. We will push the Jews into the sea, 
and we will take it over.
  It isn't that they just don't want Israel. It is that they don't want 
any Jews in Israel. They want Jews gone. They don't want Jews anywhere 
on the planet. There is nowhere they believe that the Jewish people 
have the right to exist.
  And this is after 6 million Jews were murdered by Hitler?
  You see, there is an ongoing genocide, if you will, because there is 
a group of people who still believes today that the Jews have no right 
to exist. This isn't just a modern phenomenon. You can go back to the 
days of Haman, when Haman didn't want to have the Jewish people exist, 
and he persuaded the king at that time to issue an edict to eliminate 
and exterminate all of the Jewish people.
  One woman--her name was Esther--was called upon by her uncle, 
Mordecai, and Mordecai said to her:

       Esther, could it be that you have been called to a position 
     for such a time as this?

  Mordecai, her uncle, called upon Queen Esther, and said to the queen:

       You need to go to the king, and you need to ask the king to 
     pardon the Jewish people from this death sentence.

  Esther said to her uncle:

       But if I go in to the king, I could be killed. I am not 
     allowed to just go in to the king. I have to wait until he 
     calls upon me.

  That is when Mordecai infamously said to his niece, to Queen Esther:

       Could it be but that you were appointed for such a time as 
     this?

  She rose up at that moment. She had courage, and she went before the 
king. The king, rather than banishing her or rather than having her see 
the end of her life, called her in, and he asked what it was that she 
wanted. She made the request and interceded on behalf of the Jewish 
people, and, ultimately, the Jewish people were spared.
  You see, Mr. Speaker, this isn't a one-off. This is throughout 
history--from the time of the creation of the Jewish people through 
Abraham and through Abraham's line. This was a God thing. He created 
this people. He created this race.
  In the Book of Genesis, it is extremely clear:

       Those who bless Israel, I will bless, says God. Those who 
     curse Israel, I will curse, says God.


[[Page H3237]]


  That isn't just a one-off. It is for all time.
  The United States of America, I believe--it is my opinion--has been 
singularly blessed by standing by the Jewish people, and on this day of 
remembrance of the Holocaust, we stand with Israel. We, too, remember, 
and we stand up against those who want to see the extermination and the 
annihilation of the Jewish race.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________