(Goodbye to Congress) Brian Baird says US should break Gaza blockade by ‘our version of the Berlin airlift’!
Two U.S. Congress members entered the Gaza Strip yesterday, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an and the Associated Press reported.
Representative Brian Baird, a Democrat from Washington State who is retiring from the House of Representatives, is one of the lawmakers who entered. It’s not clear who the other one is, and there’s minimal coverage of this from U.S. media.
This should be making the news: Baird has called on George Mitchell, the Obama administration’s envoy to the Middle East, to visit the Gaza Strip and witness the destruction caused by the Israeli onslaught last year. And, most importantly, he urged the United States to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
From the Associated Press:
The United States should break Israel’s blockade of Gaza and deliver badly needed supplies by sea, a US congressman told Gaza students.
[…]
Baird, who has announced his retirement from Congress, told a group of Gaza students Sunday evening that the US should not condone the blockade.
"We ought to bring roll-on, roll-off ships and roll them right to the beach and bring the relief supplies in, in our version of the Berlin airlift," he said, adding that the supplies could be delivered to U.N. aid agencies.
Baird, who represents the district that Rachel Corrie was from, has been quite outspoken on the Gaza massacre and the blockade. He signed the Jim McDermott-Keith Ellison letter to President Obama that urged him to press Israel to lift the suffocating blockade of Gaza.