Turkey recalled its newly minted ambassador to the United States, Namik Tan, on Thursday after the House Foreign Affairs committee narrowly passed a resolution that aims to ensure that the U.S. government formally refers to the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians in World War I as a "genocide."
The 23-22 vote will likely harm relations between the United States and Turkey, according to Al-Jazeera.
The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed a bill last night authorizing President Barack Obama to sanction companies that sell refined petroleum to Iran.
The final vote was 412-12, with 4 people voting "present." (Here's the roll call.)
The House vote came just hours after a hearing in which four witnesses said the sanctions bill would hurt U.S. policy in the region. That has long been the consensus among Iran experts, who fear the bill will hurt ordinary Iranians without changing the regime's behavior.
I don't know if any of this came through in my earlier post, but as I sat on Capitol Hill this afternoon and listened to debate over the anti-Goldstone Report resolution, I found myself getting angry.
Furious, actually. The congressmen defending the resolution made no attempt to be honest; they made no effort to have an intelligent debate about Goldstone's findings. They smeared the report as the "hopelessly biased" product of an anti-Israel inquisition. Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., went so far as to compare Goldstone to the justices who approved the internment of Japanese prisoners during World War II.
And then 344 members of the United States Congress (here's the roll call) voted to bury his findings.
Final update: The final vote on the anti-Goldstone resolution was 344-36, with 22 people voting "present." The resolution passed.
Just so everyone's clear, this is a non-binding resolution. It urges the president and the secretary of state to keep condemning the report and to block it from reaching the Security Council, the International Criminal Court, and other world bodies. It's a symbolic victory for Israel, but it has no binding legal authority.
We'll post a link to the roll call later tonight so you can see who voted yes or no. Our live-blogging of the debate follows after the jump.
A few odds and ends about Israel and the Goldstone Report. The U.S. House of Representatives is due to vote later today on a resolution condemning the report. (We did some fact-checking of the resolution last week, in case you missed it.)
The U.N. General Assembly is scheduled to take up the report tomorrow; Arab states are floating a proposal that would also require the Security Council to consider the report. The draft would call on Israel and Hamas to conduct investigations "that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards," according to AFP.
Spencer Ackerman just posted a copy of a U.S. House of Representatives resolution condemning the Goldstone Report. Ackerman reports that the resolution will probably come up for a vote in the next few days.
The resolution makes some valid points. I completely agree, for example, that the report is too dismissive of claims that Hamas used human shields during the war. I made that point when I blogged the section about human shields.
But the resolution is also riddled with inaccuracies and misleading statements. A few examples after the jump -- the quoted sections are from the resolution.
I got a couple of press releases tonight about the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act (H.R. 1327), approved this afternoon by the House of Representatives. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), would allow state and local governments to divest from companies which do business with Iran. It was approved almost unanimously, 414-6.
The Senate still needs to approve companion legislation before the bill becomes law. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) is working on similar legislation.
I'm not sure how many state/local governments actually invest in said companies -- the U.S. doesn't exactly have close economic ties with Iran -- or how many would even consider divesting. I'm kinda curious; I'll put in a call to Frank's office tomorrow to find out.
