Well, only some of them called for everyone to be denied visas. Most of them just called for an “investigation” into the terrible terror ties of the activists aboard the flotilla, sponsored by a Turkish NGO called IHH that is not on any American watch list.

But to the assembled politicians and most of the small crowd, it is already settled — based on decade-old investigations and foreign intelligence reports — that IHH has ties to al-Qaida and Hamas. (Well, it does have “ties” to Hamas — anyone looking to build anything in Gaza is forced by the Israeli siege to deal with Hamas.)

So! Here’s Carolyn Maloney (at one time a theoretical liberal challenger to Kirsten Gillibrand):

Highlights:

• “The Gaza flotilla wasn’t about aid to suffering Palestinians, it was about terrorism.”
• “We are told that IHH was involved in the 1998 plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport.” (The evidence for this one is circumstantial at best.
• “They want to increase the flow of weapons into the hands of Hamas. That’s what this is about.”
• “And while there were well-intentioned humanitarians on board the flotilla ships, I think America has a right to be concerned that some of them may come and try to come to the United States.”

Here’s great liberal hope Anthony Weiner, telling the story of a theoretical boat, filled with people who hate America, that takes off from Yemen (not sure why he picked Yemen, but that is where this boat is coming from) and is heading for our shores:

This ship is “heading right toward Queens, or Brooklyn. Let’s assume it was coming toward New Jersey or Florida.” (What do those American locales have in common, exactly?)

The, uh, obvious counter to this hypothetical is to imagine what our response would be if the ship was headed for Queens but was stopped because it violated, say, Canada’s blockade of New York City.

(At 1:29, Weiner’s microphone went out. That was the event’s highlight.)

Hypotheticals and historical analogies were a popular way of justifying Israel’s actions. Rangel compared the blockade to the Cuban missile crisis. Weiner talked about that mysterious Yemeni flotilla targeting, somehow, Queens.

Jerry Nadler had an extended bit about how we would respond if New York were under rocket attack — from New Jersey. But that ended with him actually criticizing the actions of the Israeli government! See, he’s mad that it released the activists it detained. If America had captured activists looking to support these mysterious rocket-launching New Jersey terrorists, what would’ve happened?