US court: No ‘Israel’ on passports of American citizens born in Jerusalem

Mike L.

{Cross-posted at Free News of the World.}

This US government is selling out its Jewish constituency.

The snippet below was written by Michael Wilner and Reuters and published in the Jerusalem Post:

WASHINGTON – A US federal appeals court on Tuesday invalidated a law that was designed to allow American citizens born in Jerusalem to list Israel on their passports as their birthplace.

The unanimous ruling by the three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upholds a longstanding US foreign policy dictate that says that the president – and not lawmakers – has the sole authority to say who controls Jerusalem.

In the government, the president “exclusively holds the power to determine whether to recognize a foreign sovereign,” Judge Karen Henderson wrote for the panel.

Soooo, does this mean that US president Barack Obama recognizes no part of Jerusalem as sovereign Israeli territory?

From a symbolic standpoint this is very weighty stuff.  The US federal court of appeals in Washington, DC, has decided that Obama gets to decide if Jerusalem belongs to Israel.  It's not even a matter of the eastern section of the city, or the Arab sections, but Jerusalem in its entirety, including heavily Jewish western Jerusalem.

I do not see many bloggers or pundits highlighting this news snippet, but it should be highlighted.  It represents yet another example of how the United States government, during the current administration, is essentially hostile toward the Jewish State of Israel.

Jerusalem has been the capital city of the Jewish people for four thousand years and, yet, with a snap of a finger the Obama administration can simply say "no."

The real danger facing the Jews today is not the Arab-Muslim Jihad in the streets of Israel, but the long, slow crunch of western diplomats and politicians.  It comes from things like the European Union's recent decision to boycott Jews in Judea and Samaria and the passive-aggressive stance of president Obama, who has suggested - with his Go Search Your Souls comment - that the Jews in the Middle East do not honestly want peace.

The reason that this is a danger facing Jews, and not merely those of us in the Jewish State, is because the well-being of Israel is tied up with the well-being of the rest of us.  It's not just a matter of the fact that if Israel goes, so goes the Jewish life-raft, but that Jewish culture (and, thus, the Jewish soul) will then suffer an irredeemable crippling.

We must not forget that the reconstitution of the Jewish State of Israel on historically Jewish land represents the redemption of the Jewish people throughout the world.  For two thousand years prior to 1948 the Jews were a people almost entirely in diaspora.  The Jewish collective was, in the imagination of European Christians, the Wandering Jew.  The Jews throughout Europe and the Arab-Muslim Middle East lived or died according to the whims and fancies of local princes and imams.

When a US federal appeals court decides that maybe Jerusalem is not really part of Israel, then this is a step in the direction of the delegitimization of Israel and thus the delegitimization of the Jewish people.

It represents a denial of our place within the community of nations and no self-respecting Jew would apologize for it or put up with it.