And where were you born?

The Jerusalem Post informed its readers on Tuesday that the US State Department considers Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem as included in the US demand that Israel halt "settlement" construction, including for natural growth purposes as State Department spokesman Ian Kelly admitted. And that is an appropriate introduction for me to expand on a matter of State Dept. deviousness.

As American citizens are aware, their children, if born in Jerusalem, whether west Jerusalem or east, I emphasize, are not recognized by the US State Department as being born in Israel. Their birth certificates and subsequently, their passports, will list the "place of birth" as simply "Jerusalem", a seemingly stateless location.

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Getting lost in the Green Line

As a CAMERA alert informed me, one written by Tamar Sternthal, the papal trip of Benedictus XVI to Israel has confused the Los Angeles Times newspaper, which allowed some errors of fact about Israel to appear in its pages. One of them seems to been a stumble over the Green Line, as if it were a tripwire for political geographic correctness.

Duke Helfand, an LA Times reporter, erroneously states in one article that the Pope will arrive at:

the West Bank, where he'll visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and Jerusalem's Western Wall, Judaism's holiest site."

Ooops. Yad Vashem, for sure, is not in the "West Bank" and I would suggest that neither is the Western Wall. They are located in Jerusalem. And, if one wants to get nitpicky, Yad Vashem is actually in the western section and was under Israeli control prior to 1967, that watershed year when maps got redrawn, Biblical locations became rediscovered and the Green Line became, well, obsolete to a great extent.

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Green line language

A May 1 New York Times story included this information about Jerusalem:

The Palestinian population of East Jerusalem, which stood at about 66,000 in 1967, is now about 250,000. In addition, more than 195,000 Israelis live in Jewish developments - referred to as "neighborhoods" by the Israelis and as "settlements" by the United Nations - in East Jerusalem."

Now, I am not certain that the numbers above are exact but, for the moment, that is less a concern to me than the language used.

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Calling the Kettle Black

This has a familiar sound to it:

The Palestinian Authority accused Israel of "ethnically cleansing" east Jerusalem of Palestinians, following the tearing down of dozens of buildings in the capital's east... said Nabil Abu Roudeina, a spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.  "This is an infuriating campaign by the municipality to 'Judaize' the city and expel the Palestinian population," he added.

No, I don't mean that the Arab propagandists have been making this claim in years past, which they have. I mean that actually they have done exactly this - to Jews.

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