Monday, June 15, 2009

Follow-up on "West Bank"

I received this in response to a letter of protest (below):

Dear Mr. Medad,

Thank you for your note.

Please be advised that is a long-standing U.S. government policy, and does not represent a recent change. We will certainly be happy to pass along your views to Washington regarding this issue.

Sincerely,

Luke Zahner

U.S. Consulate General Jerusalem



--------------------------------

Letter of Protest


Dear ,

Thank you for the update on the regulations.

On behalf of myself and additional American citziens, I kindly request that you convey the following protest to the highest officials both in the Consulate as well as the State Department in Washington, including Madam Secretary of State.

The custom adopted by the United States bureaucracy to note "West Bank" for babies born to American citizens in the regulation 7 FAM 1360 APPENDIX D BIRTH IN ISRAEL, JERUSALEM, AND ISRAELI-OCCUPIED AREAS whereby

"If a child is born in the West Bank, whether they are Israelis or Palestinians, place of birth on the U.S. passport is either the city (Efrat, Ramallah, etc.) or the area – the West Bank in that case."

And that furthermore,

"In addition, since the couple’s previous children were born in ________ (and not, say, in Beit Shemesh, etc.), their passports would have to be amended the next time they are renewed. American Citizen Services, Special Consular Services"

is illogical.

As State Dept. officialdom should know, the "West Bank" does not exist as a geo-political entity and never did. In fact, the 1947 UN Resolution referred to Judea and Samaria. So, even if there are some who perceive a logic in the regulation, and I do not recognize such, nevertheless its internal reasoning is based on May 15, 1948 as a cut-off date. However, the "West Bank" did not exist prior to that time. Actually, it only evolved in 1950 when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a state, incidentally, that launched a war of aggression against the nascent state of Israel on May 15, 1948, one-sidely declared an administrative entity they called the "West Bank".

If the State Dept. cannot bring itself to note "Israel" as the state in which "Jerusalem" is located, and furthermore, seeks to create a new political entity, the "West Bank", which never existed previously, I and many others protest this attitude.

The UN Partition Resoltuion 181, partitioning the Mandate territory, was quite explicit about boundaries and place names. "West Bank" does not appear whereas "Judea" and "Samaria" do. Those were the official British Mandate names.

So, until a future alteration in policy, I must insist that the State Dept. adopt those names. An American child born in Efrat or Hebron should be registered as "_______, Judea" and for a child born in Bethel, Ofra or Shiloh, registration should read "______, Samaria".

Moreover, any retroactive actions in previous instances where registration was not done in accordance with the above noted regulation, any amendments should be discounted.

Sincerely,

Yisrael Medad

6 comments:

DANIELBLOOM said...

did you condemn those kids in that video and their parents and the Jewish communities that asent them to Israel to act that way? Did you?

blog on my blog, pro or con, sir, i hope i have touched your conscinece.

See my blog post here about why I have renounced Judaism and feel to blog on my rant pro or con. Thanks. danbloom@gmail.com

http://northwardho.blogspot.com/2009/06/jewish-author-renounces-judaism-over.html

http://www.rantrave.com/Rant/The-Ugly-Sick-Racist-Video-of-Jews.aspx

The Ugly, Sick, Racist Video of Jews Posted on YouTube by Max Blumenthal


DANNY BLOOM BLOGS: "This is such a disgusting video, as a Jewish American man, 60, i am deeply ashamed of these young men and women in the video, and because of this video I am renouncing my Judaism today - publicly. Not that anyone reads my blogs, but here it is. I will never again call myself a Jew. This was a very sad day in modern Jewish life, and the makers and distributors of the video should be ashamed of themselves. Oi."

YMedad said...

Dan,

I condemn a left-wing radical who took advantage of drunk teenagers.

And if, when sober, they would express themselves similarly, I would then condemn their silly rantings - which by the way is protected by the right to free speech.

Ashamed of Danny Bloom

DANIELBLOOM said...

A 79 year old Holocaust survivor in NYC, who has written a powerful book about his time in the camps as a kid, self-published, i read it last winter, amazing story, and TRUE...he said to me today re thios brouhaha:

"Come on Danny, you can no more renounce Judaism than I can. I tried to do so
after the War when my attitude was that my Jewishness has brought me nothing
but misery. I managed to shake the religious aspect, but I am a Jew and that
is part of the core of my being. When Israel was created it became a nation
among nations, with all the rights this entails. Unfortunately, it also
entails the right to have criminals, idiots and total nitwits like those
shown in the misguided video. What you are saying that we Jews should be
better than that. I agree, but that's not how the world is made."

DANIELBLOOM said...

re

''It's not enough for me, or for San Diego Jewish World, to repudiate such sentiments--as we most certainly do. It's important that the Jewish community, through its various organs, also join in the condemnations.''

Denouncing the racists in our own Jewish community

By Gary Rotto

SAN DIEGO—I'm waiting folks.

See, my friend Henry warned me about the video. "Vile, racist rhetoric is being spewed forth from the mouths of drunk Jewish students in Jerusalem," he said. "Gar, if you expect to have something to eat in the next couple of hours, don't because you will be truly disgusted." The video was made on the eve of President Obama's visit to Cairo.

The youngsters horrifyingly called upon vile stereotypes of blacks to express their anger against President Obama. One wanted to have watermelon with the president. "He deserves to get shot" proclaimed another, who I hope in some fashion will be sternly disciplined "White Power and F... the N..r," sneered another. "He's like a terrorist," asserted a college aged girl from South Florida. By the way, this genius is a political science major ... who, though interviewed in Jerusalem, did not know that Benjamin Netanyahu is the Prime Minister of Israel.

It's not enough for me, or for San Diego Jewish World, to repudiate such sentiments--as we most certainly do. It's important that the Jewish community, through its various organs, also join in the condemnations.

I was also disgusted to see these Jewish youngsters proudly displaying how many cuss words they can utter in 30 seconds and how their parents wasted money on them to either visit Israel or go to college or both.

If any of these kids were my son or daughter, they would be walking around with a bar of good old fashioned Ivory Soap in their mouth for the next day and a half. I was taught that cussing was a lazy person's way of expressing himself. These kids were sloths akin to a slug.

I'm still waiting.

DANIELBLOOM said...

continued by Gary Rotta:

The reason why I am waiting is that within five minutes of such a video from Skinheads, our community would be up in arms
demanding to know who these people were, expecting condemnations and decrying the parents who would bring up
such racists. The absolute shame is that these boys and girls are American Jews in Israel. Sure, they are only a few idiots who were exposed on a video. But if these were black kids saying such things about Jews, we would talk about latent anti-Semitism in the African American community.

Although the video has been circulating for some time, I didn't want to just assume that either the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League were aware of the video. So yesterday I left messages with their offices about the video. We'll see if there will be mention of the video on either the AJC or ADL website. So far, racist Jews are either running under the radar or are not important to our community.

Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly is quoted as saying "...the things these pathetic kids say are repulsive and the yeshivas that sent them to Israel are due for a serious soul-search this Yom Kippur. Their children are an embarrassment to Judaism."

There will be those who excuse this as "only a few idiots and not representative of young Jews." But we would still be all over them if they were skinheads talking about Jews as having big noses and being cheap. We would be demanding arrests and prosecutions if non-Jewish young people threatened to kill an Israeli leader visiting North America.

There are those who will point out that one of the videographers is part of a Taayush, an Arab-Jewish group that seeks "A future of equality, justice and peace begins today, between us, through concrete, daily actions of solidarity to end the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and to achieve full civil equality for all Israeli citizens." They will trash the videographers as lefitsts and self hating Jews.

But the trashing of the messenger can't obscure the fact that it was all too easy to find young racist Jews who proudly spewed filth with out much prompting.

So I'm still waiting ... for these parents to cancel their kids
credit cards, grab them by the ear lobe, throw them on the next plane back to the US and shove that bar of soap into their son's and daughter's mouths and to teach them about respect for life, proper public discourse and how what it really means to be a Jew.

I'm waiting for that video.

DANIELBLOOM said...

Here's a followup to how the Jewish Americam professional groups responded to Mr Rotto's article above. ADL provided a written mealy-mouthed response ... saying the kids were drunk etc etc....that was the answer from the ADL. AJC did not even reply to Mr Rotto's emaols or his voice mail messages requesting comment.

See? Why no comments here?