RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mr. Shapiro is a constitutional litigator at Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher in New York, and counsel to amici curiae members of Congress in Zivotofsky v. Kerry.
The State Department says no, Congress says yes. Now the justices will decide a case involving a boy’s passport.

Menachem Binyamim Zivotofsky is soon to become a bar mitzvah, but his place of birth is still in dispute.

This much is clear: He was born on Oct. 17, 2002, in Shaare Zedek Hospital, in western Jerusalem. His parents, Ari and Naomi, are U.S. citizens, which makes him a U.S. citizen as well. But when his mother visited the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv to apply for a passport and birth documentation for her newborn son, and listed his “place of birth” on both applications as Israel, consular officials balked.

Since 1948, successive U.S. presidents have taken the position that Jerusalem is a city without a country, pending the conclusion of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. Under State Department policy, personal-status documents of Jerusalem-born U.S. citizens such as Mr. Zivotofsky list only the city “Jerusalem” as the passport holder’s place of birth, and not Israel. That Jerusalem has, as a matter of fact, been the seat of Israel’s government for almost seven decades is of no relevance to the State Department.

In 2002 Congress stepped in and passed a law that directs the Secretary of State to permit U.S. citizens born in Jerusalem to choose to list “Israel” as their place of birth. The purpose of the law was to provide citizens like Mr. Zivotofsky the opportunity to self-identify as being born in Israel. But Presidents Bush and Obama have refused to implement the statute, citing what they called the president’s “exclusive” powers to direct the nation’s foreign affairs and to recognize the boundaries of foreign powers. His parents filed a lawsuit on behalf of their child, then a year old.

Fast-forward a decad

Liberals are fighting liberals over referenda that would make the health law worse.

Democrats keep saying that opposition to the Affordable Care Act is a spent political force, but not so fast. Senate Republican candidates have run more ads against ObamaCare than on any other issue, according to Kantar Media/CMAG. But perhaps more fascinating this election year are the state referenda that confront rising costs and declining patient choice.

The pity is that these states are trying to solve the problems caused by ObamaCare with more ObamaCare-like rules and government control. Leading this challenge from the left as always is California, where on Tuesday voters will consider Proposition 45, which would impose stronger price controls on health insurers.

The state’s individual and small-business insurance markets were reasonably functional, but now all coverage must conform to the White House’s income-redistribution goals, and premiums are headed up fast. Anthem Blue Cross—whose 2010 rate hikes President Obama infamously served up as a reason to vote for the bill—is raising small group rates 9.8% next year. The California insurance commissioner prefers 2.1%.

So Prop. 45 would give the commissioner the power to reject rates he deems “unreasonable,” with no reference to actuarial or solvency standards. Government would dictate what products consumers are allowed to buy and use its clairvoyance to decide what businesses can charge.

One irony is that the ObamaCare exchange known as Covered California already fixes prices via crony capitalism, albeit in the back room. Instead of promoting competition among many insurers to lower costs, the bureaucracy follows a practice called selective contracting: Insurers receive a list of demands and Covered California then picks a few compliant winners. The losers are excluded from the exchange’s subsidized consumers.

Bedfellows make for strange politics, and the double irony is that the campaign against Prop. 45 is led by Covered California and such ObamaCare supporters as Nancy Pelosi . They don’t want an interloper to disturb their discretion. With characteristic California unwisdom, Prop. 45 gives outside pressure groups and especially trial lawyers the right to challenge rates in court.

In Egypt, a young Coptic Christian man, accused of blaspheming Islam for simply “liking” an Arabic-language Facebook page, was sentenced to six years in prison.

One of the intruders in Uganda was shouting, “Today we shall kill you [for converting to Christianity] — you… are not respecting our prophet’s religion.” He then heard his 12-year-old-girl’s cries as the Muslim intruders were strangling her. Then they seized him.

Muslims in Germany were granted their own section of the cemetery. Now these same Islamic communities are demanding that, during Islamic funerals, Christian symbols and crosses in the cemetery be removed or covered up.

During the Islamic State’s June invasion and consolidation of Mosul, Iraq — where Christians have been present since the first century — countless atrocities against them were committed. Accordingly, the region is now reportedly empty of Christian presence.

The Islamic State, among other acts, reinstituted the collection of jizya, the “tribute” conquered Christians (and Jews) were historically required to pay in order not to be killed in accordance with the Koran (9:29).

In one instance, three Islamic State members burst into the home of a Christian family, demanding the jizya-money. When the father of the house pleaded that he did not have the money, the intruders raped his wife and daughter in front of him. The man was reportedly so traumatized that he committed suicide. Four other Christian women were killed for not wearing the Islamic veil.

Soon after taking over Mosul, the Islamic State also announced that it would destroy all Christian places of worship. Several churches were burned, including the Armenian church near the Al Salam hospital, and the Church of the Holy Spirit, after first being looted and desecrated. A large statue of the Virgin Mary disappeared.

Among the many Christians missing are two nuns from the Daughters of Mary Order, who managed an orphanage for girls in Mosul. It is believed they have been kidnapped.

By Jed Babbin – – Thursday, October 30, 2014
The leaders of our uniformed military — the Joint Chiefs of Staff — have committed an act of common sense that exposes President Obama’s Ebola policy for its comprehensive lack of that commodity. According to a recent report on Fox News, they have called for all troops returning from the Ebola “hot zone” to be quarantined for 21 days.

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced that returning troops would be quarantined for the length of Ebola’s incubation period and asked the Joint Chiefs to propose a way to do it.

That not only conflicts with Mr. Obama’s refusal to impose any limitation on coming to this country for people who have possibly been exposed to Ebola, but it also conflicts directly with the pressure the president has put on the governors of New York and New Jersey for doing for Ebola-exposed health workers exactly what the Joint Chiefs proposed and Mr. Hagel has now ordered.

By sending troops to the Ebola zone in West Africa, Mr. Obama wrongly decided to put them in harm’s way against an enemy they can’t fight with bullets, rockets and bombs. Ebola is a disease that our best medical experts only begin to understand.

This week, Russian aircraft have probed NATO defenses to a degree unseen since the Cold War. Fighter aircraft from eight NATO members were reportedly scrambled to intercept more than two dozen aircraft just on Tuesday and Wednesday.
As the Wall Street Journal report details, the intercepts of Russian aircraft have occurred more than one hundred times this year, which is about three times the number of intercepts conducted last year.
Though those intercepts didn’t intrude on NATO airspace, they are consistent with the high number of Russian challenges to American air defenses and with the apparent intrusion of a Russian submarine in Sweden’s territorial waters I wrote about last week. It’s not obvious what Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing, but these actions – coupled with his own explanation in a major speech – do lead us to a few conclusions.

Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, recounts the many historical world orders both before and since the Treaties of Westphalia in 1648 which, by recognizing the sovereignty of nation-states re-ordered a world order that had previously been ordered by religions. Putin’s speech, delivered on 24 October, was alternately threatening, conciliatory and a statement of what Putin apparently wishes a new ordering of the world to look like.
Putin – who has said that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the Twentieth Century – emphasized his view that America’s actions since the Cold War denigrated national sovereignty in an effort to impose universally American ideals. He accuses the United States of destabilizing nations and supporting the rise of “neo-fascists and Islamic radicals.”

Putin’s alternative is to create a world order in terms of institutions such as the UN and regional alliances: “I am certain that if there is a will, we can restore the effectiveness of the international and regional institutions system. We do not even need to build anything anew, from the scratch; this is not a ‘greenfield,’ especially since the institutions created after World War II are quite universal and can be given modern substance, adequate to manage the current situation.”
In short, Putin’s view injects Russia as a regional power with influence everywhere. He would invest the United Nations with the power it had to deter American action and increase Russia’s influence – first regionally, and then globally – to essentially the same power it had during the Cold War.

Last week, the Obama White House finally clarified its Middle East policy. It’s détente with Iran and a cold war with Israel.Our new partners? OUR NEW PARTNERS?

To the administration, Israel isn’t worth the trouble its prime minister causes. As one anonymous Obama official put it to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, what good is Benjamin Netanyahu if he won’t make peace with the Palestinians? Bibi doesn’t have the nerve of Begin, Rabin, or Sharon, said the unnamed source. The current leader of this longstanding U.S. ally, he added, is “a chickens—t.”

It’s hardly surprising that the Obama White House is crudely badmouthing Netanyahu; it has tried to undercut him from the beginning. But this isn’t just about the administration’s petulance and pettiness. There seems to be a strategic purpose to heckling Israel’s prime minister. With a possible deal over Iran’s nuclear weapons program in sight, the White House wants to weaken Netanyahu’s ability to challenge an Iran agreement.

Another unnamed Obama official told Goldberg that Netanyahu is all bluster when it comes to the Islamic Republic. The Israeli leader calls the clerical regime’s nuclear weapons program an existential threat, but he’s done nothing about it. And now, said the official, “It’s too late for him to do anything. Two, three years ago, this was a possibility. But ultimately he couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger. It was a combination of our pressure and his own unwillingness to do anything dramatic. Now it’s too late.”

In other words, the White House is openly boasting that it bought the Iranians enough time to get across the finish line. Obama has insisted for five years that his policy is to prevent a nuclear Iran from emerging. In reality, his policy all along was to deter Israel from striking Iranian nuclear facilities. The way Obama sees it, an Iranian bomb may not be desirable, but it’s clearly preferable to an Israeli attack. Not only would an Israeli strike unleash a wave of Iranian terror throughout the region—and perhaps across Europe and the United States as well—it would also alienate what the White House sees as a potential partner.

Jewish peers in Britain’s upper legislative chamber, the House of Lords, last night engaged in robust defense of Israel during a four-and-a-half hour debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former chief rabbi, told the chamber, “at the outset I declare an interest. I am a Jew. Israel is therefore for me the place where my people were born almost four thousand years ago, the place to which Abraham and Sarah travelled, where Amos voiced his vision of social justice and Isaiah dreamed of a world at peace, where David composed the Psalms and Solomon built the Temple – and this had consequences not only for Jews but also for Christians and Muslims, who claim Abraham as their ancestor in faith, and whose God they take as their own.”

Later on in his speech, Sacks declared: “The Islamists also know that the only way they can win the sympathy of the West is by demonizing Israel. They know you can’t win support for ISIS, Boko Haram or Islamic Jihad, but if you can blame Israel you will gain the support of academics, unions and the media and you will distract attention from the massacres in Syria and Iraq, the slow descent of other countries into chaos, and the ethnic cleansing of Christians throughout the region.”

Another Jewish peer, Lord Mitchell, frankly told the Lords: “Around the world, atrocities are being committed and we all wring our hands and do precious little, but when Israel alone defends herself, everybody goes ballistic. At best it can be called hypocrisy, and at worst it is called something else.”

Mitchell added that he agreed with iconic British Jewish actress Maureen Lipman “when she says Labour and [party leader] Ed Miliband have got it wrong.” As The Algemeiner reported yesterday, in an article for the current issue of Standpoint magazine, Lipman, who had a starring role in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film about the Holocaust, The Pianist, excoriated Miliband for his support for British recognition of a Palestinian state independently of any negotiations with Israel.

Column: Deputy National Security Adviser: Iran Deal ‘Is Healthcare For Us’

Deputy National Security Adviser and MFA in creative writing Ben Rhodes likened an Iranian nuclear deal to Obamacare in a talk to progressive activists last January, according to audio obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The remarks, made at a since-discontinued regular meeting of White House personnel and representatives of liberal interest groups, reveal the importance of a rapprochement with Iran to President Obama, who is looking to establish his legacy as his presidency enters its lame-duck phase.

“Bottom line is, this is the best opportunity we’ve had to resolve the Iranian issue diplomatically, certainly since President Obama came to office, and probably since the beginning of the Iraq war,” Rhodes said. “So no small opportunity, it’s a big deal. This is probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy. This is healthcare for us, just to put it in context.”

Rhodes made the comparison as the White House was reeling from the botched rollout of the $2 billion Healthcare.gov. Polls continue to show that the health law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, remains unpopular.

Rhodes also said the White House wants to avoid congressional scrutiny of any deal.

“We’re already kind of thinking through, how do we structure a deal so we don’t necessarily require legislative action right away,” Rhodes said. “And there are ways to do that.”

That is similar to what an unnamed senior administration official told David Sanger of the New York Times last week for a piece headlined “Obama Sees an Iran Deal That Could Avoid Congress”: “We wouldn’t seek congressional legislation in any comprehensive agreement for years.”

Secretary of State John Kerry denounced the word “chickenshit” to describe Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as a senior administration official told The Atlantic, but in the same breath described the country as one that “wants to be a Jewish state.”

As soon as the article was brought up to Kerry today at the Washington Ideas Forum, he said “the long game, as everybody knows from the investment I made much of last year, is to find a way to bring the parties to make peace in the Middle East.”

“We still believe it is doable, but it takes courage, it takes strength. You have to be prepared — both sides have to be prepared to compromise in order to do it,” he said. “Here’s what I know, and I think all of you know this, viscerally and intellectually. And I’ve asked this question of people in the Middle East.”

“One of the great challenges for Israel is obviously not to be a bi-national state. It wants to be a Jewish state. To be a Jewish state, you clearly have to resolve the issue of two states.”

Kerry argued that “if you don’t and you are a unitary state and people have equal rights to vote and participate as citizens, is Israel going to have a Palestinian prime minister?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think so. Not going to happen.”

Netanyahu regularly refers to Israel as the Jewish state.

“So therefore, what is the solution here? How do you move forward?” Kerry said. “And what we’re trying to do is evenhandedly and hopefully thoughtfully strengthen Israel’s ability to free of rockets — not strengthen, to make it free of rockets, to — to end this perpetual conflict in a way that provides for the complete security of Israel, which has a right totally to be free of tunnels coming into its country, terrorists jumping out of a tunnel with handcuffs, with tranquilizer drugs, guns next to a kibbutz. No country would tolerate that.”

I have never in my increasingly long life felt vulnerable as a Jew in America. I never even dreamed it would happen. But it has now — with the Obama administration.

Something is seriously wrong. At almost every opportunity, Obama and his minions have criticized Israel out of all proportion to the actions of the Jewish state, particularly during the recent Gaza War when there was a constant barrage of warnings from our State Department about harming civilians. (This is a criticism State would never turn on itself. Who knows how many innocents have died in the U.S. air attacks on ISIS — no one even says a word about it.)

Now they have called Israel’s prime minister a “chickensh*t,” a “coward” and who knows what else, using adjectives for Benjamin Netanyahu they don’t employ with Kim Jung-un, Vladimir Putin, Hassan Nasrallah, Bashar Assad or even the murderous Islamic State’s al-Baghdadi, not to mention — and this is probably crucial — the potentially most homicidal of all, Ayatollah Khamenei of the Islamic State of Iran. (One of the more sinister aspects of Jeff Goldberg’s article that generated this controversy was that one of his leakers bragged they had scared cowardly Netanyahu into not attacking Iran’s nuclear installations, as if this were a good thing, the implication being that the administration can now look good for making an Iran deal — that would ultimately give the mullahs the bomb.) It’s as if Netanyahu, not the aforementioned maniacs, were the administration’s worst enemy.

Meanwhile, the attempts to make nice to the Israelis over the vicious personal slurs from the article, which apparently came from two high and thus far unpunished administration officials, have been perfunctory, so perfunctory that you know they are not meant to be taken seriously, quite the contrary. In fact, an attempted terrorist assassination of a prominent American-Israeli in Jerusalem yesterday that caused the Israeli government to put the Temple Mount on lockdown has already generated more chastisement of the Israelis from our secretary of State. All this against an unprecedented, at least since World War II, rise in global anti-Semitism.

The administration claims to be making these “constructive” criticisms for Israel’s sake, but the Jewish state has better allies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia than they do in an Obama administration that seems to prefer Islamofascist Qatar — those same oil sheiks that bankroll Hamas, the terror organization whose charter exhorts all Muslims to kill every Jew hiding behind a tree anywhere in the world.

And you wonder why I feel like I’m living in Berlin in 1937.