1. Ekklesia (http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/16335)
Report alleging discrimination against Christians 'confused', 27 February 2012
by staff writers
Civil rights advocates are expressing puzzlement at a new report from Christians in Parliament and the Evangelical Alliance UK which claims that Christians are victims of prejudice in Britain.
The report, 'Clearing the Ground', suggests that civic and legal authorities in the UK are suffering from 'religious illiteracy' and that there is a failure to treat Christians who hold conservative social views - including those who say that their beliefs should allow them to discriminate against others in the provision of goods and services - with fairness.
During a six-month inquiry, the Christians in Parliament all-party group, led by Conservative MP Gary Streeter, analysed a range of instances, including employment tribunals and court cases, where Christians claimed they had received unfair treatment under the law.
It also took evidence from what are described by the group as "key organisations, denominations and experts" and received written evidence from a further 40 groups and individuals.
The report criticises the Equality Act 2010, despite the exemptions churches have from it, and indicates that some Christian groups believe that the Equalities and Human Rights Commission is biased against Christians - even though it made a high-profile attempt last year, criticised by other equalities groups, to intervene at the European Court of Human Rights in four cases in which Christians alleged they had been unfairly treated.
The new report alleges that "indications from court judgments are that sexual orientation takes precedence and religious belief is required to adapt in the light of this. We see this as an unacceptable and unsustainable situation.”
'Clearing the Ground' makes a number of recommendations for correcting what it sees as 'religious illiteracy' in public life, and it promotes the notion of 'reasonable accommodation' as a concept "that has merit and warrants further consideration. If proved viable it may help prevent legal cases where religious activity is" [according to the report] "unduly restricted".
Writing for the Daily Telegraph website to accompany the launch of the report, Gary Streeter MP and Jim Dobbin, a Labour MP, call on the Government to consider requiring judges to weigh up whether employers have taken “reasonable” steps to accommodate the religious beliefs of workers. The MPs say new guidelines could help balance what they say are “competing” rights.
But critics say that the report is confused and confusing in its understanding and approach to a range of complex issues.
Simon Barrow, co-director of the religion and society thinktank Ekklesia, commented: "Initial impressions from this report are that it raises significantly more questions than it answers. For example, it seems to assume that most people who are convinced Christians automatically share, or should share, a range of prejudices - notably against LGBT people - which make them unwilling to comply with requirements to act in a non-discriminatory way in the provision of public services. This is not the case. Many Christians from all traditions believe that equal treatment of others is not simply a legal requirement but a Christian obligation.
He continued: "The report employs the dubious notion of 'competing rights' to seek to posit a clash between Christians (taken to be a homogenous group) and gay people (who are assumed to be quite separate from Christians). In fact, the whole point of the human rights convention and UK equalities legislation is to seek to ensure fair treatment regardless of religion or belief, or indeed sexual orientation. It protects Christians against discrimination as much, but no more, than anyone else.
"The Christians in Parliament document also jumbles up a range of quite distinct and different legal cases, advocating the notion of 'reasonable accommodation' in a way that stretches from matters like workplace dress, where negotiation may be entirely appropriate, through to cases where exemption from equality requirements in the provision of goods and services would clearly disadvantage and discriminate against those not sharing narrowly conservative Christian views. This is not 'clearing the ground', it is muddying the waters."
Mr Barrow added: "The bottom line here is that being a Christian is no longer a 'trump card' in public life in the way that it may once have been, and many Christians whose views are not reflected by this report will undoubtedly say, on strong theological grounds, 'nor should it be'. Christianity is a free choice, and freedom of belief is abused when it is imposed on people, particularly in a limited and limiting way.
"Nothing in Christian belief compels Christians to participate in the offering of public goods and services of the type that are at issue here. Those who are not prepared to do so without discriminating against others, or who object to complying with laws aimed at protecting the rights of all, remain free to refuse to do so. This is surely a 'reasonable accommodation' in a plural society?
"The general public mood now is that discrimination and prejudice against gay people, for example, is as unacceptable in public life as discrimination against black people or any other social or ethnic group. It is very sad that some Christians find this hard to accept, and wish to maintain a privileged position for themselves, regarding equal treatment as 'discrimination' against them. But the law is surely correct not to allow prejudice to overcome civil rights for all, and despite the huge efforts of certain lobby groups - whose involvement is not properly investigated by 'Clearing the Ground', incidentally - legal cases brought by a small number of religious complainants have failed again and again. This has not happened because there is bias or ignorance in the legal system, but because of a failure of evidence.
"Indeed, it is insulting and unfair to those who work in the legal system, including Christians, and to those who work for EHRC, who have made very considerable (some would say over-stretched) efforts to reach out to the very groups who attack them, to suggest that they are biased and prejudicial. As a Christian think-tank working on these issues for some years, this is not our experience at all. Specific attempts to show that the law has been inaccurately or unfairly interpreted have been notably unsuccessful, so attempts are now being made to insinuate prejudice. This is regrettable, to say the least.
"We now live in a mixed-belief 'spiritual and secular' society where the number of practicing Christians has fallen considerably. Many sections of the church are adapting well to this, and recognise that the decline of 'top down' religion opens up opportunities to rediscover the Christian message as being about empowerment not exclusion. Others, however, resent their loss of status and power to control others. Further education within churches and faith communities about living positively in plural society is now vital.
"If there is 'religious illiteracy' in society more widely, many would say it begins with the failure of some people of faith to communicate their beliefs in an open and engaging way, and to address prejudice and exclusion - not least against women and LGBT people - in their midst. There is a major theological and educational task to be addressed here," concluded the Ekklesia co-director.
In 2005, Ekklesia's book 'Faith and Politics After Christendom', authored by Jonathan Bartley, predicted that there would be an increase in allegations of discrimination and persecution by some Christians in the UK, and analysed the underlying shifts in social and religious demographics behind this.
・ The 'Clearing the Ground' report may be read in summary and in full here: http://www.eauk.org/clearingtheground/
・'Discriminating Christian confusions', by Simon Barrow: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/14312
・'Christianity, the legal system and discrimination' - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/11873
・Equalities issues: http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/tags/4194
・'Religion, belief and non-discrimination law' (in the run-up to the 2010 Equality Act) - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/8700
・'An ill-judged intervention from the Equality and Human Rights Commission', by Savi Hensman - http://www.ekklesia.co.uk/node/15119
Ekklesia is a member of the Cutting Edge Consortium. This is a coalition of faith groups, human rights campaigns, trades unions and other organisations. They are opposing calls for ever more “religious opt-outs” from equalities legislation in Britain. http://www.cuttingedgeconsortium.co.uk
[Ekk/3]
2. Malaysian Insider (http://www.themalaysianinsider.com)
What every Malaysian needs to know about ‘race’ (Part 4): Race and history , 27 February 2012
by Clive Kessler
FEB 27 — It is now nearly over.
We are nearing the end of our long and winding journey across the “landscape” (as people these days like to say, as if they were all architectural gardeners and designers of country-house grounds!) of “bangsa”, “race” and all the various contending, and often mutually incompatible, ideas that are thrown indiscriminately together within the bangsa “suitcase”.
There remain just a few more things to sort out: first about “race” and prejudice; then about “race” and “racism” in the context of worldwide European imperial domination; and finally to address in Part 5 a familiar old question:
“What is to be done?”
My discussion ends with some suggestions about how to proceed towards the kind of “linguistic engineering” and conceptual clarification of which Malaysia, and users of the Malaysian national language, are now greatly in need.
“Colour” and Prejudice
Now that the necessary “ground-clearing” has been completed, we can proceed onwards with the last parts of the discussion of “race” and its conventional “mis-understanding” and confusion — via the all-purpose term “bangsa” — within Malaysia’s Malay “linguistic universe” or “language world”.
Onwards!
Race is not simply a matter of what used to be called “colour prejudice”.
What that kind of “colour” or “race prejudice” involved was the scorning of people of any “different”, usually “darker”, pigmentation than one’s own; and then subjecting them, on account of those unequally valued features of perceived physiognomy (physical appearance), to differential treatment.
Often that has proved a matter even of subjecting those broad categories of people who are classed, on the basis of typified colour and appearance, as “inferior” to abusive, discriminatory and ultimately oppressive treatment.
Such attitudes, habits and practices seem to be almost as old as humankind.
Certainly they are just about as old as the meeting and social mixing of people from different historical “branches” of humankind or identifiable human “stocks” or localised populations.
Consider here some revealing words from what is perhaps the world’s oldest and greatest love poem, the Biblical “Song of Songs” (or “Song of Solomon”).
For some this text is simply a love song to a beautiful dark-skinned lady from the South, perhaps from Africa, who found herself in Jerusalem in the time of King Solomon, some hundreds, perhaps almost a thousand, years before the time of Jesus.
A long time ago
For some, the person on whom this poem focuses is the Queen of Sheba, or Puteri Balqis, who came as King Solomon’s guest to Jerusalem.
For others the poem is allegorical, a lyrical song about the God’s love for humankind. That’s the only reason why so erotic and explicit a love song could become part of the holy canon of the Bible. It is not really what it seems to be prosaically about, the pious solemnly declare; it is to be understood metaphorically and figuratively.
That background aside, now to the diagnostically significant words.
The author, the man who is enamoured of this beautiful woman, insists (Chap. 4) that in all manner of wonderful ways this woman is “fair”. Indeed, she is (6:1) the fairest among women, he assures her. Why?
What does the woman herself say at the outset, not to that man but to the other women of the city, perhaps her rivals for royal affection?
Her words (1:5-6) are an appeal and a challenge. I am black and beautiful, she says to them. (“Black is beautiful,” as the Black Pride movement of the 1960s insisted.) So do not look down upon me, you daughters of Jerusalem, simply because my skin is black, because the sun has darkened me, she demands.
So there we have it.
As long ago as then there was a clear tendency, which the beautiful dark-skinned lady was contesting, to look down upon people of her kind and to treat them with less than full and ordinary respect.
Note that my use here of the Biblical text is not doctrinal or theological, not in any way a matter of religious apologetics.
The Biblical text is cited here as historical or contemporary ethnographic evidence of the existence, perhaps pervasiveness, of what we would now call “colour prejudice” at the time of King Solomon.
That kind of prejudice is not, as some like to think, a recent, modern invention of the Age of Imperialism and European domination.
It is not, but something else is.
That something else is not simply this kind of “colour prejudice” but racism itself, in the modern political and historical sense.
Race and Racism: “Colour”, Culture and Power
When the sailors and adventurers of an expanding Europe in the great Age of Discovery reached Africa, Asia and the Americas, they suddenly, often to their great surprise, encountered people of radically different kinds than their own.
These peoples were, so it seemed, different in all manner of things: especially in appearance, speech, and ways of life or “culture”.
Encountering such people posed to those Europeans, or at least to the more sensitive of them (and also, one must suppose, to those whom they encountered) a huge question.
Who are these other people? — since people, fellow human beings, they certainly were.
And, if people, then what were the implications of their evident and undeniable humanity — and of the European recognition of their full but differently “conditioned” and “constructed” humanity — for the European recognition and understanding of their own?
There were two great historical kinds of response to this question, to this intellectual and moral challenge: the positive, or humanistic, and the negative, or violent.
The positive fully recognised “the humanity of the Other” and all its implications.
From this response grew some of the best things in modern Enlightenment culture: moral universalism; a broadened view of humanity, of “human nature” and its possibilities; a recognition of the inherent dignity of all people including all non-Europeans, sometimes embodied in the at times naïve idea of the “noble savage”; an embracing of the notion that all these different human ways of life, “designs for living” or “patterns of culture” were both mutually incommensurable and equally authentic, equally entitled in principle to respect.
In other words, there was no privileged standpoint “outside” of culture where one might stand to evaluate, judge and rank them.
Ideas such as these found impressive expression in such endeavours as the anti-slavery emancipation movement of the nineteenth century.
Perhaps its finest expression was, at its best, the modern — and now regrettably much eviscerated — discipline of anthropology, which took head-on the impact of those encounters and made the intellectual tension that they generated its scholarly foundation.
What — anthropology always asked itself — were the implications of any one of these many exotic “ways of life” for our general understanding of human nature and the human condition? And, at the same time, what insight might be drawn from our general understanding (such as it was and is!) of human nature and the human condition for the understanding of any such specific, unusual and foreign way of life?
At its best — which, alas it no longer is — anthropology was very good.
That, anyway, was the positive response.
And the negative?
It marshalled and “tweaked” these same experiences, facts ideas in a different way.
For those of this other inclination, certain things were clear, and became matters of doctrine and dogma.
Three in particular:
● First, those foreign exotic peoples looked different: they were of different colour, physiognomy and appearance — or what later came to be known as “race”;
● Second, even if they were human, they lived out their humanity in a different way from Europeans, in different human “life-worlds” based upon different cultures, languages and in different types of (supposedly “simpler” or more “primitive”) forms of social organisation; and
● Third, as became increasingly true as time went on — and became a literally “overpowering” difference by the nineteenth century — there were great differences in power between these foreign societies and their own European societies: notably in the different capacities of some of those societies, namely their own, to impose their will upon and have their way with others.
Those of this negative, inhumane and violent inclination “packaged” those ideas in a certain way.
They in effect said:
Those other people (since they look and seem so) really are biologically different from us; their cultures and societies are different, often seemingly simpler, than ours; and we are far more powerful than they.
This tripartite package they employed, in mutual confirmation and apparent “proof” of its three parts, and in both directions.
They moved up and down this three-tiered “rack” of propositions like musicians, moving up and down playing a scale.
In a self-deluding exercise in circular, self-justifying logic they argued:
First: They are biologically inferior; that is why their ways of life and levels of cultural and civilisational achievement are less advanced and hence “lower” than ours; and that, too, in turn is why we enjoy, and are entitled to exercise, political power over them in any way that pleases us.
And conversely, second: we have enormously more power than they do; this means that the kinds of society in which our great power is based are far better than their weaker kinds of society, which we are able to dominate; and the fact that our societies are stronger than theirs, and we more powerful than they, is both an expression and a proof of the fact that they are inherently, meaning biologically, inferior to us, and we superior, in both might and right, to them.
In other words, our political domination proves their biological inferiority; and their evident biological inferiority vindicates the power that we wield over them.
Racism and “bangsa”
That malign, violent package of self-justifying domination is what we know as “racism”.
It was the “operative ideology” of the “high” imperial age.
The history of worldwide struggle against racism and of the overthrow of imperial domination is nothing other than the story of the political pulling apart, and the moral discrediting, of that tight, three-part doctrinal scandal, disgrace and horror.
That’s why all this still matters now.
Alive and well and living in Malaysia?
That is why it still matters even, and especially, in Malaysia.
Why?
Because the entire modern political idea of “bangsa” as it now exists in Malaysia and dominates Malaysian public life is a product of that age of race-based and “racist” European imperialism.
That idea is tinged by the circumstances and time of its modern elaboration in the colonial context of “British Malaya”. It still bears the stamp, and carries the moral burden, of its origins. It is inherently tainted by the circumstances of its elaboration under the sway of the dominant ideas and ideologies of that race-obsessed imperial age.
From its origins in that context, the entire idea of bangsa (as it now exists, and is understood and used) is permeated and pervaded by the stain of those central racist notions and ideologies of the European age, and notably its self-satisfied British variant.
Ideas of “race” are deeply and ineradicably embedded in the word bangsa: in its meaning — both its direct denotation and its further emotive connotations — and in its everyday use.
So those race-obsessed ideas lurk within the language, the basic verbal “coinage”, of all who now speak the Malaysian form of the Malay language.
Not everybody whom I know and talk to in Malaysia is personally a racist. Far from it.
But so many people in Malaysia — the vast majority, some of them unwittingly and others knowingly yet reluctantly — become involuntarily complicit in a kind of “racism” through their use of language:
They have become complicit through their largely inescapable and necessary recourse to habitual forms of language — including, notably, such terms as “bangsa” and its associated ideas, that have “made their peace”, so to speak, with some of the worst features of a now otherwise long-rejected racist ideology, attitude and era.
That era, be it remembered, was one not of great Malay glory and sovereignty but of Malay humiliation and shame at the hands of an arrogant colonial power with its poisonous dreams of imperial grandeur and domination.
That is why all Malaysians, including and especially Malay Malaysians, need to be wary of, to criticise and “deconstruct”, and to reject the insidious term bangsa and all the dubious ideas, residues and implications that covertly “travel” with it.
Wittgenstein’s “Fly-bottle” and Malaysia
Back to “race” and the beguiling of our thinking by that changeable, pesky, mercurial word “bangsa”.
The great Vienna and Cambridge philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) once famously remarked that the role of philosophy is to disentangle the many confusions entailed by the use of language: by the conventional but often imprecise and confusing customary uses, the unruly meanings, of everyday words.
Philosophy’s task, he maintained, was to serve as the means of overcoming the bewitching (or, as we might now colloquially say, the “bamboozling”) of intelligence — the confusion and frustration of precise and systematic thinking — by language, with all its everyday idiosyncrasies, peculiarities and habitual lack of precision.
Or, as he put it, the role of philosophy was to serve as the means for the fly to escape the fly-bottle.
(In his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein posed to himself the question “What is your aim in Philosophy?” To which he answered: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle”.)
A fly-bottle is a kind of trap and “specimen jar” that is used by entomologists, the experts in studying the various species of insects, to trap and collect (and then disable and paralyse!) the individual examples that they study.
So philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is a kind of therapeutic treatment, even a kind of liberation technique and strategy. It is the indispensable tool that may enable thinking to escape confusion, or being “bamboozled”, by freeing itself from its disabling entanglement, even imprisonment, in conventional language.
Thinking is like that fly which is trapped, dulled and disabled in a fly-bottle. The fly-bottle here is the confinement of thinking within the limits and distorting constraints of everyday language.
The challenge is to find a way out for that fly, to liberate thinking from dulling and disabling “mystification”.
That, and nothing less, is the task of philosophy.
In the Malaysian case, in this specific Malaysian instance that is discussed here, that confining, constraining fly-bottle — that bewitching, confusing and distorting piece of everyday language — is the term bangsa.
It is a term — so this extended commentary has argued from the outset — that is sorely in need of clarification, “disaggregation” and so-called deconstruction.
・Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
・This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
3. CNS.News (http://cnsnews.com/news)
U.N. Chief Sends Greetings, and an Envoy, to Israel-Bashing Conference in Qatar, 28 February 2012
by Patrick Goodenough
U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon’s Mideast envoy Robert Serry, far left, shares a platform at the International Conference for the Defense of Jerusalem in Doha on Sunday, February 26, 2012 with (from left) Arab League secretary-general Nabil Al-Arabi, Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, a Qatari government minister, and Organization of Islamic Cooperation secretary-general Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu. (Photo: Conference Web site)
(CNSNews.com) – U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sent his Mideast envoy to deliver a message on his behalf to a conference in Qatar this week whose aims include “pointing out the weaknesses of the Jew’s historical arguments backing their claims” to Jerusalem.
Co-hosted by the Qatar government and the Arab League, the two-day “International Conference for the Defense of Jerusalem” brought together politicians from across the Arab and Muslim world, representatives of pro-Palestinian organizations, clerics and academics.
Participants included Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an influential Sunni cleric regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, who has drawn criticism for comments about Palestinian suicide bombings.
Ban’s Middle East envoy, Robert Serry, shared the platform with the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, Arab League Secretary-General Nabil Al-Arabi, Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Secretary-General Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu and Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
The organizers’ objective was to contest the “judaization” of Jerusalem – the Islamic claim that Jews are trying to tighten their grip on Israel’s capital by highlighting what Muslims say is an invented Jewish heritage.
One of the aims of the event, according to the conference Web site, was “pointing out the weaknesses of the Jew’s historical arguments backing their claims to the holy city. Of paramount importance is the disclosure of Israel’s deeds at falsifying History and archeology by means of destruction, omission, modification and fabrication of historical and archeological facts.”
Qatar’s emir proposed to the gathering that the U.N. Security Council be asked to adopt a resolution setting up an international commission to investigate actions taken by Israel in Jerusalem “to erase its Islamic and Arabic identity.”
Ban’s message, delivered by Serry, described the conference as an “important international forum.”
Sunni cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, regarded as the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, participates in the Jerusalem conference in Doha on Sunday, February 26, 2012. (Photo: Conference Web site)
Ban did acknowledge Jerusalem’s significance to “Muslims, Jews and Christians,” but reserved his criticism for Israeli actions and policies, citing settlement activity, home demolitions, forced evictions, the revocation of permanent residency, restriction of access, and the forcible transfer of Palestinian lawmakers from East Jerusalem to Ramallah.
He told Israel it was violating international law and pointed out that “the international community does not recognize Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem, which remains part of the occupied Palestinian territory.”
Ban’s only direct advice to the Palestinians was that they “should remain constructively engaged. And he said that “both sides have a particular responsibility to create a conducive environment for meaningful negotiations.”
The message made no reference to a sustained Arab-Islamic campaign aimed at denying Jewish claims to the city.
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim figures have often challenged Jewish heritage in Jerusalem, with the OIC’s Ihsanoglu, for example, having called the site of the historical first and second temples “the alleged Temple Mount.”
Abbas in his speech at the Doha conference raised the issue again, accusing Israel of conducting a “war aimed to erase and remove the character of the Arab-Islamic Jerusalem” and claiming that Israel was plotting to rebuild the Temple “on the ruins of the al-Aqsa mosque.”
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in a brief statement described Abbas’ speech as “harshly inflammatory” and the al-Aqsa claims in particular as “baseless and irresponsible.”
“The time has come for the Palestinian leadership to stop denying the past and distorting reality,” he said. “For thousands of years Jerusalem has been the eternal capital of the Jewish people. Jerusalem, under Israeli sovereignty, will continue to be open to believers of all faiths. There is freedom of worship for all and Israel will continue to carefully maintain the holy places of all religions.”
State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told a press briefing Monday that “statements that serve to delegitimize the deep religious links that Muslims, Jews, and Christians all have to Jerusalem are not helpful. They’re not helpful to the process, not helpful from any side.”
Asked whether the administration had raised those concerns with “the parties,” Nuland said, without elaborating, that it had.
Israel claims historical links to Jerusalem going back 3,000 years, when the biblical King David made it the capital of his kingdom.
Bible vs. Qur’an
The Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, marks the location of the temple built by Solomon, David’s son, and destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BC; and later of the second temple, razed by the Romans in 70 AD.
Muslims conquered Jerusalem in the 7th century and two mosques were subsequently built on the site, which Muslims call Haram Al-Sharif (Noble Sanctuary). Muslims revere one of the mosques, al-Aqsa, as the third holiest in Islam, based on the belief that Mohammed stopped there during his “night journey” – a trip from Mecca to heaven on his legendary winged steed, al-Buraq.
Jerusalem is not mentioned by name in the Qur’an, and there is no historical record of Mohammed having visited the city during his lifetime. But the Qur’an’s sura 17 says that he traveled from “the sacred mosque” in Arabia to “the farthest mosque” (al-Aqsa) en route to heaven, and Muslim scholars generally contend that that refers to Jerusalem.
The Temple Mount and surrounding Old City and eastern Jerusalem were controlled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967, when Israel captured the area during the Six Day War.
Israel’s government at the time took the decision to allow continued Islamic control over the site. The overall area falls under Israeli sovereignty, disputed by the international community.
The closest observant Jews can get to the Temple Mount most of the time is the remnant of a retaining wall on the platform’s western flank, which is often mistakenly described as Judaism’s holiest site.
Israeli governments of all political hues have declared Jerusalem to be the “eternal, indivisible” capital of the Jewish state.
The P.A., backed by the Islamic world and the United Nations, wants at least some of the city – including the area of greatest religious significance – as its future capital.
The U.S. Congress in 1995 passed a law stating that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel and the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999.”
But a waiver was built in and presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all used it for consecutive six-monthly periods, citing national security interests.
(End)
