A post on the Weekly Standard‘s website that says that the State Department doesn’t recognize people born in Jerusalem as Israeli has been burning up the right-wing blogosphere.

This morning Bob Turner joined in the fight.

“President Obama has found a new way to try to humiliate our Israeli allies and placate that nation’s enemies, and he needs to reverse himself immediately,” said Turner, the Republican nominee for the 9th Congressional district.

Turner added that State Department’s denial of Americans born in Jerusalem the right to stamp “Israel” as their nation of origin on their passports is a blatant insult to the State of Israel and to Israeli-Americans.

“The Obama Administration has spared no pains in finding ways large and small to ostracize the State of Israel on the world stage,” Turner said. “Jerusalem is Israel’s beating heart, yet, through these actions, Mr. Obama’s State Department is denying that Jerusalem is even part of the Israeli nation.  Symbolic slights like this, however small, are widely noticed by Israel’s enemies. They do not need any further invitations to aggression.”

Turner has been trying to frame the race against Democrat David Weprin as a race about President Obama’s Israel policy, but sources close to the Weprin campaign doubt that it is much of a winning strategy. The district is about a third Jewish, but a lot of those voters are secular, liberal Jews who likely support the president’s Middle East policies.

That said, according to the recent Siena poll, 52 percent of voters in the district say that they disapprove of the job that Obama is doing.

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