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© 2010 Young Jewish Leadership PAC
Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament unanimously voted on Monday in support of expelling Israel’s ambassador in Cairo and halting gas exports to the Jewish state.The motion is largely symbolic, because only the ruling military council can make such decisions, and it is not likely to impact Egypt’s relations with Israel. But it signals the seismic change in Egypt after the ouster of longtime leader and Israel ally Hosni Mubarak a year ago in a popular uprising that ended his 29 years in power.
Today it is contraception and the morning-after pill. Tomorrow it will be kosher slaughter, or matrilineal descent, or circumcision, or other matters of existential importance to Jewish observance. If the Obama administration gets away with forcing Catholic institutions to step across lines of life and death in the name of “health,” the federal government will have a precedent to legislate Judaism out of existence — as several other countries have already tried to do. It isn’t happening in the United States — not yet, except for a laughable referendum in San Francisco last year to prohibit circumcision. But it’s happening in England, where the country’s highest court has ruled that the religious definition of Jewish identity is racist. It’s happened in several European countries as well as New Zealand, which have banned or might ban kosher slaughter.
