To quote daffy old Uncle Joe Biden: This is a big fucking deal. Excerpt:
Sixty-nine years after Israel declared Jerusalem as its capital, and 23 years after the US Congress passed a law mandating that Washington move its embassy there, the US formally opened its embassy in the city on Monday afternoon, in a move Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called “courageous” and “momentous.”
“What a glorious day. Remember this moment!” Netanyahu entreated the applauding crowd. “President Trump, by recognizing history, you have made history. All of us are deeply moved. All of us are deeply grateful.”
“Last December, President Trump became the first world leader to recognize Jerusalem as our capital, and today, the United States of America is opening its embassy right here in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu said. “Thank you President Trump, for having the courage to keep your promises!”
In a video address to the assembly, US President Donald Trump said the move was “a long time coming,” and that Israel, like all sovereign nations, has a right to name its own capital.
Even President Trumps’ peripatetic critic Senator Schumer agrees that this is a good thing:
“In a long overdue move, we have moved our embassy to Jerusalem. Every nation should have the right to choose its capital,” Schumer said in a statement. “I sponsored legislation to do this two decades ago, and I applaud President Trump for doing it.”
It’s interesting to see President Trump and Senator Schumer agreeing on something.
Now, the local Arabs are, predictably, RHEEEEing about how unfair it is that Israel actually determined where their own capital is located, and that the United States has the nerve to locate their embassy in Israel’s capital. But the question is this: The relocation of the embassy has been a matter of US law for decades, every President in recent history has paid lip service towards the relocation but did nothing about it.
So what’s different about President Trump? The answer is, of course, “almost everything.” You might agree with him and you might not, but nobody can deny that he is getting things done.
That in and of itself is rather refreshing.
