U.S. Visa Service Site Erases Israel

A U.S. Visa Service Web site, used by foreign citizens to facilitate travel to the United States, apparently does not recognize Israel.

Elder of Ziyon, an American blogger who writes about the Arab-Israeli conflict and antisemitism, noted in a blog post on March 14, 2016, that the web site is not part of a government Internet domain. He reports that the service has been outsourced from the U.S. government to a private company, possibly Computer Sciences Corporation, which is listed at the bottom of the page. However, he noted:

“It really is the official U.S. visa site, though, and a number of U.S. embassy and consulate webpages point there.” The U.S. Embassy in Chile even states that it is “the only authorized website for the payment of visa fees [emphasis added].”

Yet, the page on the web site that offers prospective travelers the ability to choose which country they are from, omits the nation of Israel. The names of other countries appear next to their respective flags and languages spoken.

Not only does the country listing for Israel not appear, but the Israeli flag is similarly missing. By contrast, nations much younger than the Jewish State (re-established in 1948), such as the United Arab Emirates (established 1971) are listed by name next to their flag.

Instead of showing Israel, the Israeli cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv are listed.

No other countries on the site feature city names, including the only other nation not to have its flag shown: Cyprus. Elder of Ziyon notes:

“But if Israel would be mentioned, then Palestinian Arabs would be far more upset than Israelis would be for pretending Israel doesn’t exist. So this site used by the US embassies and consulates worldwide decided it is better to offend Israelis by pretending it doesn’t exist than to offend Palestinians by saying Israel does exist.”

The U.S. Visa Web site is not the only outlet or entity to make the Jewish state disappear. As CAMERA has noted, schools in Sweden (“School in Sweden Teaches Pupils Israel Doesn’t Exist,” Feb. 1, 2016), HarperCollins, a publisher of atlases (“HarperCollins Erases Israel, Then Corrects,” Jan. 5, 2015) and Intercontinental Hotels (“Intercontinental Erases Israel,” March 9, 2006), among others, each have removed any mention or reference to Israel, at one time or another.

More recently, in a graph claiming to detail every major refugee crisis in the last 75 years, The Washington Post omitted any mention of the more than 800,000 Jewish refugees from Middle Eastern and Arabic lands—twice refusing to correct without explanation (“The Post erases nearly 1 million Jews from history,” Washington Jewish Week, Feb. 3, 2016).

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas has made murdered Jews disappear: In his Soviet-sponsored doctoral dissertation Abbas claimed that less than a million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust—instead of the more than six million murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs, which oversees the U.S. Visa Service, claims that it “contributes significantly” to the U.S. government’s “goal of promoting international exchange and understanding.” Exactly how does erasing the world’s sole Jewish state and the Middle East’s lone democracy do that?